“IKH BIN GEVORN SHTUM”: coercion, control and gender-based violence in two Yiddish poems by Avigayl

• In Event: Yiddish Women’s Writing

Abstract

Feminist researchers have highlighted the representation of gender-based violence in Yiddish literature, through exploring the depiction of domestic violence in folksongs (Adrienne Cooper), workplace sexual harassment in Yiddish literary texts (Sonia Gollance and Jessica Kirzane), and the portrayal of abuse of Soviet Jewish women in Khane Levin’s poetry (Joanna Degler Lisek). These preliminary studies invite more comprehensive research into gender-based violence in Jewish life and Yiddish literature.
Gender-based violence is a central motif in two poems by Avigayl, published in 1915 in the prestigious Yiddish literary journal, LITERATUR UN LEBN, and republished in 1928 in YIDISHE DIKHTERINS ANTALOGYE, where they were praised for introducing “unique nuances” into Yiddish literature.
In this paper, I will unpack these nuances, blending feminist theoretical perspectives on gender-based violence with an exploration of the aesthetics that give voice to this abuse. Utilising close textual analysis, I will examine depictions of physical and sexual abuse in Avigayl’s writing. I will highlight the stylistics that situate these poems within the Yiddish literary landscape of the time, while addressing themes that remain highly relevant today. I will discuss the poetics that illustrate trauma and abuse, and articulate impacts of gender-based violation from the inner perspective of victim/survivors. In doing so, I will note challenges in creating literary translations of these retrieved poems.
Framing the abuse within structural and cultural contexts, I will interrogate the silencing of the poet, and the speakers in both poems. I will analyse Avigayl’s representation of strategies of coercion and control, identifying ways that the men inflicting violence in the poems leverage power, and emphasising the effects of intersectional factors of oppression and inequality, through aspects of class, age and race gleaned in these poems.
My presentation will illuminate ways that these poems foreshadow theoretical responses to gender-based violence today, over 100 years after the poems were first published. I will argue that these poems represent a continuity of oppression and abuse that is deeply rooted in ongoing power asymmetries. I will further argue that the poems’ reverberation of contemporary feminist discourse signifies enduring enculturation and entrenchment of patriarchal systems of coercion and control.

Author

• Hinde Ena Burstin, Monash University