Deborah
By: Esther Singer Kreitman ; translated from the Yiddish by Maurice Carr ; introduction by Ilan Stavans ; afterword by Anita Norich.
Contributors: Carr, Maurice.
Edition: 1st Feminist Press ed.
Series: The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish women's series
Publisher: Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: Jewish girls -- Fiction.; Jewish families -- Fiction.; Jews, Polish -- Social life and customs -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Work titles: Sheydim-ṭants.
Description: "First published in Yiddish in 1936, Deborah is perhaps the only novel to give us full insight into the experience of growing up female in a traditional Polish Jewish family soon after the turn of the century, as the world of the shtetl gave way to modernity. Esther Singer Kreitman provides a loving but clear-eyed depiction of this world in flux, replete with rabbis and yeshiva students, socialist rebels and gangsters, street vendors and seamstresses. At the same time, the novel reveals the frustration of its young protagonist: so hungry for life and learning, Deborah is barred from formal education, confined to the household, and finally exiled into an arranged marriage. As her life closes in around her, Deborah's apocalyptic visions seem to presage the cultural, as well as personal, destructions to come." "In Deborah, Kreitman recalls much of her own youth as the elder sister who watched her younger brothers, Isaac Bashevis and I. J. Singer, enjoy the education denied her. As Bashevis later explained, she was the inspiration for "Yentl," his famous story about a girl who dresses as a boy in order to study at the yeshiva. While Kreitman never undertook Yentl's feat, she made an astounding accomplishment of her own: Against all expectations and against all odds, she wrote honestly, fiercely, and profoundly about what is now a lost world."--BOOK JACKET.