Devorah Baron was a pioneering Jewish writer, noted for writing in Modern Hebrew and for making a career as a Hebrew author. She has been called the "first Modern Hebrew woman writer". She wrote about 80 short stories, plus a novella titled Exiles. Additionally, she translated stories into Modern Hebrew.
Early years
She was born in Uzda, about 50 kilometers SSW of Minsk. Her father, a rabbi, allowed her to attend the same Hebrew classes as boys, which was highly exceptional for the time, although she had to sit in the screened women’s area of the synagogue. Also, and again unusual for girls at the time, she completed high school and received a teaching credential in 1907. Baron published her first stories in 1902, at the age of 14, in the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits, which was edited at that time by Leon Rabinowitz. She appears in a photo of Yiddish writers in Vilna in 1909, when Mendele Moykher Sforim was visiting there, which is exceptional both because she is the only woman in the photo and because she does not appear in a similar photo of Vilna's Hebrew writers who posed with Sforim during his visit. She was engaged to the author Moshe Ben-Eliezer, but he later broke it off.
Emigration and life in Palestine
In 1910, after her father’s death and later the destruction of her village in a pogrom, she immigrated to Palestine, settling in Neve Tzedek, a settlement outside of Jaffa that, since 1909, was part of the new city of Tel Aviv. In Palestine she became the literary editor of the Zionist-Socialist magazine Ha-Po’el ha-Za’ir. She soon married the editor, the Zionist activist Yosef Aharonovitz. Along with other Jews in Palestine, they were deported to Egypt by the Ottoman government, but returned after the establishment of the British Mandate after the First World War. In 1922, Baron and her husband both resigned from the magazine. At this point, she went into seclusion, staying at her home until she died.
Hebrew writings
When the Bialik Prize for writing was first established in Israel in 1934, she was its first recipient. She later was awarded the Rupin Prize in 1944 and the Brenner Prize for literature in 1951. Although she wrote and published throughout her life, it was divided into two phases, during which she was, first, an active, even daring young woman, and then, a secluded and apparently passive woman. During her passive phase, when she was ailing and dependent on others, she referred to some of her earlier stories as “rags”. The common thread throughout her life was her dedication to the art of writing. "Seclusion" is not an exaggeration: She chose "not to out of her house", even for her husband's funeral, although one eyewitness reported, "I saw her descend three steps and return to her house." During this period of seclusion, she remained intellectually sharp and continued to write, composing "a group of stories depicting the world as seen through the window of an 'invalid's room' ". Rachel Shazar notes that her stories, "animated by a deep empathy for the weak and the innocent," reflect profound learning: "No other woman writer in Israel was as familiar with the sources of Judaism as Devorah Baron." During the latter part of her life she also did some important literary translations into Hebrew, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Though part of the Zionist movement, she wrote much about village life in the shtetls of Lithuania, "sometimes in near-poetic tones."
Jelen, Sheila. Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007.
Jelen, Sheila and Shachar Pinsker, eds. Hebrew, Gender, and Modernity: Critical responses to Dvora Baron’s fiction. Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2007.
Lieblich, Amia. Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Lieblich, Amia. Embroideries: Conversations with Devorah Baron. Jerusalem: Shoken, 1991.
