Conversations with Dvora
Subtitle: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer (Contraversions - Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture and Society , No 6)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: May 22, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9780520085411
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Women's studies; Jewish; Criticism and interpretation; Biography & Autobiography; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Semitic languages; Religion; Literary; Ethnic Cultures - General; Social Science / Jewish Studies; 1887-1956; Baron, Devorah,; Imaginary conversations
First sentence: It was a scorching day.
Description: Dvora Baron was born in a Lithuanian village in 1887. Because of her precociousness, her rabbi father gave her the kind of education usually reserved for boys. Already in her girlhood Baron's stories were widely published, and at age fifteen this independent and forward-looking spirit left for the provincial city of Minsk to acquire a profession and secular education.

In 1911 she immigrated to Palestine, where she married a prominent Zionist journalist and joined the literary intelligentsia of an emerging new nation. Her writing showed startlingly modernist points of view, and she took on such topics as divorce, incest, and domestic violence. But when her beloved brother died in 1923, Baron retired to her apartment, where she was tended by her daughter, Tsipora, until her death in 1956.

Amia Lieblich was seventeen when Dvora Baron died; the two women never met. But Lieblich has written this biography as a series of conversations taking place in Dvora's darkened room in the last year of her life. In a vividly realized portrait Lieblich elicits Dvora's rich memories of her shtetl childhood, the descriptions of traditional women's lives in her short stories, a view of her eccentric marriage and strangely exploitative relationship with her daughter, her thoughts on work, life, and death.

The result is a moving story not only of one unusual woman but of the light her life casts on that of a younger woman writing in our day. This edition of Conversations with Dvora includes a translation of one of Dvora Baron's most powerful stories, "Fradl."