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Women’s Chains and Liberation: Sonya, the AGUNE, and Phyllis, the divorcée, in Blume Lempel’s BALADE FUN A KHOLEM

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

Abstract

In this paper, I will analyze two short stories by Yiddish writer Blume Lempel. Both stories revolve around a female protagonist negotiating her womanhood outside of marriage, yet they differ strongly on one front: Sonya Hammer’s status as an agune is tied particularly to Jewish law and society, whereas Phyllis Shtromvaser’s divorce is primarily a civil matter to be solved according to state law. While divorce is a recurrent trope in feminist (Jewish) women’s literature, Lempel’s Yiddish stories are unique in that they juxtapose the narratives of Jewish women leading traditional and secular lives, thus drawing parallels where one might have expected a championing of secularization. By and large, I will argue that these stories negotiate situations of liminality, that is, spaces between girlhood and womanhood, between urbanity and nature, between sexual desire and prescribed roles, between fertility and infertility. Notwithstanding the great cultural gap between these two protagonists - Sonya being a rabbi’s daughter who feels intimately connected to the Jewish past, religion and culture and Phyllis being an assimilated Jewish woman more closely tied to contemporary American mainstream culture – their sense of loneliness and disorientation as they find themselves outside the framework of marriage is very similar. Both women are exposed to a violation of their personal space and bodily integrity, situations that cannot be termed anything other than rape, and both women can only offer limited resistance to society’s need to scrutinize women’s bodies and negotiate its values across these bodies. Both women demonstrate a certain longing and desire for sexuality and eroticism, yet both women are unable to fulfill their needs – Sonya because she feels constrained by Jewish propriety, and Phyllis because she cannot negotiate the boundlessness of the sexual liberation movement. By and large, Lempel’s stories offer a rather pessimistic and bleak picture of the difficulties Jewish women face in negotiating their personal space and identity. However, the glimpses of positivity that are experienced, particularly in the oneiric and hallucinatory scenes where the unconscious rears its head, seem to offer a demonstrated need for the poeticism of Yiddish women’s literature in which to negotiate these difficulties.

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