Dvora Baron and Twentieth-Century Aesthetic Experience

• In Event: Rethinking Hebrew Literary Modernity Through Dvora Baron

Abstract

Dvora Baron is the celebrated exception of Hebrew prose fiction. She is rarely thought of as a modernist writer, not often read in connection with other women modernist prose writers, and viewed as a belated extension of the nineteenth-century fascination with the Jewish shtetl. This talk aims to read Baron as part a broader feminist, modernist prose aesthetic shared by early twentieth-century Jewish women writers, including Fradel Shtok, Elisheva Bikhovsky, and Leah Goldberg. In the talk, I focus on her dialogue with Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY and his vision of women’s aesthetic lives in the provinces. In the 1930s Baron translated the novel into Hebrew, and her 1932 translation sought to elevate Emma, taking seriously her desires and disappointments. If Baron “corrected” Flaubert’s novel, she was also attracted to its portrayal of a provincial woman’s aesthetic desires. In her short fiction of the 1930s, Baron portrays women’s desires to aestheticize the everyday as the starting point of an aesthetic practice that animates her own writing. Written shortly after her translation of Madame Bovary, “Ketanot,” [“Trifles”] thinks through women’s relationship to the feminine objects that represent an aesthetic world from which they are excluded. The story negotiates the relationship between art and life, reflecting on women’s aesthetic practices under the social constrictions imposed upon them. Reading “Ketanot” alongside Baron’s other short fiction of the period, I will argue that she envisions a modernist form of aesthetic experience that arises from the everyday. I locate her aesthetic in a modernist tradition ranging from Shtok to Goldberg, to argue that the feminist aesthetics are central to Hebrew modernity.

Author

• Allison Hope Schachter, Vanderbilt University