3
Baron "in the Closet"
An Epistemology of the "Women's Section"

The "women's section" [of the synagogue] was a kind of spiritual ghetto for women.
—Shmuel Niger, 1912

I

If Abramovitsh captured the hearts of his public by gaining—in his Mendele persona—a comfortable familiarity, Dvora Baron fascinated her readers by her singularity, by the very uniqueness of a woman's command of Hebrew in the heart of traditional Eastern Europe. To the image Frishman drew of Abramovitsh being borne aloft by thousands of admirers we can juxtapose the images of Baron's life: the young girl sitting alone in the women's section of the synagogue, listening to her father teach Torah; the fifteen-year-old who left her home to study secular subjects in the big city (with her parents' consent!); the young woman lying on a bed on a Friday night in Mariampol, surrounded by yeshiva boys eagerly displaying their modern Hebrew skills for their young and beautiful mentor; the frail recluse, shut in her apartment for decades as Tel Aviv grew and roiled around her. Whatever psychological idiosyncrasies shaped Baron's extraordinary life, it is hard to view this life as separate from the initial move she made, when barely into her adolescence, to become a Hebrew writer, the first woman to make a career for herself in Hebrew prose.

If Baron was exceptional, it was first of all by being born to an exceptional father, a small-town Lithuanian rabbi who had a radical and generous approach to his gifted daughter's education. A student of Baron's father describes how the young Dvora participated in the classes her father held in the town beit midrash.

Dvora would sit by herself, imprisoned in the "women's section," studying Eyn ya'akov [a collection of haggadic material in the Talmud] or midrash

aloud. From time to time she would call over the partition: "Father" or "Benjamin!" [her brother] "What does this mean?" Frankly, I secretly envied her dedication, although I also couldn't help admiring her.^[1]

The biographical notes assembled by Baron's daughter after the writer's death confirm this scenario, describing how Baron's father, "noticing her talents and nobility of mind, educated her as he would a boy; she studied the Eyn ya'akov and midrash with great diligence, and later the Talmud as well."^[2]   In her important biography of Baron, Nurit Govrin details the factors that enabled Baron to receive an education in traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

The rare combination of understanding parents, a brother who was also a spiritual guide, and a girl who was also blessed with talents, eager for learning and iron-willed, was what made possible the very existence of a rabbi's daughter-Hebrew writer, whose knowledge of Hebrew and grounding in the religious sources were natural and primary. The solution to her acquiring the Jewish-Hebrew education normally given to a boy was to make a necessary compromise, which allowed her to receive an education without seriously overthrowing accepted social conventions.^[3]

Baron's father had it both ways. He upheld the letter of the law by having her remain within the women's section in body ("imprisoned," as Moshe Gitlin puts it) while allowing her to break the tacit and, in some sources, explicit prohibitions against women's Torah study. The study hall was simultaneously open and closed to her, and the screen or partition that separated her from her brother and father served as a reminder of the marginal status dictated by her female body even as she transcended the partition in mind and voice.

Another biographical account adds an interesting dimension. According to a man who grew up in Baron's hometown of Ouzda, Baron's father was "a strange man" in yet another way: "All day he studied and taught Torah, but at night, after midnight, when the people of the town could see a light in their Rabbi's window, they knew that he was reading the novels of Shoymer, the folk writer, which were so beloved by women."^[4]   This unusual man not only allowed his daughter access to the normatively male arena of Torah study, he himself also crossed the line into the arena of Yiddish literature, apparently without hiding these excursions from his fellow townspeople.

Dvora Baron never gave direct fictional form to any of the experiences described in these biographical vignettes, though they are important for explaining, as Govrin puts it, "the very existence of a rabbi's daughter—Hebrew writer." However true these stories are, the account of Baron in

the synagogue can serve as a metaphorical map for Baron's transgressions of the sexual and linguistic borders of Hebrew-Yiddish. The traversed partition can encode the ways in which Baron presents us, often simultaneously, with the exemplary and the exceptional, the normative and the transgressive moments of feminine experience. Baron lays bare the vigorously upheld yet continually negotiated boundaries of the sexually segregated social and textual order.

The women's section and the main area of a traditional Eastern European prayer or study hall represent no simple symmetrical division of the genders into "separate but equal" zones. Synagogue architecture sets off a male center, with the Holy Ark holding the Torah, the pulpit, and the other ritual accessories, from the female periphery, where the women serve as the audience for male religious practice. (The women's section in Eastern European synagogues was often a balcony or gallery.) A semipermeable barrier regulates the flow from male center to female periphery. In many cases, the Eastern European synagogue did double duty as synagogue and classroom or informal study hall. This arrangement came in handy for Baron. The design intended to organize communal prayer had the benefit, at least in her case, of providing space for qualified female participation in Torah study as well, although the use Baron's father made of this contingency was far from sanctioned or usual. The partition, during his classes, became more permeable than usual, since the young girl was allowed to call across the screen to her father and brother and thus participate, to a limited extent, in the give-and-take of traditional Torah study. Nevertheless, the barrier and all it represented remained in place.

My reading of Baron's work through the metaphor of the synagogue is not completely without precedent. Amalia Kahana-Carmon has used synagogue architecture to describe modern Hebrew fiction, although of a later date. Kahana-Carmon argues that the hierarchies underlying synagogue architecture continue to govern collective Jewish practices, even at their most secular. Modern Hebrew literature, following the model of the synagogue, ordains that writing, like prayer, must speak of and for the collective, which is firmly associated with its male leadership. Kahana-Carmon explains that, in such an environment, women's speech and women's experience are necessarily seen as peripheral.

The supplications of the individual are preordained as trivial or inferior, compared to the central act, collective prayer. And this central activity—where does it take place? In the synagogue, a forum out of bounds for women.
Being a woman, her one place in this arena is in the women's gallery. As a

passive observer, she does not contribute anything. Someone else, acting in the name of all Israel, speaks also on her behalf.^[5]

In insisting on the continuities between traditional and "modern" Jewish thought structures, Kahana-Carmon illuminates the patriarchal ideologies underlying the Hebrew canon. The reception of Baron's Hebrew work was certainly influenced by its deviation from the masculine norms of her literary generation. The collective biography of the Hebrew writer in Eastern Europe describes the young writer's encounter with the Talmud, and, on the sly, with Haskalah literature, typically in the yeshiva in which he received the Orthodox education that would provide him with the building blocks he would later use in writing Hebrew.^[6]   This familiar narrative pinpoints the break with religious tradition, which usually occurred in adolescence, as the formative conflict from which modern secular Hebrew literature arose. Alan Mintz describes what he calls the "apostasy narrative" of the young men who were to become secular Hebrew writers.

Typically they originated from the most devout and scholarly circles of Jewish society, and many distinguished themselves as child prodigies of talmudic learning in whom the pride and resources of family and community were heavily invested. Often already in adolescence the "infection" of religious doubt was contracted through contact with Haskalah writings; the process was hastened after the writers left their towns and villages for the yeshiva and there formed bonds with other youths who harbored the same hesitations.^[7]

This painful but creative rupture with the past often revealed itself in the intertextual strategies by which secular Hebrew writers reworked the religious canon of Hebrew and Aramaic sources. Modern Hebrew literary texts commonly position themselves as both inside and outside the chain of Hebrew literary history, rereading the Bible or postbiblical texts through a swerve empowered by the process of secularization.

Baron also left her home and religious background in midadolescence, and undoubtedly had male friends whose lives followed the pattern Mintz lays out. Her work, however, immediately strikes the reader as different from that of her male counterparts. Whereas many of the major fiction writers of her time (Y. Ch. Brenner, Sh. Y. Agnon, U. N. Gnessin, etc.) are more or less explicitly concerned with the aftermath of their male protagonists' break with religion, Baron tells stories about the traditional religious world. For a literary audience accustomed and eager to recognize the collective apostasy narrative in a literary text, Baron's work might well have seemed timid, outdated, and populated with the

ignorant small-town folk the new generation of Hebrew readers longed to leave behind.

Baron's work, though, is neither conservative nor nostalgic. In story after story, she deals with an earlier and arguably more radical break than the one her readers were conditioned to recognize. A creative swerve, generated by her position of insider/outsider to the Hebrew literary tradition, did guide her writing. In Baron's case, the swerve was a function not only of secularization but also of a gendered exteriority to this tradition. Her stories read and counter read tradition not by nostalgically or bitterly describing, as her male counterparts did, a backward but coherent and unified traditional universe. Baron's "break with tradition" is already inherent in her experience of this tradition, either because she could not fail to notice its asymmetrical gender order or because of her own antinomian encounter with it.

