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Empathy as the Origin of Narrative in Deborah Baron’s Prose

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 1

Abstract

Dvora Baron is one of the leading authors of Hebrew modernism. Her self-conscious fiction maintains a constant tension between traditional established norms of contemporary Hebrew fiction (such as the “Nusach”) and modernist poetics which may reject linear narrative, and dabble with stream of consciousness. Her shtetl is constructed between pathos and irony, which coexist comfortably. One dominant attribute of her stories is that they do not advance in a linear pattern but rather tend take unexpected deviations (although it is not always clear that there is in fact a main line they are straying from). This paper focuses on two stories in which the narrator observes a female protagonist with empathy: “Ketanot” (“Trifles”) and “Ma She-Haya”. In both stories female characters face annihilation. Although Mina is in far greater risk than Hannah-Gittel, (the first is the victim of an abusive mother, the second was brought up in an environment of domestic violence and is falsely accused of theft) the stories are similar in the position of the narrator the narrator’s attentiveness and close observation of a friend are central to the story. In “Ketanot” an intimate conversation between the narrator’s aunt and Hannah-Gittel not only provides H-G with an alibi but allows the Rabanit to sail out into the world and away from emotional and intellectual suffocation. In “Ma she-Haya,” in which Baron’s narrator analyzes her own narrative poetics, it is the intimate relationship between the narrator and Mina which constructs Mina’s subject and rescues her from her mother’s violence, while simultaneously nurturing the narrator’s growth as an author. In reading these stories, this paper will attempt to describe in detail how empathy and narrative are mutually dependent on each other in Baron’s fiction, and how empathy is the source and motive of narration. This position stands in opposition to contemporary authors such as Gnessin and later Vogel, but connects Baron directly to Yosef Haim Brenner’s fiction, situating her at the heart of Hebrew Modernism.

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