In Which World?

Emerging as a significant writer in both Yiddish and Hebrew in Eastern Europe, Dvora Baron would become the most important woman prose writer in Palestine’s burgeoning Hebrew literary scene between the wars. Born in Uzda, a shtetl near Minsk (today in Belarus), she overcame the pervasive exclusion of girls from traditional Jewish education to attain a robust grounding in Hebrew and a knowledge of classical rabbinic texts. Gaining a secular education in Minsk, Kovno, and other large cities in the Pale of Settlement, Baron became a writer and established a significant reputation in both Yiddish and Hebrew, although she would at later times dismiss the short stories she published in this era as “rags.” In 1910, she settled in Jaffa, where she worked for the Zionist-socialist journal Ha-Po‘el ha-Tsa‘ir (The Young Worker) as the literary editor. She married the journal’s editor, Yosef Aronovich. Baron was deported to Alexandria by the Turks during World War I and did not return until 1919. In 1922, she became a recluse and in the last twenty years of her life rarely left her home. It was during this period of seclusion that she wrote her most widely admired stories (by then she was writing exclusively in Hebrew). Famously, she turned her home into a magnet for writers and intellectuals. Baron’s early and late work engages themes such as women’s exclusion from the cultural worlds valued by Judaism, intimacy and violence, sexuality and desire, and women’s struggles for a voice. While some of her late work extends to the life of the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) in Palestine, including attention to women at the margins of society, most of her late work, like her early work, is set in the shtetl world of her childhood. At times lyrical and warm, her fiction is also subtle and at times deeply critical. Translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into Hebrew, Baron is read by contemporary critics as a writer deeply in dialogue with Flaubert both formally and in relation to his treatment of his most famous character, Emma Bovary. In 1933, Baron became the first recipient of the new Bialik Prize for Hebrew literature.