Enforced Marginality
by Bluma Goldstein
Explores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Jews in the West. This book analyzes texts in Old Yiddish, German, Yiddish, and English at the intersection of disciplines to describe the dynamics of power between men and women in traditional communities and to elucidate the experiences abandoned women faced.
Hardcover
English
Brand New
Publisher Description
This illuminating study explores a central but neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, or agunes ("chained wives")-women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce-and of the men who deserted them. Looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany and then late nineteenth-century eastern Europe and twentieth-century United States, Enforced Marginality explores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Jews in the West. Bluma Goldstein analyzes a range of texts (in Old Yiddish, German, Yiddish, and English) at the intersection of disciplines (history, literature, sociology, and gender studies) to describe the dynamics of power between men and women within traditional communities and to elucidate the full spectrum of experiences abandoned women faced.
Author Biography
Bluma Goldstein is Professor Emerita in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in the European Wilderness (1994).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Prologue: Finally Out in the Open 1. Abandoned Wives in Jewish Family Law: An Introduction to the Agune 2. Doubly Exiled in Germany: Abandoned Wives in Glikl Hamel's Memoirs and Solomon Maimon's Autobiography 3. The Victims of Adventure: Abandoned Wives in Abramovitsh's Benjamin the Third and Sholem Aleykhem's Menakhem-Mendl 4. Agunes Disappearing in "A Gallery of Vanished Husbands": Retrieving the Voices of Abandoned Women and Children 5. An Autobiography of Turmoil: Abandoned Mother, Abandoned Daughter Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index
Long Description
This illuminating and elegantly written study explores a central but largely neglected aspect of modern Jewish history: the problem of abandoned Jewish wives, oragunes("chained wives")--women who under Jewish law could not obtain a divorce--and of the men who deserted them. From seventeenth and eighteenth-century Germany to late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and twentieth-century United States,Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wivesexplores representations of abandoned wives while tracing the demographic movements of Jews in the West. Bluma Goldstein analyses a range of texts (inJ
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