Sarah Feiga Foner’s Infringements into the Public Sphere in her Autobiographical Work MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD, OR, A VIEW OF THE CITY OF DVINSK

• In Event: “I only knew to tell about myself?” Zionism and Gender in Egodocuments by Three Women in the First Half of the 20th Century (Hebrew)

Abstract

MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD, OR, A VIEW OF THE CITY OF DVINSK (Warsaw, 1903) is the first known autobiographical work written in Hebrew by a woman. The author, Sarah Feiga Foner (1854-1937), published her work at age 49, and delimited it to the decade she lived in the city of Dvinsk in the 1860’s, between the ages of 7 and 17, until her family’s move to Riga.

Though not a complete account of the author’s life, Foner’s work conforms to the characterization of 19th Century Hebrew autobiographies as “didactic public testimonies” rather than personal accounts (Werses, 1990). Additionally, as an autobiographical work written by a woman, MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD may be considered an “Autogynography”, a term coined by Domna Stanton (1998), which distinguishes autobiographical works written by women from those written by men. Stanton observes that, while autobiographical works written by men feature “the totalized self-contained subject present-to-itself”, those written by women dramatize “the alterity and non-presence of the subject, even as it asserts itself discursively and strives toward an always impossible self-possession” (140).

In MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD, Foner indeed downplays her own part in the life of the Jewish community of Dvinsk in the 1860’s which she strives to memorialize for future generations, centering instead on the various personalities who inhabited the city at that time. In the few cases when she relates her own experiences, Foner refrains from referring to her personal feelings as a child or as an adult reliving her memories, and instead ties up her experiences to the fabric of the community’s life.

Nevertheless, the author makes two cameo appearances as an adult, using two incidents in the annals of the Jewish community of Dvinsk in order to voice her support for the Zionist enterprise at the time of writing her autobiographical work. In her cameo appearances, Foner oversteps the gender boundaries of an invisible observer who documents her childhood memories for the didactic benefit of contemporary readers, and for two brief passages, she appropriates the public sphere and assumes the role of a present-day spokesperson for the nascent Zionist movement.

Author

• Michal Fram Cohen, Independant Scholar