Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Transliteration, Names, and Place Names
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I JEWS IN INDEPENDENT POLAND, 1918-1939
- PART II REVIEWS REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- OBITUARIES
- Editor's Notes
- Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Translators
- Glossary
- Index
Janet Hadda, Passionate Women, Passive Men
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Preface
- Contents
- Note on Transliteration, Names, and Place Names
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I JEWS IN INDEPENDENT POLAND, 1918-1939
- PART II REVIEWS REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- OBITUARIES
- Editor's Notes
- Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Translators
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
No one will ever lack a good reason for killing himself.
CESARE PAVESELeave him in silence. Neither honour nor curse him.
RABBI AKIVAJanet Hadda, an American psychologist and literary critic, deals-for the first time-with a peculiar subject, and does it in a peculiar way. She describes the role of suicide in Yiddish literature, its social implications and psychoanalytic reflections. The author first analyses thirteen short novels, most of them dating back to the period between the two World Wars, the Golden Age of Yiddish literature. Her study then focuses on three more recent works: Di agune [The deserted wife], by Chaim Grade, and Der kunstmakher fun Lublin [The magician of Lublin] and Sonim, di geshikhte fun a libe [Enemies: A love story], by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This last novel provides a clue to the entire essay, justifying, as it does, suicide as an answer to an unbearable existential condition.
Hadda's book rests on two theses, both stated in the introduction. The first, implicit in the title, begins with a sociological assumption:
a different and curious factor unites most of the literary suicides created by Yiddish authors: it is their failure to marry … The men who commit suicide are chronically withdrawn or inert, a condition that renders them incapable of sustaining the demands of marriage … The women, for their part, are too wilful to be tolerated by conventional standards. (p. 3)
This type of suicide, which occurs in the ‘fictional works studied’ (but which appears from the statistics not to be a phenomenon of real life), results from the existential inability of the characters to respond to the basic call of Jewish ethics, which is to create a family, to procreate, and to live in a comfortable and warm environment.
Hadda's major aim is to prove, against current interpretations, how the authors she analyses ‘accept and forgive’ suicide, which is ‘ostensibly considered taboo and unpardonable’ (p. 12). At the same time these authors see in it a negative response to marriage and family, which are always perceived as positive and constructive aspects of life. The other thesis applies psychoanalytical methodology to literary criticism in an attempt to provide a new interpretation. The author in fact devotes some very interesting paragraphs to this approach.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 8Jews in Independent Poland, 1918–1939, pp. 415 - 418Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1994