Revisionist readings of religious texts already pervaded even the most "traditional" of female relations to the canon, as I argued earlier. Women's devotional prayers, for instance, forged a new approach to God based on intimacy and direct address. In drawing on this religious women's culture, Baron could participate in the modernist project of rereading Jewish tradition from within an apparently traditionalist discourse. And since the secular Hebrew circles Baron encountered in Lithuania were almost as male dominated as Torah study circles, it is not surprising that her creative and ironic misreadings should be directed toward the Hebrew writings of her male predecessors and contemporaries. Baron's subtle subversions of Hebrew literary texts through seemingly naive and pious characters (many of them female) do as much to unsettle Hebrew literary tradition, I argue, than the most overtly modernist Hebrew literature of her time.

To read Baron as simply a misunderstood and misread modernist is to ignore the degree to which she allowed for, even colluded in, critical "misreadings" of her work. By failing to set her stories in the contemporary Zionist community, Baron actively resisted the most overt of the ideological demands of Hebrew modernism for years after she migrated to Erets-Israel in 1911. As the literary editor of the Socialist-Zionist journal, the Young Worker , Baron was well aware of these demands. Govrin records the tepid public response to the first story Baron published in Palestine, entitled, appropriately enough, "In Which World?" One letter to the editor registered a reader's disappointment with the content of the first issue of Moledet (Homeland), a journal for youth, apparently with Baron's story in mind:

We thought that a journal for young people published in Palestine, which carries the title Moledet and is directed to the new young generation of the land and its spiritual renewal, would itself excel in providing a fresh new perspective, and would present us in its first issue with a refreshing story or essay about our new lives. And the first story the editor gives us is once again about the Diaspora, from that old painful sorrowful Diaspora life! God in heaven, when will there be an end to these stories? We're sick to death of them!^[8]

If the modernist Hebrew poet David Fogel was marginalized during his own lifetime because he remained in the diaspora, territorially removed from the Palestinian center and even the main Eastern European and American peripheries, Dvora Baron was marginalized because she continued to write about the diaspora from the very heart of Tel Aviv. Baron came to Palestine earlier than many of the Hebrew writers who are associated with the Palestinian literary center; moreover, she wrote the largest share of her work and published all her collections in Palestine. Yet Gershon Shaked includes his analysis of her work in the volume of his historiographical study devoted to diaspora writers rather than situating her in the Erets-Israeli volume of the series. Shaked's final appraisal of her work might shed some light on this apparent miscategorization: "It is possible that Baron is one of those writers who walk at the edge of the road, who leave no heirs or followers, although their clear footprints are readily seen on the grounds of our literature."^[9]   Baron, for all her geographic centrality to the Hebrew literary scene of her time, left a clear impression of and on "the edge of the road." Shaked's situating of her work in the diaspora may well be a response to his perception of her writings as themselves "in exile."

Baron's marginal stance as a woman writer, as a bilingual writer in a militantly monolingual environment, as a chronicler of the diaspora at the heart of Zionist activism, as a modernist whose experimentation took directions that were not always immediately identifiable cannot be entirely explained by the prejudices of her literary environment. Baron's modernist techniques and protofeminist political content were overlooked not only because these techniques were different from those of her literary generation or because they were unexpected in the writings of a woman but also because she cloaked herself in—or ironically reappropriated—traditional, "feminine" and subcanonical forms, genres, and styles. The trade-off for risking having her works misread is that Baron called attention (for those who were paying attention) to the subversive potential of the denigrated models she chose as her own. The model

of the performative site of the synagogue may once again be aptly called into service here. Baron alternated between transgressing the borders of the gendered (and generic) spaces assigned to women and retreating, often ironically, to the generic and stylistic "women's section."

II

Baron began to publish Hebrew short stories in 1902, when she was just fifteen, and Yiddish stories in 1904. The peculiarities of Baron's status of a "rabbi's daughter-Hebrew writer" are evident from her very earliest Hebrew work. In 2903, "Three Sisters" appeared, a story that established Baron's credentials in at least three areas: as a Jewish girl versed in traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts, as a worldly reader of modern European literature, and as an acute observer, especially of the female sphere. "Three Sisters" bears the epigraph "'Women are envious beings' (Midrash raba, Lekh lekha 45:5, 10)," as if the young female author were immediately presenting her scholarly calling card to the Hebrew reading public.^[10]   The story also draws on Chekhov's work of the same title, which appeared in 1901, and demonstrates the author's ambitious efforts to emulate the Chekhovian style in favor with Hebrew writers of the time. Further, although Baron's characters are all female, they experience a range of disappointments and frustrations that might seem beyond the range of a teenage girl: spinsterhood, an unhappy marriage, sexual envy.

Readers who knew nothing about Baron were often shocked to discover how young she was. Baron's editor Y. Bershadsky, who had never met the writer personally, insisted in 1905 that a young girl could not have written the story Baron had sent him, entitled "A Quarreling Couple"; and if she had, her writing was evidence that "without a doubt she had already known a man."^[11]   While Bershadsky was merely expressing the common assumption that writers must have experienced some form of what they describe, his sexual speculations can give us some idea of what a young girl entering the early twentieth-century world of Hebrew letters might expect to encounter. "Three Sisters," in demonstrating Baron's possession of a variety of intellectual and experiential tools, also pinpointed her as a woman who had failed to remain "in her place."

Many of Baron's stories work as quasi-illustrations of biblical or postbiblical verses or proverbs, but "Three Sisters" is the earliest and arguably most salient example of this intertextual practice. At first reading, the story appears to treat the epigraph about women being envious creatures as a prooftext for which the writer, in formulaic homiletic style,

furnishes three simple illustrative examples. The number three, typical of folkloric convention, is presumably enough to qualify as evidence bolstering the claim. Thus the writer uses her privileged insider view of women to support the midrashic text and the wisdom of the rabbis who produced it, a perhaps unexpected benefit of female Torah study. By the same token, in her application for membership to the circle of midrashic expanders of the Hebrew canon, Baron is in turn supported by her text, since the relative obscurity of the quotation can serve to demonstrate the breadth of her learning.

At the same time, the epigraph attests to the difficulty inherent in the phenomenon of the female "yeshiva student." The narrative and prooftext meet, after all, at the most uncomfortable juncture imaginable between a female writer and a masculine tradition. On one hand, the narrative highlights the gender of its author by granting us access to a female world; on the other, the epigraph, in utter deadpan, presents midrashic discourse at its most omnisciently misogynist.

Baron, or the imago of the rabbi's daughter/writer, appears most forcefully neither in the epigraph nor in the story proper but rather in the multiple gaps between rabbinical citation, Chekhovian narrative, and female signature. At the very outset, no reader can help noticing the space between the story's literary language—Hebrew—and the author's female signature beneath it. And in what amounts to very much the same thing, the story generates tension between a talmudic epigraph placing women as the transparent objects of male critical inquiry and a female-authored account of three women that proceeds to both confirm and undermine the rabbis' grand pronouncement on the subject of the feminine character.

"Three Sisters" is not just a "Jewish" text, however. The story places the young author in the ranks of the new generation of Hebrew writers who were reading the shtetl, not according to Abramovitsh, but with Chekhov's ear for the world-weary and inconsequential chatter of the restless and hopeless young. "Three Sisters" echoes the Chekhov play in title, structure, and tone. The opening lines of Baron's story are closer to spare stage directions than to the descriptive catalogs of Abramovitsh's work and of Baron's own later stories: "In a small room, Miss Goldberg sits and reviews her lesson. Across from her sits Levin, her friend." Chekhov's play begins, we might recall, with Olga correcting her students' papers while Masha and Irena sit lost in thought. Baron's narrative is rendered almost entirely through the sort of dialogue, punctuated

by ellipses and always on the verge of trailing off altogether, that is Chekhov's signature.

Levin, who had been sitting quietly until now, began to drum her fingertips on the table and spoke.
"Forget the lesson, Goldberg; let's just talk."
"And how about the lesson?"
"Don't worry, you'll know the lesson, I'll be responsible . . ."
"Anything new?"
"There's almost nothing new."

For all its self-conscious Chekhovian influence, however, it would be wrong to see this story as simply another text about the disruptive effect of modernity on the sensibilities of a traditionally educated young writer. A male Hebrew writer who moves from Midrash raba to a description of a group of young former yeshiva students mired in Chekhovian ennui might be making that point. Baron's juxtaposition of the two literary influences cannot be explained solely through the apostasy model. What is unusual about Baron's genesis as a Hebrew writer is that her immersion in religious texts was itself a "modernity effect," reflecting her father's qualified version of an Enlightenment tolerance. For Baron to quote the midrash already presents a challenge to its authority, however mildly and deferentially she utilizes the text.

