writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

change traditional life comes from the women; changes in society may come from their passive,
often silent resistance.
Ester Kreitman was productive as a writer in the 1930's and '40's, publishing two novels, a
collection of short stories and two volumes of translation. At the same time she was an active part of
the “Loshn un Lebn” magazine. She began her literary carrier with a translation from English into
Yiddish of Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol”, followed in 1930 with Bernard Shaw's “Intelligent
Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism”. The first novel in Yiddish written by women and
published as a book was Ester Kreitman’s “The Dance with the Demons” printed in 1936 in Warsaw.
This novel is often analyzed as a thinly veiled autobiography 4 .
The character of Deborah from “The Dance with the Demons” is a woman wanting to study, who
needs to dress up as a boy to attend to yeshiva. Her sexuality and gender are covered up under male
clothes because only as a boy can she attend to school, obtaining knowledge. She desires to
understand more than the society and traditional life provides for girls. Because education, the male
world of the Torah and other books, is a key forbidden for girls, she regrets her female identity 5 .
“The Dance with the Demons” is seen by American critiques as a Kreytman’s autobiography, her
literary memoir. Ilan Stavans wrote in the introduction to “Deborah” (another title by Kreytman):
Kreitman’s domestic novel is a thinly disguised autobiography about a woman
(daughter, sister, wife) in search of a place in the world. Kreitman’s native Leoncin is
Jelhitz, Radzymin, where she grew up is R., and Krochmalna Street, the street in the Jewish
slums that I.B.Singer made immortal, is the novel’s Warsaw setting. Avram Ber is
Kreitman’s father, Pinchos Mendel, Raizela is her mother, Isroel Joshua is Michael and
Deborah herself closely resembles Kreitman. Ever since childhood (we read in the story)
Deborah had longed to receive an education, to cease being a nonentity of the family”.
Later on it’s written, “Deborah – the girl who, as her father had once said, was to be a
mere nobody when she grew up –would be a person of real consequence. 6
Ester Kreitman was born in 1891 in a small shtetl in the south east of Poland. Isroel Joshua Singer,
Ester’s brother, wrote in his memoirs that “My parents would have been a well matched pair if my
mother had been my father and my father my mother” 7 . According to the Singer siblings the
difference in the parent’s religious adherence and personalities led to a reversal of traditional gender
roles, so that the father’s emotions was always at odds with the mother’s reason.
Recently an increasing number of scholars, most of them women, have begun to turn their
attention to the work of Jewish women writers as they explore questions on the “sex‐gender
system”, as it is called in literature by critic Nancy K. Miller. Feminist scholars have been conducting a
broad‐based effort of reconstruction and rediscovery that has taken them through several stages of
literary analysis. But “What does it mean to read and write as a woman within the institution that
authorizes most reading and writing”? 8 To answer that question it is required, as critics Susan Gilbert
and Susan Gubar observed 9 , to turn attention to both the biographical and textual aspects of
women’s work. Because the concept “male” and “female” have always had an impact on human
experience, they argue that it is essential to analyze how the lives of writers and the text they create
are embodied in “the materiality and mythology of history, which has almost always been
gendered”.
In 1926 Ester Hine Singer married a diamond cutter from Antwerp, and decided to change her life.
She threw away her wig and asked her husband to shave his beard. The symbolic act of rejecting the
Hassidic tradition had real consequences: the rich father of her husband cut off their money and thus
both were poor until the end of their lives.
The act of stepping out from the Hassidic community is missing in “The Dance with Demons”.
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