The First Day and Other Stories

By Dvora Baron

Book Overview

Dvora Baron (1887-1956), the first modern Hebrew woman writer, was born in a small Lithuanian town in 1887. Her father, a rabbi, gave his daughter a thorough education, an extraordinary act at the time. Baron immigrated to Palestine in 1910, married a prominent Zionist activist, but defied the implicit ideological demands of the Zionist literary scene by continuing to write of the shtetl life she had left behind.

The eighteen stories in this superb collection offer an intimate re-creation of Jewish Eastern Europe from a perspective seldom represented in Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baron brings vividly to life the shtetl experiences of women and other disenfranchised members of the Jewish community. Her stories relate the feelings of a newborn girl, a "Jewish" dog, an impoverished bookkeeper, a young widow who must hire herself out as a wet-nurse, and others who face emotional and physical hardships.

Baron's fluid writing style pushes the flexibility of Hebrew and Yiddish syntax to its limits, while her profound knowledge of both biblical and rabbinical literature lends rich subtleties to her stories. A companion to Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer, by Amia Lieblich (California, 1997), this collection is drawn from Baron's earlier as well as later works.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520085388
• ISBN13: 9780520085381
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 261 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Collection, chosen with care

Dvora Baron has become Hebrew literature's equivalent of Virginia Woolf. In a Hebrew modernist scene cluttered with men, she was a rare female voice. The intricacies of her position appear to have taken a toll. For over 30 years she never ventured from her apartment in Tel Aviv, relying on her daughter for contact with the outside world. This self imposed seclusion appears to have been rounded out by the fictional concerns of Baron's stories, here provided in one nice volume. The First Day and Other Stories were all written in Palestine and later the State of Israel, but nearly all of them concern life in the Jewish villages of Baron's youth. As a new Jewish state emerged around her, Baron stayed in her apartment to churn over the materials of Diaspora life. It was a courageous venture that left her out of step with the emerging mood of the new country. She seemed old fashioned and out of step. But now, several decades after her death, the full scope and depth of her work can be seen divorced from those fleeting political and social concerns. Baron's stories are deeply engaged in Jewish life, its texts, its liturgical seasons, and the people who inhabited them, with a particular concern for women, and their marginal position. Always with clarity and depth, always with great feeling... even in those stories where Baron has an obvious axe to grind, art comes before the ax, feeling before the score to settle.

Beautiful Stories

Beautifully written stories about women in the Shtetel. Devora Baron touches on the subjects closest to our hearts: birth, death, marriage and divorce. She weaves a beautiful tapestry of Jewish tradition and the milestones of life. All of this is told throught the sensitive eyes of a young girl, the daughter of the town's rabbi. These stories are like fine wine, to be savored and enjoyed, sip by sip, again and again.