Devorah Baron

Devorah Baron (also spelled Dvora Baron and Deborah Baron) (December 4, 1887 - August 20, 1956) was a pioneering Jewish writer, noted for writing in Modern Hebrew and for making a career as a Hebrew author. She has been labeled as the "first Modern Hebrew woman writer".[1] She wrote about 80 short stories, plus a novella titled Exiles. Additionally, she translated stories into Modern Hebrew.

She was born in Uzda, about 50 kilometers SSW of Minsk. Her father was a rabbi and took the unusual step of allowing her to attend the same Hebrew classes as boys, though she had to sit in the screened women’s area of the synagogue. She also went on to complete high school, unusual for a girl. She received a teaching credential in 1907. Her first publications were in 1902, at the age of 14, some short stories published in Ha-Melits, edited by Leon Rabinowitz (1902).

She was engaged to the author Moshe Ben-Eliezer, but he later broke it off. In 1910, after her father’s death and later the destruction of her village in a pogrom, she moved to Neveh-Tsedek in Palestine and became part of the editorial staff of a magazine Ha-Po’el ha-Za’ir (The Young Worker). She soon married the editor, the Zionist activist Yosef Aharonovitz (1877–1937). Along with other Jews in Palestine, they were deported to Egypt by the Ottoman government,[2] but returned after the establishment of the British Mandate after the First World War.

In 1922, Baron and her husband both resigned from the magazine. At this point, she went into seclusion, staying at her home until she died.

When the Bialik Prize for writing was first established in Israel in 1934, she was its first recipient. She later was awarded the Rupin Prize in 1944 and the Brenner Prize for literature in 1951.[3]

Her career as a writer is divided into two significantly different phases. First, she was an active, even daring young woman. Later, she became secluded and passive. But she wrote during both phases. Thus, we can see Baron’s life as divided into two very different halves: her first, active, daring, autonomous phase as a young woman. She wrote some angry stories about the place of women in Jewish life.

In her second phase of life, she was passive, ailing and dependent life-style, and referred to some of her earlier stories as “rags”. The common thread throughout her life was her dedication to the art of writing, which characterized the author during her seclusion no less than before it. "Seclusion" is not an exaggeration: she chose "not to step foot out of her house", though for her husband's funeral, one eyewitness reported, "I saw her descend three steps and return to her house."[4] During this period of seclusion, she "composed a group of stories depicting the world as seen through the window of an 'invalid's room' ("Be-Lev ha-Kerakh," in Parashiyyot). Her perception remained sharp to the end, and her stories are animated by a deep empathy for the weak and the innocent. No other woman writer in Israel was as familiar with the sources of Judaism as Devorah Baron."[5]

It was during the later part of her life that she also did some important literary translations into Hebrew, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Though part of the Zionist movement, she wrote much about life back in the shtetl village life of eastern Europe.

Works by Devorah Baron

Also, translations into Hebrew, including Madame Bovary

Works about Devorah Baron and her writings

External links

References

  1. ↑ Lieblich, Amia. 1997. Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer. Berkeley, CA. 1997.
  2. ↑ p. 9. Bernstein, Marc. 2001. Midrashj and marginality: The ‘Agunot of S. Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron. Hebrew Studies 42: 7-58.
  3. ↑ p. 8. Bernstein, Marc. 2001. Midrashj and marginality: The ‘Agunot of S. Y. Agnon and Devorah Baron. Hebrew Studies 42: 7-58.
  4. ↑ p. 272. Govrin, Nurit. Devorah Baron, Early Chapters (in Hebrew), Jerusalem: 1988.
  5. ↑ Encyclopedia Judaica.
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