"The First Day" and Other Stories

by Dvora Baron, Naomi Seidman (Editor), Chana Kronfeld (Editor)

Dvora Baron (1887-1956), the first modern Hebrew woman writer, was born in a small Lithuanian town in 1887. Her father, a rabbi, gave his daughter a thorough education, an extraordinary act at the time. Baron immigrated to Palestine in 1910, married a prominent Zionist activist, but defied the implicit ideological demands of the Zionist literary scene by continuing to write of the shtetl life she had left behind.

The eighteen stories in this superb collection offer an intimate re-creation of Jewish Eastern Europe from a perspective seldom represented in Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baron brings vividly to life the shtetl experiences of women and other disenfranchised members of the Jewish community. Her stories relate the feelings of a newborn girl, a "Jewish" dog, an impoverished bookkeeper, a young widow who must hire herself out as a wet-nurse, and others who face emotional and physical hardships.

Baron's fluid writing style pushes the flexibility of Hebrew and Yiddish syntax to its limits, while her profound knowledge of both biblical and rabbinical literature lends rich subtleties to her stories. A companion to Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer, by Amia Lieblich (California, 1997), this collection is drawn from Baron's earlier as well as later works.

Genres: Fiction, Jewish, Short Stories

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2001

About the author

Devora Baron (דבורה בארון, also spelled Dvorah Baron and Deborah Baron) (December 4, 1887 - August 20, 1956) was a pioneering Jewish writer, noted for writing in Modern Hebrew and for making a career as a Hebrew author. She has been labeled as the "first Modern Hebrew woman writer". She wrote about 80 short stories, plus a novella titled Exiles. Additionally, she translated stories into Modern Hebrew.
She was born in Uzda, about 50 kilometers SSW of Minsk. Her father was a rabbi and took the unusual step of allowing her to attend the same Hebrew classes as boys, though she had to sit in the screened women’s area of the synagogue. She also went on to complete high school, unusual for a girl. She received a teaching credential in 1907. Baron published her first stories in 1902, at the age of 14, in the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits, which was edited at that time by Leon Rabinowitz. She was engaged to the author Moshe Ben-Eliezer, but he later broke it off.
Emigration and life in Palestine
In 1910, after her father’s death and later the destruction of her village in a pogrom, she immigrated to Palestine, settling in Neve-Tsedek, a settlement outside of Jaffa that, since 1909, was part of the new city of Tel Aviv. In Palestine she became the literary editor of the Zionist-Socialist magazine Ha-Po’el ha-Za’ir (The Young Worker). She soon married the editor, the Zionist activist Yosef Aharonovitz (1877–1937). Along with other Jews in Palestine, they were deported to Egypt by the Ottoman government, but returned after the establishment of the British Mandate after the First World War. In 1922, Baron and her husband both resigned from the magazine. At this point, she went into seclusion, staying at her home until she died.

Reviews

[Deborah Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a book about shtetl life from the point of view of women and an animal (or two).