Hebrew, Gender, and Modermity : critical responses to Dvora Baron's fiction / edited by Sheila E. Jelen and Shachar Pinsker. -- Bethesda, MD : University Press of Maryland, 2007.
291 p. -- (Studies and texts in Jewish history and culture ; 14)

Dvora Baron (1886-1956) was the first woman writer to have her Hebrew fiction canonized during the period of the Hebrew linguistic and cultural revival at the turn of the 20th century. Baron's representation of traditional Jewish culture, particularly women's culture, in experimental writing modes, has shed new light on the relationship between tradition and modernity in Eastern European Jewish society and in mandatory Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hebrew, Gender and Modernity: Critical Responses to Dvora Baron's Fiction aims to represent, for the first time in any language, the scope and diversity of the recent scholarly interest in Dvora Baron and her fiction. The anthology presents the work of leading scholars in the field of Jewish and Hebrew studies from Israel and the United States. This collaborative effort creates a dialogue leading to a new and innovative approach to the field of Modern Hebrew literature and culture.

Table of contents:

 

• Introduction (p. 3)
   
• Foundations
• The Endless cycle : the poetic world of Dvora Baron / Dan Miron (p. 17)
• The Genesis of Dvora Baron / Nurit Govrin (p. 33)
   
• Gendered Domains and Spaces
• Staring at the bookcase : daughters, knowledge, and the fiction of Dvora Baron / Wendy Ilene Zierler (p. 69)
• Tidbits from Nehama's kitchen : alternative nationalism in Dvora Baron's The Exiles / Orly Lubin (p. 91)
• The Rabbinical court as a slaughterhouse : Dvora Baron's Bill of Divorcement / Avraham Balaban (p. 105)
   
• Tradition and Transition
• "Like a wife forsaken" : on the story Agunah / Marc S. Bernstein (p. 117)
• Unraveling the yarn : intertextuality, gender, and cultural critique in Dvora Baron's fiction / Shachar Pinsker (p. 145)
   
• Reconsidering canons
• Gender and the disintegration of the Shtetl in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature / Naomi Seidman (p. 173)
• All writers are Jews, all Jews are men : Dvora Baron and the literature of The Uprooted / Sheila E. Jelen (p. 189)
   
• Selected works of Dvora Baron in translation
• Transformations / translated by Haim Watzman (p. 203)
• For the time being / translated by Sheila E. Jelen (p. 225)
• Agunah / translated by Marc S. Bernstein (p. 279)
   
• About the Authors