| Deborah
by Esther Kreitman
Introduction by IIan Stavens. Afterword by Anita Norich
This popular novel, by Esther Kreitman, tells in fictionalised form, of the lives of the young Singer family in Poland before the First World War.
Deborah was first published in Warsaw in Yiddish in 1936 and later translated by her son Maurice Carr into English in 1946, when it was published by W.G Foyle. It was republished by Virago in 1983. The novel begins in the hermetic, traditional world of Polish Jewry before the first World War. Deborah is the daughter of an unworldly rabbi. Talented and ambitious but condemned to household chores, Deborah frets that she is not allowed to receive the same education and opportunities as her brothers. She falls in love with a communist but capitulates to her parents and agrees to an arranged marriage. Deborah experiences marriage as a living death and seeks to escape. Written with rage and passion about her own journey to creative self-fulfilment against the odds.
This is a book that scholars and fans of the Singers continually refer to for its authentic account of life in the Singer household. It mirrors the struggle of Esther Kreitman to be free and her determination to achieve the same accolades for her fiction as her more famous brothers
Esther Kreitman (1891-1954), born Bilgoray in Poland, lived most of her adult in London. Apart from Deborah and Blitz and other stories (first published in Yiddish in 1950) she published one other novel Brilyantyn (Diamonds) in Poland in 1944. Diamonds will be published in 2005 by David Paul in a first-ever English translation.
£14.99 reduced to £9.99
ISBN 09540542-7-X
Hardback, 140x216mm: 384 pp
UK Publication date: December 2004
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