Short stories
קטנות
Not translated into English
Devorah Baron · 1933
Synopsis
A collection of stories published in 1933, the author's third, containing for the first time in her work several long stories. Like all of her work, it draws on her childhood in a Jewish small town in Belarus, where her father was a rabbi, and focuses on the most destitute: women, the poor, people on the margins. The gaze is realistic, attentive to the detail of daily life, without emphasis, carried by the compassion and gentleness that critics note in her.
Context
It was the author's third book, her first having appeared only in 1927: her maturation was slow. Her translation of Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, had appeared in 1932, and the biography published by the Ben-Yehuda Project links to that experience the appearance, in this collection, of her first long stories. After the Shoah, she saw herself as the negative plate left alone after the disappearance of what it had photographed, and set herself the mission of continuing to write the Jewish life of the small town.
Who it is for
Stories of varying length, in Hebrew, with no French or English translation of the collection. It is better to know that the world she describes was destroyed during the Shoah.
Prizes and reception
Bialik Prize of the city of Tel Aviv; one of the three collections that critics regard as the best of her work, with two volumes from the forties and fifties.