Deborah by Esther Kreitman

For Women in Translation month, I pulled Deborah (1936) by Esther Kreitman, translated from Yiddish by her son, Maurice Carr, in the 1940s. It was a gift from a Virago-loving friend called Alex back in 2020, and it definitely ticking off a language that I’ve never read before. Deborah is apparently quite autobiographical, following a Rabbi and his family in early-20th-century Poland. Deborah has a brother who teases her, a mother who is apathetic towards her, and a father who is a little lost in lands of unworldliness and more interested in studying scripture than being demonstrative towards his daughter. For a long time, the novel looks at daily life in an insignificant town for a family who are sort of an outlier, socially. Like so many young heroines in literature, Deborah is spirited, intelligent, and frustrated. She longs for education and for romance, and is offered neither. As a girl, her future is not considered to be worth discussing in comparison to her brother’s – except…