What is most subversive about Baron's text is not any explicit feminine protest she expresses against rabbinic pomposity, it is her unique epistemological stance, her multiple avenues of knowledge. She knows the text of Midrash raba , just as she demonstrates her familiarity with Chekhov, and she has access to the female experience both texts claim to describe. Baron's story does not deny that "women are envious": the three women described exhibit definite propensities for envy. What most differentiates the narrative from its epigraph is its evaluative stance: where the midrash is absolutist and judgmental, Baron is psychological and reserves explicit moral judgment, using Chekhov's dry delivery to distance the narrator from both the characters and the prooftext.

Baron's story follows the three unmarried Goldberg sisters in the course of a day in which they meet various female acquaintances, each of whom is better off than they are in some way. Although each sister is indeed envious in her own way, they never express their jealousy, leaving the narrator to identify their sighs, tears, and glances as signs of suppressed envy. By the end of the story, their poverty and spinsterhood, combined with the blind insensitivity of their luckier acquaintances,

win the reader's sympathy for the envy they understandably feel. In the course of apparently bolstering the masculine authority of the quoted text by drawing the curtains open on the female experiences it claims to understand, Baron undermines the superior tone of the midrash and reverses its emotional charge. The condemnation implicit in the midrash is redirected against a social order that unequally distributes material wealth, punishes women for failing to marry and oppresses them if they do (in the last example, the unmarried eldest sister and her married friend each envy the other's state), and finally, sees fit to criticize women for their human reactions to an unfair social and economic system. Envy is a possible, even a likely, result, in other words, of social, economic, and sexual marginality. Put in this way, the rabbinic diagnosis of women is less illuminating of "female nature" than of women's place in a social order the rabbis themselves are complicitous in maintaining.

Baron's first collection of Hebrew stories appeared in 1927, twenty-five years after she first began publishing short stories. The opening story of Stories is entitled "In the Beginning," signaling the writer's extravagant claim for her own literary work as a quasi-divine act.^[12]   The story echoes the two creation stories in Genesis: the first describes God creating the first human as a "male and female" (Gen. 1:27); the second establishes the hierarchy between Adam and his female partner, born of Adam's rib (Gen. 2:22). "In the Beginning" begins not with an egalitarian narrative, however, but with a female-centered one, describing a new bride's arrival in a poverty-stricken shtetl where her young husband has just received a post as rabbi. The story begins with the woman's unhappy perspective.

Is it any wonder that the Rebetsin [rabbi's wife] of little Zhuzhikovka, when she saw the ruin of a kehilah [community] house and its neglected courtyard, should have stood tall and stubborn by the door and refused to enter.
But she did go in later. She took off her hat, revealing a blond wig with soft curls—and went in. But afterwards, when the welcoming party ended and everyone went home—she dropped in her city clothes to the naked bench in the community room and cried and cried, without cessation and without easing off, while he, her young husband, stood beside her in his silk caftan, girded in the sash of a rabbi—and at a loss for ideas.^[13]

This description stops here and abruptly begins again, as it were, from the beginning; this time, the narrator includes a mildly ironic self-exhortation.

This story should begin in a different version, a more fitting one—as follows:
When the new rabbi was supposed to arrive in town to take up his rabbinical duties, the head of the community ordered that all the streets and the synagogue be swept as if it were the eve of Passover.^[14]

The first version, which focuses on the rabbi's wife's experience, changes the typical center/margin relationship that organizes many of the narratives about a young man or couple moving back to the provinces. Here it is the wife who is the educated and cultured big-city person forced to confront the narrow confines of shtetl life, a role more usually assigned to the young maskil. Her husband's official status is mentioned only to be immediately contrasted with his helplessness before his weeping wife.

The narrative that "begins again," however, places the male and his exalted occupation as the central figure of a more distanced and conventionally told story. This second version provides a panoramic view of the shtetl, omnisciently relating the sequence of events—unlike the first version, which mentions the welcoming party only to set the stage for the Rebetsin's tears. These two openings thus present a doubled perspective on the same events: one female and subjective, the other vacillating between a male and an omniscient or communal perspective. They are also stylistically distinguished from each other. The first version is presented in a folksy, conversational style behind which the Yiddish is clearly audible. The story begins with this passage:

About my mother, the Rebetsin of Zhuzhikovka, they say in my little hometown this:
She, the Rebetsin, was brought here some years ago from some faraway large city in the country of Poland.^[15]

The generic affiliations of this passage, with its implied collective narrator, unspecified time, and vagueness about details that are not readily available ("from some city"), are with the folktale. But while this subcanonical affiliation links Baron with orature, which is often affiliated with women, it also frees her from the conventions of premodernist realism, allowing her to experiment in the flexible syntax associated with the conversational mode and substitute unexpected gaps and juxtapositions for the catalogs of realia of the nusach style, the normarive Hebrew prose idiom forged by Abramovitsh and his immediate followers. How, then, do we read Baron's move toward a more conventional perspective and mode of narration after four paragraphs? On one hand, her "self-correction"

highlights the stylistic and perspectival transgressions of the first "beginning," placing the entire narrative squarely in the camp of self-conscious modernist experimentation. On the other hand, the narrator, once having chosen a "more fitting version," continues her story with it, making us wonder to what extent we are supposed to approve of "propriety" in storytelling. In any case, it is telling that the first version of the story aligns a woman's perspective with a simulation of Yiddish syntax and modernist experimentation while in the second version the masculine perspective and normative premodern Hebrew syntax dominate.

In "The First Day," a story that appeared in the same collection as "In the Beginning," Baron again juxtaposes modernist and antimodernist elements, although in different ways. If "In the Beginning" shifts generic affiliations from the folktale to the socially conscious realist narrative, "The First Day" represents Baron's ironic relation to two subcanonical genres: children's literature and the memoir. Baron, whose marginalization derived in part from her use of children as narrators (she also often wrote for children), here took her own practice to its limit by having her story narrated by a day-old baby.^[16]   If her practice of writing from the perspective of young shtetl girls contributed to the perception that her work was thinly veiled autobiography or naive children's literature, then "The First Day" subjects this perception to a reductio ad absurdum. Baron's first-person chronicle of a day-old baby girl cannot be ascribed to memory; nor could the experiences related here have come from family stories—in one passage, the narrator describes the discomfort of her too-tight swaddling clothes. Among the effects of such scenes in "The First Day" is to expose the fictionality of memoiristic conventions.

Feminist readings of Baron that privilege her explicit protest narratives are no less immune to misreading than the male critics who see her focus on domestic life and her apparent adherence to conventional forms as reflecting a modesty appropriate to a woman writer. What interests Baron is precisely the tenuousness of traditional textual and social structures—both in the area of distinct masculine and feminine spheres and in the separation between the modern and traditional, modernist and antimodernist realms. Thus "The First Day," despite its explicit feminist protest against the lesser valuation of daughters than sons, presents a complex universe in which masculine and feminine discourse cannot be easily separated. The last few paragraphs of the story describe the baby's father, whose voice floats over the partition to his new daughter, singing a song that is not about "sons or daughters."

For a long time my father continued to walk back and forth on the other side of the partition, singing to himself an ordinary, unimportant tune, like one that might be sung to calm someone or put them to sleep, and which comes easily and fluently to every father's lips. His other tune, the extraordinary one, the one which in the course of years, during those nights in my bed, would drench my sadness like wine, came afterward, a few hours later, as he sat by the light of the lamp at the table over his books, no longer pondering the fate of sons or daughters on this earth but rather that of humanity in general.
Reproachful, piercing, laced with gentleness—as if with a magical wand he lifted the veil from my future for an instant, and I peeked:
Gloom and greyness, with no passage or exit . . . —and I was shaken.
At the sound of my cries Father came from the other side of the partition and rocked me, going back, in an instant, to the tune from before, the ordinary one, the one every father knows by heart.
—There, there, it's nothing, it's nothing, he soothed me, soothed me and sang, until I calmed down, and exhausted—fell asleep. So ended the first day of my life.^[17]

The partition in this small house is a graphic image of the poor family's makeshift quarters. However tempting it might be to read the partition also as the already-erected barrier of gender between the listening daughter and the father who is lost in his books, the father's words themselves militate against such a reading. But his ability to transcend the strictures of gender, if only in solitude and meditation, is not necessarily utopian: it is the tune that comes to his lips in this mood, "no longer pondering the fate of sons or daughters on this earth but rather that of humanity in general," that terrifies his daughter.

For all of the apparent solidity of Baron's described shtetl universe, the narratives generally take their shape in the liminal spaces where old forms break down or where the conflicting demands of men and women, tradition and modernity, the urbane and the provincial confront each other. "Feminist" or "misogynist" discourses in Baron cannot be simply identified with male and female characters; instead, texts supportive of or antagonistic to male or female interests form a broad and ramified palette from which male and female speakers may draw. That this should be so does not neutralize the political potency of the texts, nor does it essentially alter the social hierarchy. Baron, far from being the recorder of a static or even stagnant society, presents us with a system in flux, and male/female relations are often the points of stress or the incentives and markers of change. In "The First Day," the grandmother quotes from the rabbis, "may their memory be blessed," to her exhausted and intimidated daughter-in-law.

