The Sentimental SHRAYBERIN: Yiddish Popular Fiction, the Jewish New Woman Writer and The Aesthetics of Feeling

• In Event: Yiddish Women’s Writing

Abstract

Where is the woman writer situated within Jewish literary hierarchies of the early 20th century? This paper proposes a characterological study of the woman writer protagonist in the short works of Yiddish women writers: who is this emergent professional figure, what genres does she write, and how does she navigate in her literary environment? I argue that the woman writer protagonist found in a selection of short stories published in the 1910s and 1920s by Yiddish women writers—Yente Serdatsky, Rosa Lebensboym and Miriam Karpilove—upsets gendered assumptions about genre (the sentimental, lyrical feminine against the modernist masculine) in Jewish literary hierarchies. These Yiddish women authors compose representations of Yiddish women writer protagonists that oftentimes make use of sentimental double-binds, occupy highly ambivalent narrator positions and experience oppressive literary expectations from both male writing peers and female audiences. I argue that in addition to the "transnational Hebrew and Yiddish feminist modernist aesthetic" put forward by Allison Schachter in her recent WOMEN WRITING JEWISH MODERNITY, 1919-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2022), the presence of these New Woman protagonists—and the printing of the stories themselves in the Yiddish press—compels us to reconsider the boundaries of these "bad modernisms" and long-standing divisions between SHUND (popular, "trash" fiction) and high modernist journal literature. I embed this analysis within American Studies research, including theorizations of modernism in Lisa Mendelman's MODERN SENTIMENTALISM (Oxford University Press, 2019), the archival recovery of Anglophone women journalists in Jean Marie's FRONT PAGE GIRLS (Cornell University Press, 2018), and the historical study of professional women writers in the Yiddish press profiled in Ayelet Brinn's A REVOLUTION IN TYPE (NYU Press, 2023). At the same time, I argue that these Jewish women writers must be read with sensitivity towards their particular Jewish female 'reading lives' as distinct from male reading lives, referring to Iris Parush's READING JEWISH WOMEN (Brandeis University Press, 2004) in order to yield a broader understanding of their critique of both American and Jewish literary regimes.

Author

• Dalia Wolfson, Harvard University