| This is a study of five Jewish women writers which tells a larger story of Jewish cultural history in Tsarist Russia. Of the eighty-six women I discovered who contributed to the Russian-Jewish press from 1869 to 1917, I focused on Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920), who interacted with members of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) while translating their works into Hebrew and penning original compositions Hava Shapiro (1878-1943), who associated with Jewish nationalists interested in reviving Hebrew while acting as correspondent for their newspapers Rashel' Khin (1861-1928), who hobnobbed with members of the Russian cultural elite while writing fiction in the realist tradition Feiga Kogan (1891-1974), who participated in the founding of the Hebrew national theater (Habimah) and of Russian Symbolism while composing Russian poetry and Sofiia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986), who engaged in the Jewish Labor Party (Bund) while composing Russian Silver Age poetry and contributing to the library of Jewish history. That these Jewish women formed part of the phenomenon of cultured, urbanized, female professionals that emerged in late-nineteenth century Russia challenges stereotypes of Russian-Jewish society in general and of Eastern European Jewish women in particular.Since Jewish girls were rarely trained in Hebrew and daughters of the middle class had usually minimal interest in Yiddish, the bulk of Jewish women writers gravitated to cultures built on non-Jewish languages. While purveyors of both Hebrew and Russian cultures claimed to embrace female literary personalities, in the end, the latter proved far more receptive to Jewish women writers.The collective biography of these women indicates that embourgeoisement, in both the economic and cultural senses of the term, was paramount in their formation as writers. Overwhelmingly drawn from the merchant class--like their gentile counterparts in Russia, as well as Jewish and Christian women of the Western European middle class--they were provided with secular training that though intended to mold them into refined ladies resulted in the unexpected creation of a group of women equipped to act as appreciative readers, able translators and competent writers of modern, secular culture. |