Having spent her life in the vicinity of learned men, and thus listening to their conversations, my grandmother also knew some sayings from the discourse of our sages, may their memories be blessed, in the matter of a daughter and her value in life.
Thus, for example, she knew, that if the son is compared to wine, then the daughter is nothing but vinegar; if a son is as wheat, then the daughter—is like unto barley.
True: there is a need for wine and a need for vinegar, but the need for wine is greater than for vinegar; so too, one needs both wheat and barley but—the need for wheat is greater than that for barley.
Alas, the erudition of this old rabbi's wife was awesome. Like giant boulders rolled the sayings from her mouth, one heavier and more frightening than the next.^[18]

Lost in translation is Baron's juxtaposition not only of two women's responses to the birth of a daughter but also of two different Hebrew styles. The grandmother's words are composed of ponderous quotations from religious texts. Like the writers of an earlier generation, the grandmother speaks in shibuts form, building sentences both by direct quotation and by adapting formulaic talmudic connectives to make her point. A reader familiar with this tradition would not only recognize the quotations in substance and form but also hear the singsong intonation by which the grandmother's logic would impress itself on her listener. The grandmother's speech, in short, is thoroughly imbued with the weighty style of masculine Torah discourse, just as her words are drawn from the most misogynist of its texts. Her relationship with this discourse is an uneasy blend of appropriation and internalization, as if she herself could escape the rabbinic judgments only by the boldest affiliation with their authority.

The daughter-in-law, by contrast, is represented only implicitly in the "combined perspective" (linking the daughter-narrator and the new mother) of the sentences that follow. The style of these sentences moves toward the modernist flexibility Baron's generation introduced into the Hebrew idiom, a flexibility that is largely derived from Yiddish: her second sentence is structured according to the Yiddish rules for word order. The ambiguity of the younger woman's response—nora means both terrible and awesome—and the hyperbole of the narrator's tone have something of the irony that often characterizes Yiddish, especially in relation to Hebrew.^[19]   By describing the rabbinical words as awesome/terrible, the less-educated mother can both acknowledge and ironically undermine their textual and sexual authority. As in "In the Beginning," Baron alternates between two Hebrew idioms, one associated with a masculine

world of textual allusion and the premodern prose style of early generations of Hebrew writers and another informed by Yiddish conversational style, a feminine, somewhat ironic discourse that challenges and responds to the first style.

In the next paragraph, the desolate mother is comforted to remember that at the birth of her first daughter, her husband had explained to her that "what was meant by 'And God blessed Abraham with everything [bakol ],' was that He gave him a daughter named 'Bakol.'" The father, in this passage, refers to the commentary on Genesis 24:1 that reads the word bakol as referring to a daughter by that name. But the commentators are divided on how to interpret the passage, with the medieval commentator Rashi citing a different midrash that equates the word bakol numerically with the word for son. Thus the father chooses only the midrash that will support his own desire to celebrate the birth of a daughter, a choice that also lends support to his wife. If this passage represents a masculine manipulation of the patriarchal Jewish tradition, it also signifies the uses to which a well-versed woman author can put the Hebraic intertextual universe. Similarly, the paternal voice's triumph over the grandmother's misogyny can indicate that, as a man, his message takes precedence over a woman's, or that his feminism saves the day. In either case, the father's kindness to his wife counters the grandmother's misogyny, making it difficult to map out a symmetrical equation between gender and gender ideologies.

In "Family," the phenomenon of feminine ventriloquism of masculine discourse takes the form of a female character who acts as guardian of community values.^[20]   Batya, who chastises Dinah for failing to procreate, is presented as a student of her itinerant-preacher father: "She learned to orate from him and at family gatherings she loved to hold forth while the others were compelled to listen compliantly." After Dinah has remained childless for five years, Batya comes to visit "armed, as the importance of the occasion dictated, with the ancient umbrella she had inherited from her father, and which, in her hands, acquired the form of a chastising rod."^[21]   To complete the image of the phallic woman, competing on equal terms with male discourse because she is willing to adopt it unquestioningly, Batya adds her own voice to the Torah reading in synagogue, telling a parable about a tree that fails to bear fruit and is thus struck down, "waving her palm rapidly until Dinah, who was standing near her, flinched, as if Batya were ready with the axe against her."^[22]   Batya's adoption of a murderous male discourse finally forces Dinah to abandon the women's section, so that female companionship or sympathy

is denied her as well. Thus women's participation in patriarchal traditions is viewed ambivalently as a possible threat to female solidarity and as consolidating and universalizing male control over female lives.

What might be seen as the biological misfortune of Dinah's childlessness is revealed, in Batya's words, as a transgression against a textually inscribed order. It is significant, then, that when her salvation finally comes, it is through a malfunction in this textual system. When after ten years of childlessness her husband is compelled—against both of their wishes—to divorce Dinah, the divorce is annulled when the bill of divorcement is shown to contain an inadvertently misshaped letter. The narrator writes, "Sometimes drowning people suddenly see a hand or a board floating on the water, or people engulfed in fire see a window or hole in the wall; here it happened in the form of a letter that was inserted in the wrong place and stuck out of the straight line."^[23]   The last phrase "yats'ah min hashurah" (it [or she, since "letter" in Hebrew is feminine] went out of the line), dramatizes the confluence of social and textual transgressions. Earlier in the story, Dinah is herself described as being outside the line of dancers that includes her husband at a wedding party: "Now she was outside the line, a link that had slipped from its place."^[24]   The possibility of slipping out of one's place, which is devastating for her in the social and biological realm, is what saves her in the textual realm. The "failures" that occur in the biological order have their share in the textual order; as it turns out, this is a fortunate slip of the pen. The connection between the body and the text is dramatized in this description of the flawed bill of divorcement.

The old scribe did not immediately understand what had happened and tried to set the dangling line stroke back in its place, and then my father put out his hand and raised the parchment and the assembled crowd, in their fear and trembling, saw that one end of a letter had been cut off like the leg of a living being that had been dislocated, and it was bleeding ink [shotetet dyo ] and darkening like a wound in the middle of the text.^[25]

The story makes brilliant use of the Jewish tradition of finding equivalences between the body and the text. The dislocated leg aptly stands in for the couple whose connection to each other the manuscript is supposed to dissolve. But the story also explores the discontinuities between body and text. While the manuscript is "bleeding ink," the narrator describes the husband's face as drained, "with no drop of blood in it."^[26]   The Talmudists and Kabbalists were concerned with demonstrating

the equivalences of the Torah with the perfect (male or divine) body. Baron, by contrast, is more interested in recognizing the place of imperfection, dismemberment, sterility, transgression, and the feminine in this textual-physical realm. Human experience, the story seems to imply, does not always match the texts that attempt to govern it; and when correspondences are found, the match may be in the very flaws of each system.

Baron's story establishes correspondences not only between bodies and texts but also among texts themselves, responding to earlier treatments of the issue of patriarchal control over marriage. "Family" alludes to Y. L. Gordon's well-known mock-epic poem of 1868, "The Tip of the Yod." Gordon's "passionate threnody on the plight of the Jewish woman"^[27]   begins with the famous question "Jewish (or Hebrew) woman, who knows your life?" and relates the tragic separation of two lovers when the woman's divorce from her first husband is declared invalid. The now-missing husband, Hillel, had signed his name with the "defective" rather than the "plene" spelling, and so the yod, the smallest (and most insignificant, Gordon implies) letter, is missing. Gordon's poem, a Jewish version of the kingdom lost for want of a nail, is a melodramatic attack on the hairsplitting orthodoxy of his time.

Baron's story, at first reading, appears to reverse Gordon's attack, since the hero of the story is the rabbi who, by discovering the mutilated letter, allows the couple to remain together. Rabbis, this rabbi's daughter might be saying, can as easily decide in favor of human needs as against them. "Family" lends itself to a different intertextual reading, however. In Baron's story the textual flaw is what enables the loving couple to remain married despite the practice of divorce prescribed for childless couples. By contrast, in Gordon's poem, the flawed text keeps his couple apart. The disputed divorce provides Gordon with the opportunity to demonstrate the wrong-headed legalism of the rabbinic world.

