Jewish Women Writers in Interwar France (1919-1939)

A presentation by Elissa Gelfand, Professor of French

Elissa Gelfand, currently Dorothy Rooke McCulloch Professor of French, came to Mount Holyoke in 1975. A specialist in 20th-century French literature and culture, she studied the connections between female criminality and creativity in "Imagination in Confinement: Women's Writings from French Prisons" (Cornell UP, 1983), then examined theories of gender and textuality in "French Feminist Criticism: Women, Language and Literature" (Garland, 1985) Elissa Gelfand has taught courses on women writers of France and French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean; mothers and daughters in literature; representations of female creativity; literary politics and social contestation; and, the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality in the construction of literary and cinematic heroines. She is now exploring the interwar period in France, specifically the relations between gender and ethnicity in the works of French Jewish women writers of the 1920's and 1930's.

Report on the European Studies Seminar Lecture

by Zlatinka Gougoumanova

Among the literary works we discussed in class were Myriam Harrys' "Siona à Paris" (1919), Elissa Rhais "Les Juifs ou la fille d'Eléazar" (1921), Louise Weiss' "Délivrance" (1936), and Irene Nemirovskys' "Les chiens et les loups" (1940). These Jewish women worked in the context of a massive interwar Jewish immigration from Central Europe and Algeria to France and in a time of restrictive naturalization laws. What resulted from this immigration was a division between the native and the immigrant Jews. In 1938 Darquier de Pellepoix founds the Rassemblement Antijuif. In this repressive climate, Jewish women writers were particularly active in some suffragist and leftist movements (the leader of the Popular Front of 1936-1937 Leon Blum was himself of Jewish origin). The Dreyfus case of 1894 - 1906, the Golden Age of the French Jewry (1906 - 1918) when Franco - Judaism was extolled, and the rising of Zionism effected in different ways the Jewish women writers' works. In these works one often finds stereotypes of the Jewish woman like the stereotype of Rebecca who marries a Christian. Jewish women at that time wrote about arranged marriages, the absence of birth control, and the threat of fascism. Most of the Jewish women writers in the 1920s and 1930s lived in Paris and Alsace. They were almost invariably middle-class women and studied in the best schools, usually Catholic private schools. Their plots were complicated and their novels constituted the so-called roman fleuve (river novel). These women writers were committed to legalism and anti-clericalism. They were also the first generation of Jewish women to write in French. According to some specialists, the literary production of Jewishwomen in the 1920s and 1930s may be divided in two periods: --1918 - 1933 : The "euphoric generation" that depicted foreign - born women who came to France with the hope to find a better future) --1933 - 1940 : A period of tragic plots that treated various social and political issues in France). The writings of the Jewish women writers in interwar France teach us how ethnicity and gender shape creativity. Two terms that describe this inter-cultural creativity are Jacques Deridas "circonfession" and "juifemme" or Jewoman.   (Materials used: the handout in class and class notes)