Writing Women: The Narrating SHRAYBERIN in Yente Serdatzky’s Short Prose

• In Event: On Yiddish Literary Lineages: Dropkin, Serdatsky, Sutzkever

Abstract

In 1915, well-known literary critic M. Katz diagnosed Yiddish writer Yente Serdatzky’s stories as follows: “Yente Serdatzky’s pieces aren’t characteristic of Russia…America…the Revolution…they are only characteristic of her writing: the bokhurte has grabbed hold of her pen, and won’t let it release a single natural word, a single natural figure.” The dominant literary discourse in both the New York-based Yiddish scene and greater American popular opinion considered the emerging category of “woman’s writing”—Serdatzky’s text being just one example—to be largely unmediated, the product of emotional, domestic and direct concerns. Its female audience, in turn, was held to be sentimental and superficial in its reading needs, a conception most recently discussed by Ayelet Brinn in her analysis of the editorial histories of women’s columns such as IN DER FROYEN VELT. Yet the short prose of writers such as Yente Serdatzky and Rosa Lebensboym shows an ongoing, gendered negotiation of modernism as experienced by their internal, fictional “readers” and “writers.” As girls, these characters are swept away by Maupassant, Tolstoy and Balzac; as adults, however, they found this literature unsuitable to their new lives, working in Lower East Side factories and participating in Socialist circles where pamphlets on “free love” left them vulnerable.

In this paper I will explore the ways in which the fictional characters of reading and writing women are used to express Yiddish female authors’ feminist, pessimistic critique of sentimental literature on the one hand, and an ambivalent, frustrated attempt to forge female intellectual literary voices on the other. My paper draws on narratology and theory of the novel to analyze different characters’ literary encounters in Serdatzky’s short prose published from 1910-1915. Inspired by Kathryn Hellerstein’s study of elusive female subjectivities in Yiddish poetry, I suggest that examining the internal characters of women’s prose offers an approach for identifying certain shared “traditions” among these authors, and redeeming and complicating the discourse around Yiddish “women’s writing.”

Author

• Dalia Wolfson, Harvard University