The presiding judge, a Kabbalist, who was versed in the "secret wisdom"
Decided according to the AR"I that Hillel was spelled without a yod,
And the second judge agreed according to Bedek habayit —
And the two of them decided that the divorce was kosher;
Only Rabbi Vafsi decided that Hillel was spelled with a yod
As the ZA"M and the SA"M had decreed, in accordance with the
Shulchan Arukh .
And he raged at them and said that he was amazed
That both of them could have forgotten the decision of the Arukh .
And so he stood his ground like a porcupine and like a planted tree
And shouted out loud in Yiddish, "The divorce is invalid!"^[28]

For Gordon, then, the problem of Jewish textual authority over sexuality and gender roles is one that pits lenient interpretations against strict ones. The implication is that if only the lenient approach were adopted, the loving couple could be reunited. Men, in Gordon's narrative, retain control over determining what constitutes a textual (and sexual?) lack. For Baron, masculine textual authority over women's lives is itself the problem, one that no paternalistic manipulation of Hebrew or Aramaic texts can resolve. The only way in which women's concerns can be reflected in this male universe is when the text is disrupted. It is when the scribe's hand fails to perform its prescribed role according to "the letter of the law" that the divorce papers finally reveal something of the painful story occluded in the document's perfect state. Only the slip of the pen can signify the painful separation of Dinah (who has no part in the "official" document) and her uneducated husband, inadvertently pointing to this experience as the bloody mutilation of a living organism.

In "Family," as in "Three Sisters," the gaps between masculine and feminine knowledge are implicit in the narrative but are never directly described. In "Agunah" (Abandoned Woman), Baron places the epistemological gap at the heart of the story and translates architectural divisions into hermeneutic differences.^[29]   The narrative begins with a description of the bitter late autumn in the village and the muddy road along which a traveling preacher makes his way to the prayer hall, and takes the reader through the prayers and the opening remarks of the preacher. After setting up the scene from a distanced, universalizing, and omniscient perspective, the narrator moves to the women's section of the synagogue, where Dinah, the rabbinical judge's elderly wife, sits alone, literally and figuratively "in the dark," since she does not understand the prayers she can nevertheless recite by heart. The narrator describes Dinah in her peripheral, alienated, and disempowered relation to the religious narrative unfolding within the synagogue. The physical barrier separating men and women in the prayer hall, then, is also an epistemological one, denying women access to textual intercourse. To the extent that communication does exist, the multiple barriers dividing the sexes produce refractions and "warped" readings, like the light that comes into the women's section obliquely and already diluted. Dinah can hear the prayers and the preacher's sermon, but their meaning is closed to her.

Her two eyes look directly at the mouth of the dear Jew, standing at the pulpit beneath. The biblical verses and rabbinical sayings are closed to her,

though, and rest uneasily in her mind, like the slices of stale bread in her husband's house—in her toothless mouth. But no matter: she has her sock and ball of thread with her, and here she is in the meantime, knitting.^[30]

Not only is the bread dry, her mouth is toothless the narrative tells us, signaling deficiencies in both the Torah and her desire or ability to partake of it. And even the bread, like the Torah, comes from her husband's house: she is an unequal participant in both the domestic and the religious spheres. The phrase, in fact, is a homely concretization of any of the numerous aphorisms linking bread and Torah, either as equally necessary and good forms of sustenance or as representing materiality and spirituality, respectively ("Where there is no bread, there is no Torah," "Not hunger for bread . . . but for the word of God," etc.).^[31]   The Torah as stale bread metaphor is familiar in principle, but the negative valence of both tenor and vehicle is distinctly not.

When the itinerant preacher leaves off the tasteless biblical quotations and begins to spin a parable, however, Dinah immediately drops her knitting to listen to the story. The preacher tells of a beautiful princess whose husband, after lavishing gifts and affection on her, leaves her without granting her a divorce, so that she remains legally anchored, as the word agunah implies [ogen = anchor], to an absent man. The preacher expounds the parable's allegorical description of the relationship between Israel, lost in the darkness of exile, and God, her distant, rejecting husband, but Dinah remains transfixed at the literal level of the story, wondering until late into the night what happened to the princess. Looking out at the dark night, she remembers how the preacher spoke of the "darkness of exile." Finally, she turns to her husband across the dark and dank bedroom.

—Raphael—she stretches a gaunt hand through the air—You understood him, there, in the synagogue: What happened to her? What happened to the agunah? Did he come back to her, the husband? Did he come back?
There is no reply. He, the old man, is not asleep, but he does not answer.
—That's the way it always is—she shakes her head, as it were, to the wondrous princess, intimating to the princess what she thinks about "them," men, and then she turns over again and faces the wall, the window.^[32]

Dinah's situation is truly that of the agunah, even though she technically has a husband. She is dependent on him even to understand the meaning of her own situation, a meaning he withholds in a form of intellectual abandonment. Baron's reading of Dinah's literalist "misreading" of the parable is a double one. On one hand, Dinah's mistake is duly noted, and the implied author marks her own ironic distance from the

woman schooled to hear only "stories."^[33]   More than that, the implied author echoes the hermeneutic mode of the preacher by having the title refer to both the princess in the parable and, indirectly, to Dinah, whose unhappy marriage could be compared to the abandonment/dependence of the abandoned wife. That is, Baron's story is also a kind of midrash, also a multilayered performance of a Hebrew text, though it takes a different turn from the familiar allegorical interpretation of the preacher. The woman writer's affiliations are with the preacher she describes and criticizes, much more than with the female protagonist for whose experience she evinces such empathy.

On the other hand, by returning the parable to the specific situation of women, the narrator, like Dinah, resists the long tradition, in which the preacher firmly stands, of reading the sexual conflict in potentially subversive texts such as the Song of Songs as metaphorically describing God's relation with the Jewish people. The new midrash, in the final analysis, is an aggregate of Dinah's "misreading" by ignorance and the implied author's rereading of this misreading as an act of resistance. Together, the two readers privilege the literal over the allegorical, the female over the male perspective, and the darkness of the sociopolitical exile of women over the national tragedy of the Jewish diaspora. Dinah's marginal position is transformed into a powerful textual maneuver that can strip traditional texts of their old, set meanings. The Hebrew secular modernism that rescues sacred texts from allegorical readings is rediscovered in this story in an unexpected place—in the traditional Jewish woman's ignorance of, or freedom from, the accretions of masculinist hermeneutics.^[34]

Baron's story is aimed not only at traditional masculine hermeneutics but also at least one of the modernist varieties. Sh. Y. Agnon's "Agunot" (Abandoned Wives), which first appeared in 1908, has a nearly identical title, a female protagonist also named Dinah, and a similar interest in midrash. As in Baron's story, there are no actually abandoned wives in "Agunot," nor, in fact, does the word even appear. Agnon's story is set wholly within a traditional world, just as it makes a quasi-traditional use of the lover-beloved paradigm to suggest relationships between men and women, God and the Jewish people, Israel and the Diaspora. In his distinctively modernist approach to tradition, Agnon activates all these levels simultaneously rather than use the human love relationship to tell the national story. Altogether missing from Agnon's narrative is a consciousness of the power imbalances between men and women. The irabalances are there, in Dinah's forced seclusion, described in the traditional

terms as the feminine modesty "all the honor of the princess is within," Ps. 45:14); but her "purity" and "modesty" are formulaic praises of the traditional woman, not occasions for social protest. The tragedy of the story is not Dinah's imprisonment but her inability to unite with her perfect mate. This is not seen as a particularly feminine problem, since it is one she shares with the man her father chose for her. Dinah and her new husband, Yechezkel, are sexually and emotionally estranged from each other, but each has his or her own lost love: their situations are irreconcilable but nonetheless reflections of each other. Agnon's language captures this terrible symmetry.

He sat in one corner and his thoughts were elsewhere and she sat in a different corner and her thoughts were elsewhere. His thoughts wandered to his father's house, where Freydele's mother, the neighbor, had served them since his mother died. Dinah's thoughts wandered to the Ark and the artist who crafted it, who had disappeared in the city and nobody knew where he had gone.^[35]

The legal asymmetry inscribed in the very word agunah is lost in Agnon's translation of the term to describe all mismatched and lost souls, male and female. It would be wrong to imply that Agnon's story contains no social critique: he argues against the tragic effects of arranged marriages and a class bias that fails to appreciate the artisan class. But where Agnon pluralizes the term "agunot," using it as a code for a more general social as well as existential condition, and even derives a masculine version of the term to adopt as his own name, Baron's version returns the term "agunah" to the singular, to women, and to the phenomenology of the lone female listener at a male discursive event.^[36]

III

Much of Baron's work engages the Hebrew canon in an intertextual dialogue, although it does so from the "feminine" margins. But Baron also wrote stories that openly allude to and incorporate "women's" Yiddish religious literature. Like Abramovitsh, Baron acknowledges a literary matrilineage as well as patrilineage.

