A Bildungsroman of a Different Sort: Ida Maze’s Dineh Reverberates Across the Decades

by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel
By Ida Maze
Translated and with an Afterword by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Foreward by Emma Garman
White Goat Press, 2022
Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-734872-9-2; Hardcover edition ISBN: 978-8-9852069-0-6; Ebook edition ISBN: 978-8-9852069-1-3

Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze (pronounced MAA-zeh) is a pastorale laced with beauty and sorrow and a bildungsroman told from the point of view of a devout girl. Maze’s friend, the Yiddish poet M. M. Shaffir, typed the book from Maze’s handwritten Yiddish-language manuscript and prepared it for publication. Additionally, Shaffir was the secretary of the committee formed to publish the book. The original Yiddish version appeared in 1970. Set in what is now Belarus, Maze’s title heroine is fueled by her hunger for learning; connection to faith, family, and community; and love of the natural world. The interior mindscape—dreams, visions, fantasies—of the young person occupies a primary place in the book. Throughout, one senses the interplay, the creative conversation, between the perspectives of the author looking back on her life and the title character/fictionalized self in the in-situ moment. It is particularly in the dialogue spoken by Dineh that we see Maze bringing the voice of the child to the fore, where we can most easily forget the Ida/Dineh divide. Interestingly, Dineh contains very few surnames. That absence underscores the book’s essential hybridity and lends to it a kind of folkloric feel. We know this is the story of the author’s childhood and early youth, and yet . . .

Maze artfully interweaves Dineh’s story with portraits of relatives, neighbors, and members of the community, many of them women and girls. We meet the mysterious seamstress Shprintse; Beyle, who leaves home to work as a maidservant in Minsk; Hinde, who falls in love with a young nobleman; and numerous unforgettable others. Each of their lives takes unexpected turns, and Maze distills these stories to their essential core to heighten the inherent drama therein. In her unflinching examination of the lives of women she writes powerfully about class stratification, thwarted romance, violence (domestic, state-instigated, and otherwise), and the perils of childbirth. Maze’s women protagonists are forces with whom to be reckoned. They work as seamstresses, teachers, field workers, and homemakers even as they grapple with oppressive arranged marriages, domestic violence, financial hardship, ailing spouses, and many other trials. Her portrayal of women’s lives is remarkable in its candor.

Maze’s text displays, and is arguably predicated upon, a deeply-felt gendered analysis. Indeed, with its resonance across the decades to contemporary readers, it is arguably a Yiddish feminist literary classic. From a very early age, the title character has to navigate and struggle against the realities of a patriarchal society. When Dineh asks her brother Itshe what he’s studying, Itshe asks, “Would you understand if I told you? A girl is not allowed to know what boys study.”

And yet despite obstacles, Dineh, with the help of others, finds her way. Even if male characters who care deeply about her, such as her brothers Daniel and Itshe, her friend, Motl, and the farmhand, Vasil, sometimes tease or disparage her, Dineh charts her own course and remains true to the specificity of her own perspective, her way of seeing and being in the world. Dineh’s father, Sholem, recognizes her aptitude for learning. Dineh’s educated mother, Peshe, teaches Dineh and her younger brother, Daniel. For all the tension in her relationship with Dineh (that begins seemingly from the moment of her daughter’s birth), Peshe clearly takes pride in her daughter’s scholasticism. Maze makes clear that it is Peshe who has Dineh stand up in front of the class to recite the Psalms with Yiddish translation. Dineh’s drive for Jewish learning surpasses those of her own peers, and her academic talents earn her the admiration of children and adults alike. Her deep religiosity, the anchoring of her very self in the realm of the spirit, is also esteemed by many around her. Indeed, as a girl in a gender-stratified society, the very intensity of Dineh’s faith itself feels radical, transgressive. Dineh, like Peshe before her, comes to read the prayers at services for the women who cannot read. She crafts letters for young wives whose husbands have emigrated, drawing upon her awareness of what lies within the hearts of these women who themselves cannot write.

Thus, the reader joins the young protagonist as she moves into knowledge and as she shares her knowledge. And as the novel progresses, what is considered “knowledge” changes, or rather, expands. By the book’s end, we come to see that Dineh’s bildung stems not merely from her deep scholasticism, but rather from a growing mindfulness of the harsh realities of life confronting so many in the Tsarist realm as well as from her connection to family, friends, and community.

Given that the manuscript was completed in 1939, Maze was arguably ahead of her time. Today, as societies around the world confront entrenched misogyny and gender oppression, Dineh has much to say to contemporary readers about these themes in an earlier time. Dineh provides a vivid portrait of rural, village, and small-town life in White Russia in the last decade of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries.

Maze’s prose interweaves documentary observation, psychological exploration, and bursts of extended lyricism. The effect is spellbinding; her words linger long after reading. There is a great depth of feeling here, an immediacy, a commitment to probing human—and animal—emotion in all its range and complexity. Some of the scenes in this book are among the most deeply affecting I’ve ever read in Yiddish literature and beyond. I am delighted that new readers can now encounter Maze’s autobiographical novel, and I am grateful to all those, especially Ida Maze’s son, Professor Irving Massey, and the book’s publisher, White Goat Press, who have worked to make this happen.

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Born Hayeh Zukofsky (also rendered as Zukowski, Zukowsky, and Zukovsky, among other forms) in 1893 in the village of Ugli (also rendered as Ogli), White Russia (now Belarus), Ida Maze (also rendered as Maza and Massey) was an important figure in the world of Yiddish letters. After emigrating from White Russia in 1907(?), she lived briefly in New York City and then settled in Montreal. Maze’s generosity was the stuff of legend. She helped refugee writers navigate the Canadian immigration system, edited the books of other poets, and advocated for writers in many ways. The doors of her home were kept open, and many Yiddish writers gathered there. Maze was an acclaimed author of poems for adults and children. In addition to Dineh she wrote four books of poetry, A mame (A Mother; 1931), Lider far kinder (Poems for Children; 1936), Naye lider (New Poems; 1941), and Vaksn mayne kinderlekh: muter un kinder-lid- er (My Children Grow: Mother and Children Poems; 1954), which was awarded the prize in children’s literature by the Congress for Jewish Culture in 1955. Ida Maze died in Montreal in 1962.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. He is the author of six books of poetry, including A moyz tsvishn vakldike volkn-kratsers: geklibene Yidishe lider (A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems; Library of Contemporary Yiddish Literature, 2017) and two works of fiction, including Beloved Comrades: a Novel in Stories(Anaphora Literary Press, 2020). His most recent translation from the Yiddish is Blessed Hands: Storiesby Frume Halpern. Please visit his website.

LINKS & FURTHER READING:

Watch an August 4, 2022 presentation by translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub regarding Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze. The program was sponsored by the Yiddish Book Center.

Watch a November 10, 2022 conversation between Dr. Alice Nakhimovsky, Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, Colgate University and translator Yermiyahu Ahron Taub regarding Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze. The program was organized and hosted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York, N.Y.).  

Read “Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel: Reading Resources” prepared by Ezra Glinter on the Yiddish Book Center website.

Read “A Newborn Little Soul” and “Dineh,” chapters excerpted from Dineh: an Autobiographical Novel, in Jewish Fiction. net.

Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel was a 2022 Yiddish Book Center Great Jewish Books Club selection. It won a CIPA-EVVY Award (silver; second place) in the category of Women’s Fiction by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA) and an NYC Big Book Award in the category of Jewish literature.