Enforced Marginality : Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives / Bluma Goldstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goldstein, Bluma, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jewish literature--History and criticism.

Jewish literature.

Jewish women in literature.

Jewish women--Legal status, laws, etc.

Jewish women.

Agunahs.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (233 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2007]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

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

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p.187-198) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786612359187

9781282359185

1282359185

9780520933415

0520933419

9781435611351

1435611357

OCLC:

476111598