Born: 27 November 1887, Belarus
Died: 20 August 1956
Country most active: Israel
Also known as: Dvora Baron and Deborah Baron
Devorah Baron was a Jewish writer known for writing in Modern Hebrew and making a career as a Hebrew author. She has been called the “first Modern Hebrew woman writer”. She wrote about 80 short stories, as well as a novella, and translated stories into Modern Hebrew.
As a child, Baron’s father, a rabbi, allowed her to attend the same Hebrew classes as boys, which was unusual for the time. Also uncommon for girls at the time, she completed high school and received a teaching credential in 1907. In 1902, Baron published her first stories at age 14, in the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits.
After her father’s death and later the destruction of her village in a pogrom, she immigrated to Palestine in 1910, moving to Neve Tzedek, a settlement that was part of the new city of Tel Aviv. Here, she became the literary editor of the Zionist-Socialist magazine Ha-Po’el ha-Za’ir (The Young Worker) and married the editor, Zionist activist Yosef Aharonovitz. They were among the Palestinian Jews deported to Egypt by the Ottoman government, but returned after the establishment of the British Mandate following World War I. In 1922, Baron and her husband both resigned from the magazine and she went into seclusion, staying at her home until she died.
Although she wrote and published throughout her life, it was divided into two phases, as an active, daring young woman, and then a secluded and apparently passive woman. She chose “not to step foot [sic] out of her house”, even for her husband’s funeral in 1937, although one eyewitness reported, “I saw her descend three steps and return to her house.” During her seclusion, she continued to write, composing “a group of stories depicting the world as seen through the window of an ‘invalid’s room’ (“Be-Lev ha-Kerakh,” in Parashiyyot)”.
Later in life, she produced important literary translations into Hebrew, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Although she was a Zionist, she wrote extensively about village life in the shtetls of Lithuania, “sometimes in near-poetic tones.”
When the Bialik Prize for writing was established in Israel, she was its first recipient in 1934. She received the Rupin Prize in 1944 and the Brenner Prize for literature in 1951. Editor Rachel Shazar notes that Baron’s stories, “animated by a deep empathy for the weak and the innocent,” reflect profound learning: “No other woman writer in Israel was as familiar with the sources of Judaism as Devorah Baron.”