Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist
2008; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoLoentz, Elizabeth. Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007. 328 pp. $34.95 cloth. Elizabeth Loentz has written what can only be called the definitive work on Bertha Pappenheim to date. When Pappenheim died in 1 936, her work as a social worker and activist was all but forgotten. She was, however, notoriously resurrected when Ernest Jones revealed in his 1953 biography of Freud that Pappenheim was none other than Freud's famous patient, Anna O. For Loentz, the revelation has obscured who Bertha Pappenheim was after she left Vienna for Frankfurt to begin her work in the Israelite Orphanage for Girls. Loentz's extensively researched work on Pappenheim reveals a rich and active life, devoted to improving the situation of Jewish women and girls. While this aspect of Pappenheim's life is not unknown, the author 's most important contribution includes a serious study of Pappenheim's written work, which has up to this point not received much attention. As Loentz explains, Pappenheim's literary works have been undervalued: German literary criticism has often ignored explicitly programmatic and didactic literary texts, especially those that do not comply with the dominant aesthetic trends or movements of their era, or those that deal with very topical issues (especially or minority issues) [...], unworthy of serious critical attention ... (8). Loentz's work therefore fills an important gap in scholarship on Pappenheim by considering her literary and scholarly output in its entirety and within the context of her life. In each of the first five chapters, Loentz returns repeatedly to Pappenheim's literary works as they relate to her activism and personal development. These five chapters focus thus on Pappenheim's commentary on Yiddish as women's German, her relationship to Zionism, her work against conversion of Jews to Christianity - as illustrated by her collection of six stories in Struggles published in 1916 - the important role she played in protecting vulnerable Jewish women from Eastern Europe, and, finally, her own spiritual development, with special attention given to her volume of Gebete. Loentz shows how Pappenheim's writing must be understood within the context for which each text was intended and goes on to demonstrate the enduring value of the texts, which include poetry, songs, short stories, and dramas, as inspiration for her contemporaries and for subsequent generations of Jewish women. As the founder of the Jewish Women's League of Germany and the International Jewish Women's League, Pappenheim fought to protect Jewish women and girls, primarily from Eastern Europe, from exploitation. …
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