Seidman publishes Dvora Baron translations

This piece appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of the CJS newsletter Zeramim.

CJS director Naomi Seidman's translations of Dvora Baron's stories were published this spring by the University of California Press as "The First Day" and Other Stories. Seidman has also translated Amia Lieblich's 1997 experimental biography of Baron, Conversations with Dvora. Below is an outline of Baron's unusual biography, excerpted from the introduction to "The First Day," and a passage from one of Baron's early stories.

When Dvora Baron, the first modern Hebrew woman writer, died in 1956 at the age of sixty-nine, she had not left her Tel Aviv apartment for thirty-three years. During the last twenty years, she was virtually confined to her bed, attended by her only daughter, Tsipora. She continued to write and translate, producing numerous stories as well as the definitive Hebrew translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

It is clear that Baron's withdrawal from the society burgeoning all around her provided the space for a bold literary self-fashioning. In the winter of 1910-11 a combination of personal tragedy and Zionist passions had brought her to Palestine and the very center of the local Hebrew culture, as the literary editor of a Zionist-Socialist magazine. But the realities of pioneer life did not engage her for very long, least of all as a writer; she gradually turned inward, in her life and work. Baron spent the second half of her life as she had spent the first, writing and rewriting stories that were primarily drawn from the world of the Eastern European shtetl, the world of her childhood and adolescence.

Baron's work can be valued for presenting the shtetl world from a perspective to which Hebrew and Yiddish literature rarely gave voice—that of the Jewish woman, and of other disenfranchised members of the community. Baron's stories also reveal the author as a self-conscious participant in international modernism, continually experimenting with shifts in voice and perspective and inventing a complex expressive syntax in the service of her art. It is the modernist, feminist Dvora Baron that this translation has attempted to introduce to an English-speaking audience.

from "Kaddish," an early story about a young girl who challenges convention in memorizing the Hebrew prayer. The story reflects elements of Baron's life, in that her rabbi father had defied unwritten rules in educating his daughter in biblical and rabbinic sources.

So one beautiful summer Sabbath I go over to Grandfather with tremulous steps and raise my two eyes-full of quiet, holy joy-to his.

"Want to test me, Zeyde?"

Grandfather lists his head from the Talmud and brushes his brow with his hand. I see an eyelid tremble as he looks at me: "Child."

"Zeyde," I blurt out, and feel as if my heart were about to burst in my chest. "Zeyde, test me."

He goes to the bookshelf, takes out a prayer book, opens it, and sets it before me. I lower my eyes and look into it.

Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey raba . . . the "Kaddish" . . . A sweet shudder runs through my entire body. I push the prayer book away with both hands, raise my head, and piously close my eyes.

"Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey raba."

And the words flow from my lips, they pour out of me into the air so mildly, so sadly. . . I feel my face flush, break out in a heavy sweat, my heart beats and beats and I keep reciting. . .

And suddenly, Grandfather snatches me in both arms, lifts me up on high, to the ceiling, and rising and soaring himself he carries the two of us floating through the house, rocking me and tossing me into the air and adorning me with psalms of priase:

"Holy Sabbath, holy Sabbath, holy Sabbath."

Purplish red are his lips, his high forehead-pure white. His long beard flies in all directions, quivering, and among the strands—two large teardrops shimmer and tremble now like a pair of diamonds.