Yiddish Women Writing on the Periphery: The visibility of female labour in the short fiction of Esther Kreitman

• In Event: Yiddish Women’s Writing

Abstract

Although discussions of gender and collective identity in Yiddish Literature rarely incorporate writing from the UK, the short fiction of Esther Kreitman (1891-1954) exemplifies how British-Yiddish women writers were often highly engaged with the dynamics of marginalization in relation to class, gender and ethno-religious identity. The London-based stories in Kreitman’s collected volume Yikhes (1950) narrate the tensions experienced by female protagonists who occupy peripheral spaces within British society as they try and fail to assimilate into the cultural and economic centre. This paper reads the work of Kreitman through Social Reproduction Theory, demonstrating how the author resists the external limitations imposed on female Yiddish writers by making visible women’s social and literary labour. More specifically, I argue that Kreitman generates critical spaces within traditionally domestic spheres, often by subverting the intensely patriarchal nature of conventional Yiddish narrative forms and genres, in order to challenge traditional perceptions of women’s roles in Ashkenazi culture.

This paper repositions Kreitman as a core member of a network of female British-Yiddish writers whose work addresses the minimization or misrepresentation of women’s social contribution in London’s Jewish communities. At first glance, the majority of Kreitman’s London stories concentrate on male rather than female experience in order to highlight the economic and cultural marginalization experienced in British-Jewish communities during the 1930s and 1940s. However, these stories amplify female experiences of the periphery by emphasizing their omission as a negative space in the texts, creating meta-narratives of female marginalization across multiple individual stories. Kreitman’s narrative approach also reflects the unseen and unacknowledged work undertaken by women in the literary systems of British-Yiddish society, not only to demonstrate its value but also as a demand for greater visibility and recognition of female labour. As a critically neglected writer, Kreitman confronts the further marginalisation of female authors within an already peripheral community and asserts their right to a recognised role in British-Yiddish culture.

Author

• Rochelle Sibley, University of Warwick