Speaking the Silence

Abstract

BLUMA GOLDSTEIN. Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives. The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xxv + 206.SHEILAE. JELEN. Intimation*} of Difference: Ovora Baron in Modern Hebrew Renaissance. Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Pp. xliii + 240.IN DVORA BARON'S 1920 STORY Agunah (Abandoned Woman), an itinerant preacher delivers a sermon, heart of which is a parable about a beautiful princess abandoned by her king-husband. Following this parable, as listeners await nimshal (the parable's application), narrator describes quiet mood in congregation: All around there is arrested breath. In her analysis of this story, Sheila Jelen notes that the only one not silent- one who speaks silence - is narrator. This narrator introduces oft-neglected perspective of lone woman in congregation who has been listening to parable from an otherwise empty and shadowed women's gallery. As story progresses, voice of narrator fuses with lone woman's voice as well as that of preacher, offering insight into stories of real-life agunot (abandoned women) and also demonstrating a capacity to elaborate upon traditional, allegorical materials.Jelen and Goldstein 's studies similarly attempt to speak silence, giving voice to previously unspoken women's perspectives but also contextualizing these voices within Jewish tradition. Bluma Goldstein's Enforced Marginality calls attention to ways in which stories of actual abandoned women and their children are underplayed or ignored in maleauthored, canonical works of modern Jewish literature and in related journalistic materials. Jelen 's study deals with prose fiction of Dvora Baron (1887-1956) - one female prose writer to achieve canonical status in Hebrew renaissance - focusing on ways in which Baron negotiated unspoken and gendered stylistic and thematic expectations of this literary era.Both books grapple in interesting and noteworthy ways with issues of autobiography and biography: how true life is rendered and adapted in fiction, how one deploys knowledge of a writer's life story in interpretation of a text or brings one's own experience to bear on reading act. In each of these projects, scholar's own subjective position (as women working on materials that impact, or have impacted, lives of women) adds an extra sense of urgency and passion to their analyses.The point of departure for Goldstein 's study is her own experience having grown up as daughter of an abandoned wife, a story that she poignantly narrates in her book's fifth chapter. This formative, firsthand knowledge of effects of abandonment clearly shapes her approach to her literary subject: what she notices when she reads, what she applauds, and what she deplores. From this invested and engaged perspective, Goldstein presents close readings of representation of agune (as she writes it, using Yiddish pronunciation) in Memoirs of Giiki of Hamein (written between 1689 and 1719) - where she pinpoints an extraordinary instance of a woman intervening so as to prevent another woman from becoming an agune - and in stories of male adventure or self-transformation such as late eighteenth-century Autobiography of Solomon Maimon; S. Y. Abramovitsch's Benjamin, Third (Kitzur maa'M Buiyomm ha-t>heiit>hi [1878, Yiddish], published under his pen name, Mendele Moykher Seforim); and Sholom Aleykem's (her spelling) Menakhem Mendl, a group of Yiddish stories published between 1892 and 1913.Goldstein 's subject is an enduring and important one, given persistence and seeming intractability of agunah problem. To this day there are many women around world who remain chained to marriages because of their inability under Jewish law to initiate divorce. …