writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

POWER AMONG ORTHODOX WOMEN TO CHANGE TRADITION AND
TRADITIONAL LIFE: ESTHER KREITMAN’S LIFE NARRATION AND THE
AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION IN THE NOVELS “THE DANCE OF THE
DEMONS” AND “BRILLIANTS”
Agnieszka ILWICKA *
Introduction
In this paper I argue that traces of more active resistance among orthodox women can be found.
Based on the characters in Ester Kreitman’s novels as well as her own life involving women who are
challenging their exclusion from education and synagogue ritual, I draw attention to the harsh
criticism that they raise and their mobilization to change the status‐quo, despite the disapproval of
communal rabbis.
Through this study, I seek to contribute both to a better understanding of some of the feminist
changes taking hold within modern Orthodoxy at the beginning of the XX century among Hassidic
women and to a wider perspective of the web of resistance among women in conservative religious
traditions 1 .
I would like to investigate the case of Esther Kreitman’s life as a daughter of an Hassidic rabbi, a
women, a wife, a sister of two crucial writers of Yiddish literature (I.B. Singer and I.I. Singer), and as a
writer herself. I will analyze her biography through the biographies of her literary characters.
Through the analysis of Ester Kreitman’s life and writing I argue that the passive resistance
paradigm that has dominated literature on women in conservative religion is limited and they are
sources for other points of view which were ignored until more recent years.
Finally, I consider the relationship between passive and active resistance among Orthodox women
who are trying to change their status in various areas of social and religious life as visible proof for
the social changes taking place among Jewish religious communities at the beginning of XX century in
Eastern Europe.
To start, a question: was Ester Hinde Singer born and raised as an orthodox woman? The answer
to that is not so easy. Her father, Pinchas Menachem Singer, spent all of his life studying Talmud and
Torah in the shtibl. Her mother, Batsheba Zylberman was a daughter of the misnagd, an opponent of
the Hassidic community, who brought up his daughter in an open‐minded environment and saw to
her education. What type of home built these two different people? Ester’s father, Pinchas Singer,
excluded her from a formal education 2 . Her mother, who herself grew up surrounded by open
discussions, forced her only daughter to take a traditional female role. Israel Youshua Singer noted in
his memoirs that “When my sister asked my mother what she should be when she grew up, mother
answered her question with another: ‘what girl can be?’” 3 .
Both parents, for different reasons, were determined to keep their daughter ignorant. However,
family relations are a critical area in which Jewish men and women have tended to see matters from
different perspectives. And the female perspective brought up by Esther Kreytman creates the
picture of various types of women, but without a women’s subculture.
Excluded from the Torah learning, women have forged their own ways of evaluating their actions;
they have constructed their own gender‐linked value system. Passive resistance often became the
only method women could use in the fight for their own identity in a strongly male society. By using
the opposition of daughter versus mother inside male society Kreitman argued that the power to
*
University of Wrocław - Wrocław, Poland
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