Baron dealt with the feminine Yiddish tradition most explicitly in her earlier work. In these stories, Baron rarely quotes directly from these texts, as Abramovitsh did (rather late in his career) in his description of Sarah's personal prayer and as Baron commonly does with Hebrew intertexts. Rather, Baron presents Yiddish woman's texts materially, as tattered or yellowed books, signifying by their poor condition the relative

status of women in the social order. There is a long Jewish tradition of correspondences between bodies and texts; for example, the Torah scroll wears a "cloak," it is ritually kissed and embraced, it is buried if damaged, the Torah pointer is a "hand," a man who recites the blessing over the Torah in a synagogue is called "a bridegroom of the Torah." Baron's innovation is to turn this tradition toward women's texts, and to use it in the services of a feminist critique.

Baron wrote two stories entitled "Genizah" (Burial); the first appeared in 1908 and the other fourteen years later. Both stories describe the ritual practice of burying sacred books or pages that have been torn or otherwise damaged, partly to ensure their afterlife when the dead arise in the Messianic era. The 1908 story describes the ritual of burying damaged sacred books from the perspective of a young girl, the daughter of the town rabbi who is organizing the ritual. While her father allows her to participate to a limited extent in preparing for the burial, her older brother takes the opportunity to ridicule her and mock the "women's books" her mother wants included in the burial. Throughout, the narrative draws parallels between the physical life of books and the textually dictated life of the town. In an early scene, the narrator describes the rabbi's tender, nearly erotic love for the damaged Torah scroll he carries to the cemetery.

Daddy takes a few steps, goes over to the sexton, bends his head and kisses the Torah. Carefully, carefully he takes it [her] from the sexton, carefully he takes it in his arms and he clasps it very close to his heart and again kisses it. . . .
So too does a mother embrace her only son, when he finally falls asleep, and even though she doesn't want to disturb his sleep, she still kisses him softly, kisses him anyway and embraces him!

The rabbi's embrace of the Torah scroll stands in sharp contrast to the ritual treatment of women's literature, in other words, with the Yiddish literature that was metonymically connected to its female audience rather than, like the Torah, metaphorically associated with an idealized feminine figure. The narrator's brother prevents her from including her mother's "tear-stained" collection of Yiddish personal prayers (the tkhine) among the Hebrew religious books to be buried, calling it a "rag" and tossing it aside. The exclusion of this book is echoed by the call of the men as they walk to the cemetery: "Women out of the way!" At the burial ceremony, the narrator, seeing her mother mournfully looking for her beloved book of prayers among the other books, runs home to find it.

Here is the tkhine . It [or she, since tkhine is feminine in Hebrew] had been flung in the corner, its pages scattered, its yellow stains so noticeable. . . . I grab it and run back to the cemetery. And here—Daddy is still standing, his face pale, his eyes damp and his lips moving.
And I'm next to the open grave:
—t-z-z-z-z!!
That's how the pages of the prayer book whisper to me when they touch the other old books in the grave.
And it seems to me that these old books, addressing the poor prayer book with hostility, say these harsh words:
—r-r-a-a-g-g! Get out of here! . . .
In another moment my brother will approach, peering into the grave, casting an angry look at me, and take the book and throw it far, far away.
A sharp pain stabs my heart; my brain reels . . . the trees are dancing to greet me, standing around me and swaying and singing and dancing. . . . And I too begin to dance, but my legs stumble a little and I drop to the ground . . .^[37]

The books themselves reenact, in the little girl's imagination, the hierarchical segregation of the social order. When the "masculine" books call the collection of Yiddish women's prayers a "rag" and order it out of the grave, they speak the words of an exorcism ritual, "Get out of here!" The presence of the "feminine" book within the grave is not only legally unsanctioned, it also represents the monstrous threat of a dybbuk. In including this otherworldly dimension, Baron suggests that the men and their texts are not only loath to share a space with women and their texts, they are also afraid of being "possessed" by the feminine realm that always threatens to encroach. And the subcanonical romances or "smutty" literature so often associated with women readers were also commonly called rags.

The little girl's identification with the book is reinforced by the similarity in their fates. The narrator's fainting (marked by the three asterisks) at the open grave doubly imitates the burial of the book: in falling to the ground she reenacts its burial, and her loss of consciousness during the ceremony marks the absence of female rituals of memory and the erasure of feminine tradition. Yet the gap in this story produces a stronger feminist text than the burial of the women's book would have done. Genizah , in the context of the story, means "the burial of sacred texts," but it more literally means "concealment." Just as the story takes full advantage of the ambiguous link between discarding and burying, it also plays with both senses of its title. In refraining from resolving

the story and showing us what happened to the Yiddish book, Baron allows its fate to hover between rejection and redemption through burial, sanctioned concealment or shameful exposure, and suggests that the two possibilities are paradoxically related.

It is worth noting that the story, with its explicit feminist rage, is dedicated "to the memory of my father's soul." The story appeared, in fact, thirty days after the death of Baron's father, the day traditionally marked by a memorial service at the graveside. "Burial," then, is a meditation on the powerful links between burying and honoring, between words and bodies. But it also reinscribes, under the signature of the writer-daughter, the authority to decide who will memorialize the past and whose past should be memorialized. In insisting on including the Yiddish women's book in a male ritual and a Hebrew story, Baron poses the problem of female transmission within a system governed by men and male texts.

The 1922 "Burial" describes the ceremony through an omniscient narrator, in a measured and distanced, almost ethnographic, tone. The anger against the unequal treatment of men and women, women's texts and men's, that dominates the 1908 story is barely detectable here, and then only in a single passage. Mina, an old woman "from the house of priests," has some difficulty adding her torn copy of the Tsenerene , the women's Bible, to the pile, not because anyone is trying to stop her but mostly because she is old and the young boys are too absorbed in their playing with the town billy goat to let her pass through. The rabbi of the town sees her frustration and, conscious of her distinguished (and patrilineal) pedigree, graciously accepts her offering, mentally comparing her to the woman whose meager sacrificial Temple offering the priest defended, saying, "Do not mock her, it is as if she were offering her soul." The priestly ties of the woman are symbolically transferred to him by the force of his grounding in the texts—whatever they say about the importance of her lineage, he is the one who knows what they say.

The second "Burial" does continue to think through the relations between sex, or body, and text. In one passage, the rabbi catches himself thinking about his Torah sermon while still undressed after his ritual immersion, "despite the inappropriateness of the place." An elaborate and humorous parallel is drawn between the rabbi's naked body and the Torah scroll (here grammatically masculine, since it is referred to as a "sefer Torah," a Torah scroll) in the scene that follows, when the rabbi and his sexton remove the torn scroll from the attic of the synagogue.

Suddenly the sexton reeled back from the chest in the corner and cried:
—But it's [he's] naked, rabbi!
—Who is? the rabbi asked in surprise, without recognizing his own voice, which had no echo here.
—The holy book! The sexton set his candle down on the chest where the little Torah scroll lay naked, without a cloth or covering, and the rabbi, still carefully holding "The Tree of Life," tucked it [him] with a father's compassion beneath the corners of his coat, and with great emotion made his way carefully down the ladder.

The irreverent joke that connects the uncovered Torah scroll and the unclothed rabbi remains in the masculine sphere (including the sexton who is the only witness to the scene). The masculine sphere of textual study, as in Abramovitsh's description of the Hebrew writers' circle, remains undisturbed by the presence of either a biological or metaphorical female.

The two stories named "Burial" demonstrate Baron's movement from a female-centered narrative with a female narrator to an omniscient narrator's metaphysical and democratic view of Jewish tradition. Rather than being organized around a gap, the burial ritual ends with a redemptive vision of four hundred years of shtetl residents, of all classes and both genders, rising from their graves at the end of days. The development that can be traced between the two stories is symptomatic of the general course of Baron's writing career over fifty years. Govrin describes this literary and biographical progression as a movement from openness, political activity, and explicit feminist protest to concealment, self-enclosure, and a poetics of indirection and moderation. She traces Baron's evolution into "a legend in her own time, a legendary princess who voluntarily imprisoned herself in her house, granting few people permission to visit her, and embroidering stories about a vanished world in her solitude, while maintaining a living presence that transcended space and time."^[38]

The two stories record the dialectic of enclosure and disclosure, burial and resurrection, but they demonstrate that this dialectic came to be weighted against disclosure. Baron failed to include the earlier stories (including the first "Burial") in her collections, calling them "rags." In her biographical notes, Baron's daughter, Tsipora Aharonovitsh, describes her mother's process of circumscribing and fixing the canon of her own works.

This is the time to comment on D.B.'s [sic ] denigrating and belittling attitude toward all the stories she wrote in her youth, which she called "rags."

