The First Day and Other Stories

Baron, Dvora. The First Day and Other Stories. Translated by Naomi Seidman with Chana Kronfeld. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

It is a bit disconcerting that Dvora Baron, the first Hebrew woman author who immigrated to Israel in 1910 as a pioneer chose to shun the subject of nation building in her fictional oeuvre. Was her avoidance of this subject an implicit rejection of the male dominated enterprise she was only partially involved in as the co-editor with her husband of a major journal? Was the mysterious illness that kept her bed-ridden for over thirty years until her death in 1956 a somatic expression of her alienation - as a woman author - from the energetic process unfolding around her? A recent imaginary reconstruction of Baron's life, written by Amia Lieblich and translated by Naomi Seidman, entitled Conversations with Dvora (University of California Press, 1998), suggests possible explanations, without opting for any final conclusions regarding the secluded life of Dvora Baron. Ostensibly, the author's sensitive description of the vulnerable heroes of the East European Shtetl affirms the Zionist doctrine of the Negation of the Diaspora (shlilat hagola). On the other hand, we could argue that the description of Jewish women's stunted lives is a vicarious representation of Baron's own sense of alienation and vulnerability. Lieblich suggests that Baron wrote in detail about stultifying marriages in order to cheer up her daughter, Tzipporah, who suffered from epilepsy and was doomed to a celibate life.

Be it as it may, Baron's compassion for the female victims of Jewish traditionalism is unmistakable. In the short story "Bill of Divorcement," she presents the fate of the divorcee as a slow process of social dying. A previous translator, Felice Kahn Ziskend, entitled the story "Excision" in order to drive home...