Motherhood between Hunger and Religion in Semyon Yushkevich’s Play “Golod” (1906)

• In Event: Women on the Edge: Women’s Rage and Revolution in Russian and Yiddish Literature

Abstract

At the beginning of the 19th century, Odessa was a multiethnic cosmopolitan city and one of the European Jewish cultural centers. Jews made up one third of the population, but a significant portion of that Jewish population lived in extreme poverty and under impossible sanitary conditions. The most celebrated Russian Jewish author at that time, Semyon Yushkevich, reflects the tragedy of these impoverished social classes in his works. It is no coincidence that Yushkevich's play is called "Hunger"; The people's destinies are hunger, poverty, and deprivation. Yushkevich uncompromisingly portrays the destruction of age-old moral foundations in a Jewish society torn apart by social contradictions, the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the most violent pogrom in Odessa, which also happened in 1905. Nakhoma, the play’s heroine, is a 33-year-old mother of three children who decides to kill herself and her children out of despair.
This paper will analyze the fate of a woman who departs from national traditions. The focus of this research is to examine filicide in the play of Yushkevich through the lens of the Medea Myth from Greek mythology. This myth helps one to recognize common literary strategies for the representation of collective catastrophe in Jewish and world literature.

Author

• Tetyana Yakovleva, YAAANA