Yiddish Women's Fiction

The category “Yiddish women’s fiction” is indicative of the gender trouble inherent to Yiddish literature and literary studies. It is an imperfect category to describe women who wrote fiction and not literature intended for an audience of women. Women’s authorship and readership are separate yet overlapping categories in Yiddish literature. These categories signal differences in power and experiences that shape the content of stories and poems. In the essay “Yidish literatur un di lezerin” (cited under General Overviews), Shmuel Charney infamously extrapolates on the address contained in many early works of Yiddish literature (by men) to the readership that lumps together women and men uneducated in Torah as the intended audience. As Naomi Seidman explains in A Marriage Made in Heaven (under General Overviews), this address hints at but does not state the sexual politics of Yiddish, a language perceived as feminine compared to its “masculine” counterpart Hebrew, loshn koydesh. Nevertheless, we know that the readership of Yiddish literary works was not exclusively women or men who could not read Hebrew. It was anyone who picked up a Yiddish newspaper, journal, or book anywhere across the globe. Additionally, parsing apart the symbolic weight of the word “woman” in Yiddish-speaking spaces reveals a category contingent on factors such as age, marital status, and communal politics. In this bibliography, “woman” refers to those assigned female at birth and who continue to live their lives as women. For the future of Yiddish literature, this definition will need amending. Beyond the imperfections of the term “Yiddish women’s fiction,” the efforts to translate women’s fiction into English reveal new possibilities for understanding the short-lived rise and fall of Yiddish literature broadly. This bibliography focuses on English and Yiddish resources, including anthologies and the conference proceedings from Di Froyen Women and Yiddish: Tribute to the Past Directions for the Future (under General Overviews), and the fiction itself. Due to the political nature of reading women’s literature, some resources exist for the purpose of historical recovery, such as the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (under Bibliographies), making available information about these authors that may otherwise be challenging to collect. Multiple anthologies from the 1990s, literary and scholastic, pulled together women’s voices as an explicitly feminist action amid the rising prominence of identity politics in North America. Research today on Yiddish women’s literature is undoubtedly connected to this uptick in the translation of Yiddish women’s literature and provides an optimistic future for the field. Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry (under Literary Studies) demonstrates that the interrogation of a Yiddish women’s literary tradition rests upon a queer chronology that seeks a future from this fragmented and precarious past.

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