Gollance, Sonia;
(2023)
“An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre.
In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies
, APR
pp. 1-23.
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Abstract
Rose Shomer Bachelis (1882−1966) and Miriam Shomer Zunser (1883−1951) were prominent cultural figures in their lifetimes, who achieved success as playwrights, yet their dramatic work has been largely forgotten. Identified as “di shvester Shomer” (the Shomer sisters), Bachelis and Zunser represented one half of the younger generation of the most prominent shund family. Like their prolific novelist and playwright father Shomer, they knew that “the masses love razzle-dazzle and hocus-pocus,” as Sholem Aleichem claimed of their father in his famous 1888 polemic Shomers mishpet (The Judgment of Shomer). The Shomer sisters’ unpublished operetta “Der liebes tants” (The Dance of Love), submitted for American copyright in 1929, depicts the relationship between two sisters who are in love with the same man. Deploying such tropes as show business, wedding festivities, and buffoonish “greenhorns,” the play is designed to entertain. Yet a deeper examination of “Der liebes tants” gives new meaning to shund, a genre that has usually been regarded as formulaic and uncritical. While the play’s Apache dance motif conveys the potential violence and ambivalence of heterosexual desire, it can also be read against the grain to question the centrality of these very themes for the text as a whole. The Shomer sisters’ operetta undermines its own marriage plot by emphasizing the devotion of the two sisters. By focusing on sisters – – both as writers and as literary characters – – we can rethink our understandings of the marriage plot and reimagine the entire concept of literary “lineages” as they have been framed in Yiddish literary history.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | “An altogether unusual love and understanding”: The Shomer Sisters and the Gender Politics of Shund Theatre |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://ingeveb.org/articles/the-shomer-sisters-an... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Hebrew and Jewish Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168827 |
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