Devorah Baron

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Devorah Baron ( Hebrew דבורה בארן; born December 4, 1887 in Usda , Russian Empire ; died August 20, 1956 in Tel Aviv ) was an Israeli writer who wrote short stories and short stories. She was one of the early writers to write in modern Hebrew ( Ivrit ). Baron also worked as a translator in Ivrit.

life and work

Gravestone of Devorah Baron in the Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv

Devorah Baron was born in 1887 as the daughter of a rabbi in Usda, a Belarusian city ​​in the Paleon of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Some authors say only briefly about their childhood. B. Gershon Shaked : "Grown up as the daughter of a rabbi and orphaned at a young age, she moved from the shtetl to the city and came to Erez Israel with the second wave of immigration ." For JoAnne C. Juett: "Little is known about her life in Uzda"; but she concludes from Baron's stories that she must have developed a great love for the shtetl of her childhood. Amia Lieblich, on the other hand, gives many details about Baron's childhood: Devorah was the middle child of five, she had three sisters and one brother. Her childhood was marked by an upbringing that was not based on the female role model customary in the shtetl, as well as by her close ties to her brother. Like boys, she took cheder classes and learned the Torah , Halacha and Hebrew languages , which her sisters could not do. In her later stories, she idealized the father as a person who opposed convention in terms of her upbringing. At the age of 15, she followed her brother to Minsk and Kaunas , Lithuania , to get a secular education. The departure from the religiously shaped shtetl took place with the blessing of her parents. As early as 1902, at the age of 14, Devorah began publishing stories in Yiddish . These attracted attention because of the young age and gender of the author, but also because of the revealing content of the stories. A few years later, her fiancé, the author Moshe Ben-Eliezer, separated from her. Her first stories in Hebrew appeared in the Eastern European Jewish magazines Ha-Meliz and Ha-Zefira .

After Baron's father died and her home shtetl was destroyed in a pogrom , Baron emigrated, according to Lieblich, to Palestine in 1910 , which was then part of the Ottoman Empire . Other authors cite 1911 as the year of their emigration. She initially lived near Jaffa and worked as a literary editor for the weekly newspaper of the socialist - Zionist party HaPoel HaZair . In October 1911 she married Yosef Aharonovitz, the editor-in-chief of this newspaper. In 1914 their only daughter Zipporah was born. During the First World War , the family, like other members of the Jewish elite in Palestine, had to live in exile in the Egyptian city of Alexandria by order of the Ottoman-Turkish government. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after the end of the First World War, the family was allowed to return to Palestine in 1919, which was now under British administration as a League of Nations mandate area .

According to Lieblich, the Baron-Aharonovitz couple retired from Ha-Po'el ha-Za'ir magazine in 1922. However, according to another source, Devorah worked there until her husband's death in 1937. From 1922 she lived, according to Lieblich , Retired for 34 years until her death and no longer participated in public life. She was bedridden for the last two decades of her life. Only the closest relatives and selected guests were allowed access to her.

stories

After Baron had initially only published her stories in magazines, an anthology called Sipurim came out in book form for the first time in 1927 . In terms of style, she vacillates between reality-based prose and an attempt to overcome its limited possibilities. Some critics believe that their stories primarily reflect the Eastern European world, for others, however, this description of life only serves as a starting point, which they then shape for their own purposes. Thematically, her depictions of the fate of women who have been very hard hit by life predominate. Shaked sees Baron as "the first feminist poet in the history of Hebrew literature," as she focuses on the injustices done to women by male-dominated society. The key experience in most heroines' lives is being orphaned. The fight between the characters is often hopeless; In doing so, Baron directs her irony not against people who have been beaten by fate, but against cruel fate and its executors. Baron's allusions to stories in the Hebrew Bible ; so the heroine in the story resembles Fredl on Jacob's unloved wife Lea .

Translations

Baron spoke several languages ​​fluently; she translated the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert , as well as works by Anton Chekhov , Jack London and other authors into Hebrew.

Awards

  • 1933: Bialik Prize , which was awarded for the first time that year
  • Brenner price

literature

  • Gershon Shaked : History of Modern Hebrew Literature. Prose from 1880 to 1980. Arranged and from the Hebr. translated by Anne Birkenhauer . Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 978-3-633-54112-6
  • JoAnne C. Juett: Deborah Baron , in: Katharina M. Wilson (Ed.): An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers , Volume 1, Taylor & Francis, 1991, pp. 84-85

Web links

  • Dvora Baron at ITHL (Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature) (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gershon Shaked: History of Modern Hebrew Literature P. 94
  2. ↑ a b JoAnne C. Juett: Deborah Baron p. 84
  3. ↑ a b c d Amia Lieblich: Devorah Baron. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/baron-devorah , accessed November 29, 2017 .
  4. ↑ a b Devorah Baron at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
  5. ↑ a b Dvora Baron at ITHL
  6. ↑ Gershon Shaked: History of Modern Hebrew Literature, p. 95
  7. ^ Gershon Shaked: History of Modern Hebrew Literature, p. 96
personal data
SURNAME Baron, Devorah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES דבורה בארן (Hebrew)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli author
DATE OF BIRTH 4th December 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Usda , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH 20th August 1956
Place of death Tel Aviv