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Book <strong>Review</strong>s 249<br />
authors' struggles with questions of female subjectivity and gender<br />
boundariesn(325). Thus Hareven's City of Many Days, largely dismissed<br />
when it appeared in 1972, was a novel ahead of its time in terms of<br />
both its feminism and its implicit critique of Zionist ideology (332).<br />
For Feldman, Israeli women living under the real-life extension of<br />
Zionist ideology are writing ',under seige, in a society fundamentally<br />
unfriendly to their quest" that has "prevented the direct expression of<br />
Israeli female subjectivityU(325). They are reduced to indirection and<br />
"disguise:' The editorial choice to end the volume with this essay<br />
once more suggests that the ideological trajectory conceived for the<br />
collection is not necessarily that of the individual authors. Mysteriously,<br />
this essay is not mentioned in the introduction at all.<br />
Overall, one is struck by the inability of the essays, and their writers,<br />
to speak among themselves, to generate some kind of dialogue<br />
originating in a concerted response to a focused set of questions. In<br />
this regard, it undoubtedly does not help that a full six of the essays<br />
(those by Niger, Adler, Pratt, Hellerstein, Sokoloff, and Feldman) are<br />
reworked from earlier publications. Still, there is room for much<br />
browsing and reading here. The weaker essays are sociologically informative,<br />
and the best ones are excellent. They are weakened by<br />
the lack of any real editorial brace to hold them up together and by<br />
the disjointed and naive assumptions that fail to serve that purpose.<br />
The pretense to diversity is one of them, and the pretense to<br />
universality is another. The better path would have been to give<br />
these women writers a specific set of questions and let them talk together,<br />
in their essays and across seas and centuries, and see what<br />
they had to say. "I am her friend and I ask about her,!' runs a Judeo-<br />
Arabic lament. Women of the Word does ask, but not clearly. It is less<br />
clear how well it heard.<br />
- Susan Einbinder<br />
Susan Einbinder is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature at HUC-JIR, Cincin-<br />
nati.<br />
Notes<br />
1. Yitzhak Avishur, Women's Folk Songs in Judeao-Arabicfrom Jews in Iraq [texts in<br />
Judeo-Arabic with Hebrew translation, commentary, and introductionl,(Institute
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