Working Toward a Just Society
Dina expresses Jewish struggles, joys
EMILY SIMON
New edition adds diverse voices
BY
A N N D E E
H O C H M A N
The T ribe of Dina. Melanie Kaye/
Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, editors. Beacon
Press: Boston, 1989. 360 pages. $12.95.
he Tribe o f Dina, when it first appeared
as a clouble-thick issue of Sinister Wisdom
in 1986, did not so much break new ground as
open existing ground in all directions, allowing
Jewish women to see clearly where they, and
others, stood.
The book’s editors, Melanie Kaye/
Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, wrote in the
introduction to the 1986 edition that they aimed
to "express the wide range of Jewish experience
and culture, and to develop more empathy and
support for Jewish identities which we do not
share.”
The concept proved successful. The book
sold. The first edition soon went out of print,
and the editors could not afford to reissue it.
The current version is published by Beacon
Press.
The new Dina contains all the stories,
poems and essays of the first version, plus
several new pieces which reflect both hindsight
and the shifting political terrain of the Mideast.
The new work includes an essay by a woman
visiting her relatives in the Soviet Union, a
rabbi’s story of her Sephardic grandmother and
poems by an Israeli woman.
The value of Dina lies in its willingness to
show Jewish women our differences, to dis
mantle the stereotypes and silences that prevent
us from seeing each other, and ultimately
ourselves, with clarity.
Layers o f meaning inhabit many of the
selections in Dina. Whether in the recovered,
translated Yiddish stories from the early part of
this century, a walking tour through radical
Jewish women’s history in New York or the
thoughts of editor Kaye/Kantrowitz on how
‘T o Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th
Century,” sadness and anger, survival and
humor and pride co-exist in these pages, as in
their authors’ lives.
One of the most moving selections is a story
SIMON KRAMER 6 TOTH-FEJEL
Attorneys
added to this edition, by Elza Fry dry ch
Shatzkin, a child survivor of the Holocaust who
at first excelled after emigrating to America,
then committed suicide at the age of 25.
Her story, based on her own experience of
being placed in a Catholic orphanage in Poland,
captures poignantly the mind of a child,
working to make the new rules of her environ
ment blend with her own curiosity and dreams.
She writes:
“. . . They taught me Our Father, and other
special prayers. We say them in chapel every
ni ght . . . The red light always bums, and a little
tiny part of Jesus is always there.
“I was alone yesterday, and I climbed the
stairs higher than ever before. I went to a
bathroom only for the sisters. There was a
window and I was high above the city. A train
passed, and I heard the long whistle. It made
me cry, because nobody loved me, and because
there was nobody in the world. I want my
Mama and my Daddy. But they are Jews. I
hope they didn’t die. Probably, if they are not
dead, someone will come and take me back to
them. It is cold, but I will sleep now. Jesus
knows that I love him. He doesn’t mind that I
am Jewish.”
What emerges from the collection is a sense
of pride, of stubbornness, of survival sweetened
with hope of a better world. Before we can
value our heritage, we must be able to hear it,
taste it, savor its language.
“Those who call resistance to assimilation a
luxury might do well to think about calling
‘sexual preference’ a luxury, or reproductive
rights, or access to education or creative
expression,” Kaye/Kantrowitz writes in her
essay. “None of these is bread, but ‘Bread and
Roses’ was a demand voiced by Rose
Schneiderman, a union organizer and a Jew.
“What are the roses? As Jews we need our
peoplehood, our culture, history, languages,
music, calendar, tradition, literature___ We
need these things because they are beautiful and
ours, and because the point of struggle is not
bare survival but lives full of possibility.”
By rescuing The Tribe o f Dina from the
desert of out-of-print books. Beacon Press
brings the anthology to a potentially wider
audience— women and men, Jews and non-
Jews, lesbian and heterosexual— all of whom
may find some possibility glinting on the broad
ground that lies between its covers.
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