She forcefully resisted the publication of any story or fragment from those days, and on a list she made of all her stories, in order of their appearance, she wrote in a few places, as if as a testimony for posterity, the word psulim [defective, flawed, or disqualified].^[39]

"Rags," echoing as it does the masculine assessment of the collection of Yiddish women's prayers in the first "Burial," could signal the growing discomfort of a woman writer with her own proximity to feminine traditions and the distance of the later writer from these traditions. But we can also read Baron's calling her earliest stories rags as more evidence of her self-irony, not her self-denigration at all. Rags, after all, aside from their domestic usefulness, are often the raw material of women's bricolage , to reclaim Claude Lévi-Strauss's term for the female crafts. Baron's reworking of earlier material in her later work may be the perfect example of this feminine ingenuity in creating art from the discarded and outworn. Moreover, Baron's work shows strong affiliations with "rag" literature (ghost stories, pornography, children's stories, memoirs, sentimental or romance fiction).

The second word Baron used in assessing her early work, psulim , moves even more clearly in two directions. While Baron seems to dismiss her early work in the language of rabbinic legal decisions, her words read differently when we remember the uses to which she put that very term. In the context of the two "Burials," the "defective" or "flawed" books or other ritual objects are still holy, and their burial is a mark of love and respect. And not only do these damaged texts hold an honored place in Baron's stories, the narrative describes the burial as designed to assure their afterlife. Perhaps we are meant to see that Baron transmitted her early stories by burying them, as it were, in the reworked stories that appear in the later collections. In any case, Baron herself is the best teacher of the value of the fragmentary, the apparently damaged, and the nearly lost.

IV

On Abramovitsh's famous "triumphal tour" in the summer of 1909, the writer Zrubavel tells us, the Vilna writers and cultural activists decided to take group photographs with him as "a memento for generations to come." The Hebrew and Yiddish writers were photographed separately; Zrubavel describes the event from the perspective of the Yiddish writers, of which he was one.

Yiddish writers with D. Baron and Abramovitsh (at center).

We decided to meet at the photographer very early in the morning, an hour before the "grandfather" had to leave for Warsaw.
Not everyone showed up on time. Some, I don't remember who they were, were late and were left out. But we made a gentlemanly gesture toward the one "lady" in our midst and persuaded the photographer to photograph her separately and put her into the group photograph. We left a place reserved for that purpose. We did it out of love and care for our colleague, the writer Dvora Baron, who by then had already acquired a place of honor in our literature. By the way, she also had a lot of personal charm, and we all respected her for her knowledge, of religious sources as well.^[40]

Despite the fact that she wrote many more Hebrew stories, despite the enthusiastic interest she aroused as a Hebrew writer, it was the Yiddish writers rather than the Hebrew ones who left room for Baron's photograph to be inserted into their group portrait (see figs. 5 and 6). Baron's work was eventually canonized as (a marginal) part of Hebrew literature; but the 1908 photographic self-canonization of the Hebrew and Yiddish writers of Vilna suggests that her place would have been more easily established in the other camp.

The biographical notes assembled after her death give us the tantalizing information that Baron's first work, written at the age of seven, was a play in Yiddish: "D.B. could not say anything about the nature of

Hebrew writers with Abramovitsh.

this play, other than that the names of its heroes and the plot were taken from the love stories her older sister would read in Yiddish. By the age of twelve she was already writing Hebrew stories."^[41]   The passage suggests that Baron's move to Hebrew from Yiddish was early and firmly established. Nevertheless, Baron would always be associated with Yiddish, because of her gender and interest in "women's themes" and traditional women's culture and because she situated her stories in a Yiddish-speaking environment.

Dvora Baron came to prominence in a literary atmosphere that was reaping the benefits of Abramovitsh's projects of modernizing Hebrew and raising the stature of Yiddish literature. Partly because both literatures had such a worthy "grandfather" in Abramovitsh, Hebrew and Yiddish writers in the first decades of this century could command similar respect among their audiences. Nevertheless, the growing politicization and polarization of the Hebrew and Yiddish camps, with the rise of linguistic-political ideologies like Zionism and Socialism, created new obstacles in the path of the writer who failed to make a clear choice of a literary language.^[42]   As was the case among others of her literary generation, Baron's early Yiddish writings—along with the early Hebrew stories—were left out of the collections in which her work found a wide public. But while her precocious career as a teenage Hebrew writer is a

central part of the Baron legend, her not inconsiderable investment in Yiddish literature (eleven short stories in Yiddish, five of them translations from Hebrew, were published between 1904 and 1912; one, from the Alexandria period—1915–1919—remained unpublished) has been neither incorporated into the biographical narrative nor subjected to critical or popular attention. With the appearance, in 1988, of Nurit Govrin's critical biography and newly collected stories of Baron's first decade of literary production, The First Half , a more complete picture of the bilingual Baron can emerge.

Both the Hebrew and the Yiddish stories bear the traces of Baron's struggle to achieve a place in the circle of Hebrew writers. Baron's progression "from exposure to concealment" is symptomatic not only of the movement from earlier to later writing but also of the differences between her early Hebrew and Yiddish writings, though these were written during the same period. The early Hebrew stories, to generalize, combine intellectualized feminist argument with a sexual and emotional reticence; the Yiddish stories, by contrast, are among the most sexually, politically, and stylistically radical in her oeuvre. Given the loose publication standards of the time and medium, it is not always easy to decide how much of the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew versions of some of her stories can be ascribed to the free hand of an editor or even an unnamed translator. And we do not always know when the stories were written, or which version was written first. Nevertheless, these differences reveal certain patterns that would be hard to ascribe to a diverse group of editors and translators.

Let me draw the outlines of these patterns. In a series of stories that appeared between the years 1908 and 1910, during Baron's final years in Europe, Baron dealt directly and explicitly with feminist themes. These stories include "Kadisha/Kadish," "Sister," "Burial," "An Only Daughter," and "Grandma Henya."^[43]   These stories argue for women's participation in Torah study, expose the mistreatment of women's texts, insist on women's entitlement in ritually memorializing the dead, and explore the place of daughters in the patriarchal family. A few of these motifs reappear in later stories, although they find less extreme expression there. Clearly, these early texts are central to any feminist analysis of Baron's work.

Baron's feminist thematics has two strands: the exclusion of women and women's books from equal participation in religious and family life; and the sexual rivalries, ambivalences, and tensions between men and women, and older and younger generations, in the patriarchal family. It

is this second strand that is more prominent in the Yiddish stories, suggesting their affiliation with a different genre than the Hebrew stories; while the Hebrew stories are generically linked to the realist literature of social protest, the Yiddish stories are closer to expressionism, or, more specifically, to the gothic family tale. Sibling rivalry reaches murderous levels and intergenerational family love approaches incest in Yiddish stories like "An Only Daughter," "Kaddish," and "Grandma Henya," while the Hebrew stories "Sister," "Kadisha," and "Grandma Henya" transmute or sublimate these tensions into a more moderate psychological realism. Moreover, two and perhaps three Yiddish stories mentioned here involve the return of the dead (in "An Only Daughter," the "dead" returns in the sense that, after the older sister's murder of her younger sister is averted, the older girl feels her sister's continued existence to be uncanny). Such otherworldly and grotesque effects are otherwise absent from Baron's work.

The Hebrew "Sister" and the Yiddish "An Only Daughter" both describe the reactions of an older sister to the birth of a new daughter in the family. "Sister," however, emphasizes the disappointment over the birth of yet another girl into a family of four daughters, a disappointment that is compared to the joy, decades earlier, that followed upon the birth of their father, an only son. The disappointment is so deep that the family ignores the new baby, not bothering to name her, and the anguished mother accidentally drops the infant. In the final paragraphs the narrator, the oldest sister, lifts the crying infant: "Sh-sh-sh, my little one, sh-sh-sh, my baby, sh-sh-sh, my sister, there, aren't you my sister now, my sis-ss-ter." The narrator's acceptance of her new sister stands in contrast to her own earlier coldness toward both the new baby girl and the other women in the family: "No—my heart is not moved by mother's weeping. My sisters' and aunts' weeping don't touch my heart—after all, they're only women . . . it's my mother who's responsible for all this." And when she hears the baby crying, her words are chillingly double-edged: "This miserable little creature—how can I quiet her . . . ?"^[44]

The malevolence that threatens to break out into the open in the Hebrew "Sister," and that is finally overcome at the conclusion of the story, takes center stage and approaches the homicidal in the Yiddish "An Only Daughter." The birth of a new daughter in this story is, from the outset, a deathly occurrence. The narrator, listening to her grandmother tease her about her overthrown status as an only child, "sees before her—like an open grave—Grandmother's toothless mouth." And the baby's wide-open mouth reminds the narrator of a neighbor woman who also once

had "a small red-faced creature, and one day his own mother fell asleep on him and the next day they took him out of the house and never brought him back."^[45]   The fate of the neighbor's child gives the young narrator the idea of strangling her sister; the murder is averted only because, in the darkness, she mistakes the family cat for the infant.

