הפרות סדר: רחל פומרנץ כסוכנת שינוי בספרות החרדית הישראלית

Abstract

The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) writer Prof. Malka Schaps, who writes under the pseudonym Rachel Pomerantz, has a unique biography that positions her as an agent of social change in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox society. This article offers a reading of three of Schaps' novels: A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew (1997), Cactus Blossoms (1999), and Wildflower (2004), in light of Alicia Ostriker’s term ‘stealing the language,’ which describes ways in which women have ‘re-appropriated’ the language of the patriarchy and invaded the sanctuaries of male discourse. Uncovered here are the novels’ violations of accepted ideological norms in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox society, though they are not identified as critical texts, but rather as the stories of young Jewish-American women who ‘return’ to traditional Jewish practice by becoming baalot teshuva. My argument here is that even though Schaps' texts are conservatively grounded in the writing conventions of ultra-Orthodox literature, they undermine the accepted ethos with a discourse that is simultaneously conservative and subversive.