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

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The social and economic upheaval in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century had far reaching consequences, especially for those at the margins of society. Jewish women in Russian and Yiddish literature of this period are often portrayed as resilient victims. Women's heroism, if present at all, is often linked to martyrdom. This panel pushes back against the prevailing image of Jewish women’s passivity with three readings of unconventional and assertive female figures. These women take bold and even violent action to direct their own fates. Tetyana Yakovleva’s paper considers Semyon Yushkevich’s 1906 play “Hunger,” whose heroine, Nakhoma, murders her children--and herself--in a desperate act of resistance against the crumbling social order. LeiAnna Hamel argues that the understudied woman writer Rokhl Brokhes uses the Gothic motifs of madness, female imprisonment, and transgression in her 1906 “Underhill” to offer a scathing critique of women’s victimization during early twentieth-century modernization processes. Elaine Wilson’s paper examines how the shifting representation of Tonke, the heroine of Moyshe Kulbak's Yiddish novel THE ZELMENYANERS, serves as a broader commentary on women’s resistance to patriarchal traditions in the 1920s before their eventual suppression under the masculine narratives that defined 1930s Stalinist literature. Though the individual foci of these studies move across time and place from the tsarist Pale of Settlement to a Soviet urban center, collectively they shed light on literary representations of rebellious Jewish women actively grappling with modernity. The bodies and deeds of these assertive literary heroines emerge as rich sites of tension with patriarchal norms. Read together, they form a collective body of Jewish women’s resistance in Russian and Yiddish literature.

Sub Unit

• Gender & Sexuality Studies

Chair

• Sandra Nora Chiritescu, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Motherhood between Hunger and Religion in Semyon Yushkevich’s Play “Golod” (1906) - Tetyana Yakovleva, YAAANA

• The Female Gothic in Rokhl Brokhes’ “Unter-Barg” (“Underhill,” 1906) - LeiAnna Hamel, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Margins of Meaning: Gendering the Landscape of Struggle in THE ZELMENYANERS - Elaine Wilson, Columbia University

Respondent

• Jessica Anne Kirzane, The University of Chicago