| Sumario: | This article is about the transformation of the term "aḥot" ("sister") from a familial/erotic or national allegorical connotation to one of female intellectual and literary agency and solidarity. Part of a broader comparative exploration of the fiction of Shmuʾel Yosef Agnon (1887–1970) and Devorah Baron (1887–1956)—literary siblings of a sort who edited and responded to each other's work—this article examines the representation of (literary) sisters in two stories entitled "Aḥot," one by Agnon, which was originally published in Hapoʿel hatsaʿir and later, in a revised version, in ʿAl kappot hamanʿul, and the other by Baron, which was published in the Zionist weekly Haʿolam but omitted from her later story collections. Although they were published within months of each other in 1910 and share several common themes and elements, as well as authorial circumstances, these identically titled stories offer markedly divergent and distinctly gendered psychological portraits of the Hebrew literary sister. In Baron's "Aḥot," the older sister serves as narrator and shaper of the story—in other words, as a "sister of the pen." By contrast, Agnon's story leaves the sister largely silent and inert, seemingly incapable of reading, let alone writing a story to its conclusion. Notably, Agnon and Baron each return to and revise their sister portraits in later works of fiction. Agnon writes Bidmi yameha, which comes to replace "Aḥot" as the opening story of ʿAl kappot hamanʿul in later editions and famously features a female narrator/writer. Baron pens two stories, "Hayom harishon" and "Bereshit," featured in her first collection , Sippurim, which rewrites the idea of the sister as if from the very beginning.
|
|---|