"Grandma Henya" also becomes more macabre in the move from the Hebrew to the Yiddish version. In the Hebrew, the gossip explains Henya's mysterious appearance in town as the result of her having accidentally and grotesquely killed her child, like the neighbor woman in "An Only Daughter."

Her husband died and left her many goods and a single infant. One night, when her young son was in bed with her, his small body got stuck underneath hers. His cries were in vain, his convulsions and quivering were in vain—his mother was fast asleep and didn't feel a thing. The next day she found him dead, with thick, warm blood flowing and seeping from his mouth.^[46]

The Yiddish version, by contrast, hints darkly at a connection between the father's death and the mother's taking near-incestuous comfort in her son. Here, the scene is triangulated into an Oedipal struggle among three family members, one of whom is a ghost.

A terrible misfortune happened to her: on the day her first son was born, her husband died. She bathed the child in her tears, wrapped him in her own hair and loved him enough for two. One night, however, when she was lying in bed with her child and taking too much pleasure with him, a deadly sleep came down upon her from heaven. Her husband appeared to her from the grave and begged her:
"Wake up from your sleep and see what you are doing with our child—you are strangling him with your own hands . . ."
She heard his words, but was unable to move. And when she woke up from her sleep the next morning, she found a bloody corpse in bed with her.^[47]

Both stories present two versions of Henya's arrival in town, the second of which also involves a transgression: the gossips report that Henya was overly involved in the Torah study of her husband and seven sons. The hardworking mother, they say, would proudly eavesdrop on her family's Torah study from the women's section of the synagogue. In the Hebrew:

She would gaze and feel proud, look and enjoy. And this enjoyment did not find favor with the One who spoke and the world came into being. A fire blazed down from heaven and set the study hall on fire while the eight souls

were still within it. In a few days Grandmother Henya accompanied a wagon loaded down with bones. They were her husband's and sons' scorched bones.^[48]

The Yiddish version of this same scene adds a few elements to the narrative.

She would gaze and feel delight, look and take pride in herself:
—That is my husband . . . those are my children . . .
Her proud words were not pleasing, as it were, before the Highest One, so a fire came down from the sky and burned the holy house, while all the eight souls were still between its high walls. The next morning the wife and mother picked out the scorched bones with her own hands.^[49]

In the Yiddish, Henya's pleasure in her family's Torah study is explicitly described as threatening the hierarchical social and even divine order. Her pride is not only in the diligence of her husband and sons but also in her own role as wife and mother, expressed as a sense of ownership. This connection is repeated in the grisly punishment, which links her to what is left of these male bodies more intimately than the Hebrew narrative, where she accompanies the wagon. Moreover, God's anger is a kind of jealousy, not so much over her partial invasion of the male sphere as over her self-assertion of a quasi-divine (pro)creator of these men. The female transgression, then, moves from intellectual hubris in the Hebrew to sexual rivalry in the Yiddish.

The two versions of "Kaddish" follow the pattern of Henya's accidental/sexual murder of her child, where the Yiddish introduces the supernatural and macabre to expose psychosexual tensions concealed in the Hebrew. The stories represent Baron's most explicit exploration of women's unequal relations to the Jewish liturgy, in this case, the kaddish prayer. In both stories, the young narrator and protagonist insists on saying kaddish for her beloved grandfather, who left no male heir, although this prayer is traditionally recited by men. In the Yiddish, though, the congregants block her approach to the altar and her desire is diverted by an encounter with her dead grandfather.

Looking at me from above, from the sacred Ark, I see two pious-clear eyes: "Child, child . . ." so sorrowfully, so beseechingly, "child, child." And I see how the flames of the yahrzeit candle flow like an enormous burning sea, embracing me completely, completely.^[50]

This scene is entirely absent in the Hebrew, where the young girl succeeds in saying the prayer. Her success is mirrored in the title of the Hebrew story, "Kadisha," where the writer reclaims the Hebrew word by creating a grammatically feminine form from it. The Hebrew narrative

simply describes the triumphant entry of a little girl into the men's section of the beit midrash.

Many pairs of eyes penetrated me as I entered the synagogue. Everyone stared at me in amazement. For a moment I hesitated; my dress was so white among all the black caftans. But here I was already beside the pulpit:
"yitgadal veyitkadash shmey raba "
My heart pounded furiously—
When I emerged from the synagogue, a group of boys surrounded me, all of them pointing:
"It's 'her' . . . 'kadisha' . . . ha, ha, ha."^[51]

"Kaddish," by contrast, is something more or less than a "feminist" story. It tells a complex narrative about the inextricability of the present and past, represented by the girl and her grandfather, and the irresolvable desires of each of the partners in this dance of opposites that even death cannot put to rest. The scene in the Hebrew version that most graphically describes the hierarchical gender order against which the young girl struggles, in which the young boys of the town refuse to allow the girls to climb up a small hill they call Mount Sinai, is absent from the Yiddish version. Indeed such a scene would be out of place in a story whose lines of tension are strongest between family members. The Yiddish mentions the dead grandmother, whose silent absorption in her husband's nighttime Torah study is reflected in her granddaughter's similar fascination. The suggestion is made that the young girl serves as a substitute for the dead wife, raising the stakes in the relationship between the old man and his granddaughter. Even nature is implicated in the family drama. The Yiddish version ends with the girl sitting outside, "and around, like an angry stepmother, the still, black night."

The ambivalent relationships at the heart of the Yiddish story barely appear in the Hebrew. In "Kadisha," the grandfather arranged lessons for his granddaughter and delights in her progress. In "Kaddish," the young girl pays for her own lessons on the sly and demands that her grandfather "test" (farher —the term is loaded with the agonistic atmosphere common to the masculine sphere of Talmud study) her knowledge. When she proceeds to recite the kaddish, her accomplishment seems less a matter of feminine entitlement than the frightening hubris of the young toward their elders. The narrator stands at an ironic distance from the girl's achievement, describing how she pushes the prayer book away and recites "with eyes piously closed."

The Yiddish, in other words, brings to the surface what is implicit in the vernacular use of the term "kaddish" to refer to a son who will recite

the prayer for the dead parent. The relation between generations cannot but be fraught with an awareness that offspring represent not only continued existence but also substitution and death. For the young girl to accomplish her desire and recite the kaddish, her grandfather must pass away, and her reaction to his death is chillingly off the point: "But what did it have to do with me? If I only had a black dress, a completely black dress, I would be a lot more like a boy, a lot more." And the grandfather's ghostly appearance as a sorrowful but rebuking angel, in the place of honor in the men's section, suggests his continued participation in the rivalry between men and women, young and old, the still alive and the already dead.

It is not coincidental, I think, that these tensions are explored in Baron's Yiddish work rather than in the Hebrew. The macabre and the supernatural are more closely associated with Yiddish literature and folk culture than with the Hebrew literary canon, although they find their place in Hebrew as well. In Baron's Yiddish stories, however, the grotesque is used not only to elucidate psychological currents concealed in the Hebrew. The differences between the two bodies of work may also be an oblique reflection of and commentary on the different trajectories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In Yiddish prose the dead return to have their say; Hebrew is the jumping-off point where the present leaves the past behind.

But there is another possible reading of the patterns I have outlined. Yiddish provided Baron with a more open arena for an exploration of the life of the body than Hebrew did. Baron's mind and voice called over the masculine sphere of Hebrew, but the woman's body had no place there. Only in the darkness of the "women's section" of her Yiddish production could the dramas of incest and parent-child murder unfold. If Baron's later stories are models of artistic modulation and control, it is the Yiddish stories and the earlier Hebrew stories that can show us some of what it was that came under Baron's control.

The fascination with Dvora Baron in the later years of her life and after her death can be traced, in part, to the mythology that arose around Baron's self-imposed isolation in the heart of Tel Aviv, and to the curious way this self-concealment combined with her continuing immersion in a fictional world associated with her distant childhood. The drama of Baron's life, then, arose from this split between her present "real" surroundings and the "fictional" past from which she derived her sustenance. My aim in ending with the legend of Baron's later years is not to question the validity of this myth but rather to note how closely

its structure is foreshadowed in the early stories, written during years when no one could mistake her for an eccentric recluse. One can read the transformation of Baron into a "legendary princess who voluntarily imprisoned herself in her house . . . [yet] maintained a living presence that transcended space and time" as a further development of the split arena—epistemological, psychological, and linguistic—that characterized her work from the start. From this point of view, Baron's literary self-exposure/physical self-concealment provides an appropriate context for her work. As in the first version of "Burial," concealment exists in powerful dialectic with the drive toward memory. But one can also imagine the mythical qualities of Baron's biography as yet another of her literary creations, a cousin to the abandoned princess in "Agunah." As readers of Baron's myth, like Dinah and her husband, where we sit determines how we understand her story.