Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer (Volume 6) (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society) - Softcover

Amia Leiblich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520085418 ISBN 13: 9780520085411

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

The life of Dvora Baron (1887-1956) evokes both inspiration and mystery. She was born in a Russian shtetl, the precocious daughter of a rabbi. Her intellectual gifts garnered her an education usually reserved for boys, and she soon proved a brilliant writer, widely published while still in her teens. At age twenty-three she immigrated to Palestine, married a prominent Zionist journalist, and joined the literary intelligentsia of the emerging nation. Her writing showed startlingly modernist points of view (a day-old baby girl in "The First Day" and a female Jewish dog in "Liska," for example), and she took on such topics as divorce ("Fradl"), incest ("Grandma Henya"), and domestic violence ("A Quarreling Couple"). But when her beloved brother died in 1923, Baron retired to her apartment. There she spent the last thirty years of her life, in touch with the literary community but rejecting her early stories as "my rags." She never left her residence and spent most of her time in bed, tended by her daughter.

Israeli writer and psychologist Amia Lieblich was seventeen when Dvora Baron died; the two women never met. But Lieblich has written this biography as a series of conversations taking place in Dvora's darkened room during the last year of her life. Lieblich's vividly realized portrait elicits Dvora's memories of childhood; the descriptions of traditional women's lives in her writing; a view of her eccentric marriage and odd relationship with her daughter; and her thoughts on work, life, and death.

Dvora is a living presence in these conversations; Lieblich approaches her as one of the great creative spirits of Hebrew literature. Having undergone a crisis in her own life, Lieblich seeks out Baron as a source of wisdom and direction. The result is an unusual and moving literary-psychological adventure that merges Dvora Baron's world with that of an Israeli woman today.

About this title

About the Author

Amia Lieblich is Professor of Psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Several of her books have been translated into English, including Kibbutz Makom (1981), and Seasons of Captivity: The Experience of POWs in the Middle East (1994). Naomi Seidman is Assistant Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and author of A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (California, 1997, see page 36). Chana Kronfeld is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (California, 1995).

From the Back Cover

"This is a fascinating, haunting book. . . . Conversations with Dvora inevitably challenges our assumptions about the distances between art, life, and history as well as our judgments of the choices made by women of different generations."―Irena Klepfisz, author of Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays

From the Inside Flap

"This is a fascinating, haunting book. . . . Conversations with Dvora inevitably challenges our assumptions about the distances between art, life, and history as well as our judgments of the choices made by women of different generations."—Irena Klepfisz, author of Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays

Reviews

First published in Hebrew in 1991, this imagined conversation between the author (psychology, Hebrew Univ.) and her subject, whom she calls the first modern Hebrew woman author (her works are not available in English), is an excellent example of the new biographer's art. Dvora Baron (1887-1956) went to Palestine when she was 24, married, and continued to write. She and her husband spent four bitter years in exile in Egypt during World War I. For the last 39 years of her life, she was a recluse. The imagined conversations take place in Dvora's room, with her daughter in attendance. Two great streams of Jewish life in this century, East European and Israeli, are major elements of Baron's life, as are the ideals of Zionism and feminism. "Many and wondrous are the roads a human being chooses," Dvora is supposed to have said, and many and wondrous are the uses of the literary art. Highly recommended for Jewish and women's studies collections.?Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520085418
• ISBN 13: 9780520085411
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294