70
| THE CHRONICLE
EXCERPTS OF NEW BOOKS BY HUC-JIR FACULTY | EXCERPTS OF NEW BOOKS BY HUC-JIR FACULTY |
Behikansi Atah
(
In My Entering Now, Selected
Works of Hava Shapiro)
Carole B. Balin
and
Wendy Zierler,
Resling Press, Tel Aviv, 2008
A
fter five years of collecting and sifting through
materials from publications and archives
across the world, Carole Balin and Wendy Zierler
have co-edited this anthology of Hebrew writings
by the largely-forgotten early-20th century fiction
writer, journalist, feminist, and cultural critic Hava
Shapiro. Born in Slavuta [Ukraine] in 1878,
Shapiro died in Prague in 1943 during the Holo-
caust. Although a lifelong Zionist, she never
immigrated to Palestine, but persisted nonethe-
less in writing and publishing Hebrew prose in the
Diaspora. Besides writing in the ancient language,
Shapiro was unconventional in many respects: at
the age of 25, she left her husband and son to
pursue higher studies and eventually earned a
Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Berne.
Her life story reflects the sacrifices that a woman
of her time needed to make in order to pursue a
life of the mind and the pen. Shapiro was the
first woman to publish fiction in Hebrew; her
collection of stories entitled
Kovetz Tsiyurim
appeared in 1909, eleven years before Nehama
Puhachewksy’s
Bi’Yhudah hehadashah
(1921)
and eighteen years before Dvora Baron’s
Sippurim
(1927).
She was one of the first Hebrew feminist
literary critics, composing several path-breaking
essays on images of women in Hebrew literature
and on women’s reading — all of this, several
decades before the emergence of feminist literary
criticism in England, France, and the United States.
From her vantage point in war-torn Ukraine and as
a refugee in Czechoslovakia, she reported on
Jewish culture and the arts, interpreted European
literature for Hebrew readers, and also reported
from various Zionist Congresses and gatherings
across Europe. From 1899 to 1943, she kept a
diary in Hebrew, which was the first known Hebrew
diary written by a woman. She also wrote close
to 200 Hebrew letters to Reuven Brainin, the
famed Hebrew/Yiddish writer and editor, with
whom she had a 20-year-long romance. Though
Brainin never left his wife for her, Hava clearly never
left his heart or mind, for Brainin deposited all of
these letters in the Brainin archives of the Mon-
treal Jewish Public Library, which he founded.
Shapiro’s letters to Brainin constitute the first ex-
tended Hebrew correspondence between a literary
man and woman. Balin and Zierler’s edited col-
lection includes selections from all of Shapiro’s
writing — fiction, essays, feminist criticism, excerpts
from the diary and letters — as well as an exten-
sive bibliography of Shapiro’s writings and a critical
afterword, which they co-authored.
Preface to
Kovetz tsiurim
[
A Collection of
Sketches] Warsaw, 1909:
In 1909, Shapiro published
Kovetz Tsi-
urim,
her first and only collection of stories,
under the pseudonym
eim kol hai
[“
mother of
all life,” a pun on her given name Hava/Eve].
Prominently dedicated to her mother
Menuhah, the volume contains portrayals of
women, both those Shapiro admired who
broke from traditional molds and those she
disdained who conformed to convention.
Shapiro prefaced the sketches with an impor-
tant feminist literary manifesto – the first of its
kind in Hebrew literature – on the need to add
women’s voices to Hebrew literature. Riffing
on the famous opening line of the Hebrew
poet Y.L. Gordon’s
“
Kotzo shel yud,”
[
which
asks: “Hebrew woman, who knows your life?”],
Shapiro responds that women ought to take up
the pen and depict their own experiences.
Our literature lacks the participation of the
second half of humanity: that of the weaker sex.
In my entering now into this unfamiliar
sphere, my strongest hope is that many others of
my sex will be inspired to walk in my footsteps.
So long as they [other women] do not take
part, our literature will be impoverished and
lacking a certain aspect. Time and again, when
we [feminine plural] are amazed and awed
by the talents of a “wonder worker,” one who
“
penetrates the woman’s heart,” we feel at the same
time as though a strange hand has touched us.
We have our own world, our own pains and long-
ings, and we should, at the very least, take part in
describing them.
I know myself that I have not yet fulfilled the
requirements that I myself have set before the male
or female artist. This collection of sketches is only
an attempt, only the beginning of the revelation of
is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and
Modern Jewish Literature at HUC-JIR in New
York. Her areas of interest encompass gender and Judaism, feminist commentary
on traditional texts, modern Hebrew literature by women, and Holocaust literature.
She is the author of
Behikansi Atah (In My Entering Now, Selected Works of Hava
Shapiro),
edited with Carole B. Balin, and
And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emegence
of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing.
She is a contributor to
The Torah: A Women’s Commentary
.
Dr. Wendy Zierler
is Professor of Jewish History at HUC-JIR in New
York. She specializes in Modern Jewish History,
specifically Eastern European Jewish History, and her books include
To Reveal Our
Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia
and
Behikansi Atah (In My Entering
Now, Selected Works of Hava Shapiro),
edited with Dr. Wendy Zierler. She is a con-
tributor to
The Torah: A Women’s Commentary
.
Dr. Carole Balin
