A World Safe to Wander: The Adventures of the Yiddish “New Girl”

• In Event: Children’s Culture and Ideological Formation

Abstract

Girls have often figured in literature as figures of singular vulnerability; whether in primitive fairy tales, Victorian novels, or masterpieces of modernist naturalism, most of the tales that centered girls’ experiences were cautionary. The humiliation or “despoliation” of girls and women has stood in symbolically for a host of other harms from the personal to the national scale. But the educator-authors who wrote for the students at Yiddish schools and after-schools (shules) created aspirational stories of girls wandering, straying or getting lost—without the baleful consequences that such plots archetypically engender. Indeed the gap between most literary “girls in trouble” and the uniformly happy endings of Yiddish girl stories attests to both a shift in the meaning of girlhood generally and the insistently utopian worldmaking tendencies of Yiddish children’s literature, a domain in which it would be safe for girls to adventure, err, and grow.
Whereas the “New Woman” was ineluctably bourgeois, the creators of Yiddish children’s literature sought to secure the benefits that she enjoyed for the daughters of the working class. Through the type of the “New Girl,” they promulgated a wholesome culture of girlhood bound up with educational and intellectual striving—albeit with a more radical twist than in the American mainstream. The protagonists that a set of mostly male authors placed at the center of their “girl stories” were daring, mischievous, insouciant, and courageous; they were also, as a matter of course, almost wholly desexualized. No special vulnerability clings to them by virtue of their status as female in a patriarchal world. They are never subject to harassment or unwanted sexual attention. They don’t reckon with menstruation or infatuation with boys, let alone other girls. We don’t see their peer relations depicted very often at all; the drama of their lives centers on the complex negotiation between breaking away from their parents toward greater freedom and remaining connected to the home and its sheltering protections.

Author

• Miriam Udel, Emory University