Book Review: Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze, trans. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym defines the word nostalgia as “a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” ^{1 1} Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001, xiii. In her work on time, nostalgia, and childhood, Boym argues that nostalgia is more than just a longing for place, but a “yearning for a different time—the time of our children, the slower rhythm of our dreams…to turn stories into a private mythology”. ^{2 2} Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001, xv. Ida Maze’s Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel (2022) is a text that engages with the romance of the past and the yearning for a different time. Inspired by Maze’s childhood in White Russia (now Belarus), she mythologizes the lost shtetls of Kapyl’ and Slutsk. Indeed, both Emma Garman, who wrote the Introduction, and Yermiyahu Aharon Taub, who wrote the Afterword and translated the novel, quote Maze’s son, Irving Massey: “My mother never really left Europe…she made incessant references to the old country. She sang the songs in Russian and Belorussian and Yiddish that she’d learned as a child” (ix, 253). Maze is so engaged in this yearning that the autobiographical novel becomes more of a love letter to the people of the village than to the character Dineh, making the reading experience (and this review) challenging for me.

As a scholar of transatlantic girlhood literature studies in English, my expectation is that the bildungsroman primarily focuses on one person’s coming-of-age. So, a novel in which the primary focus is on the protagonist’s growth, but it is filtered through her perception of her community raises a variety of questions, such as: What can a novel like this tell scholars and readers of Yiddish and Jewish women’s literature about the history of Jewish women’s writing, and the history of Jewish experience in Eastern Europe? How can looking at texts in translation expand the definition of what a coming-of-age or bildungroman novel is, especially within my field of Girlhood Studies?

A Short Biography

Maze was born on 9 July 1893 in Ugli, south of Minsk in Belarus. She came from a rather large family with two brothers and two sisters, with two siblings (a brother and sister) who died when they were children. Maze’s schooling was limited, with only one year of cheder, but she absorbed languages and literature by just listening to her brother’s lessons. She immigrated to North American in 1905 with her parents, Shimon Zukofsky and Musha Govezniansky, first arriving in New York and later settling in Montreal. In 1912, she married a traveling salesman, Alexander Massey (1893-1961), and they had three children, Bernard (1913-1923), Israel (1918-1962), and Irving (b. 1924).

Opening up her home to poets and painters, Maze helped to establish many Yiddish and English poets, including Miriam Waddingon. Rokhl Korn says,“Ida Maze, a delicate poet, loved all Yiddish poetry perhaps even more than her own, and was indeed the den mother for a generation of Yiddish writers in Montreal”. ^{3 3} quoted in Fuerstenberg, Adam. “Ida Maze.” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 27 February 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. (Viewed on April 10, 2025) https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/a... Maze also facilitated visas for Jewish writers during and after the Second World War, helping them once they arrived in Canada.

Maze started writing in her teens and published her first book A mame (A Mother: Children’s Songs) in 1931, which was written after the death of her son, Bernard. She died on June 13, 1963 in Montreal.

Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel as a Girls’ Bildungsroman

Maze’s novel is named after its eponymous protagonist, much of it centering on stories about people indirectly or directly related to Dineh. This centering makes Dineh different from traditional girlhood texts. In her work The Rise of American Girls’ Literature, Ashley Reese defines girls’ literature “as a book written about a girl, for a girl reader, with the targeted audience identified in its name, similar to children’s or young adult literature”. ^{4 4} Reese, Ashley N. The Rise of American Girls’ Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 6. However, by this definition, it is important to recognize who is being defined as a “girl,” and in what social, political, and cultural context, and when these girls are being are being educated into performing their role as women in society. Girls’ literature scholars, such as Elaine Showalter, argue that these books usually end in matrimony, in which the girl becomes “a caretaker of others and a home, preparing for marriage and motherhood”. ^{5 5} As described in Reese, Ashley N. The Rise of American Girls’ Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 6. And yet, for Miranda Green-Barteet and Amanda K. Allen, it is more accurate to think of girls’ literature as something that “possess[es] certain recognizable generic elements at certain times (such as girl protagonists, romance plots, and a focus on clothing and manners during the late nineteenth century), but which otherwise avoids specific definitions in an attempt to uphold and emphasize its transformation—just as the concept of a ‘girl’ itself (and what identifies it may or may not encompass) similarly changes over time”. ^{6 6} Allen, Amanda K., and Miranda A. Green-Barteet. 2023. “Girls Who Persist and Resist: Resistance in Girlhood Studies and Girls’ Literature.” Women’s Studies 52 (6): 611–26, p. 619. Perhaps, as Maze was examining social, political and cultural norms for Jewish girls during the late nineteenth-century, Dineh is considered girls’ literature because it emphasizes the protagonist’s transformation from girl to woman.

Dineh could also be situated among other late nineteenth, early twentieth century texts which are in response to the traditional bildungsroman, in which protagonists are traditionally Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied, native-born, and middle class. ^{7 7} Sardella-Ayres, D., & Reese, A. (2020). Where to from Here? Emerging Conversations on Girls’ Literature and Girlhood. Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13., p. 35. These conventional bildungsroman focus on the heroine learning her role in society as a woman, most importantly training her to be proficient in the domestic sphere as wife and mother. In my work on Jewish girlhood, I examine how Jewish women writers—such as Grace Aguilar’s (1816-1846) The Perez Family (1842), Amy Levy’s (1861-1889) Reuben Sachs: A Sketch (1888), Sydney Taylor’s (1904-1978) All-of-a-Kind Family (1951) and Judy Blume’s (b. 1938) Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977)—respond to the normativity of the genre by focusing on Jewish-girl focused stories. Generally — though this has broadened over the last decade — most Jewish literature available in English that is centered on girlhood either takes place during the Holocaust or the Second World War or are immigration stories. Dineh might be considered among the immigration narratives, like Anzia Yezierska’s (1880-1970) Bread Givers (1925), but, unlike most immigration stories, Dineh primarily takes place in the protagonist’s country of origin, making it something of an outlier even among the Jewish girlhood novels known to English-reading audiences.

Unlike traditional bildungsromans, Dineh does not end in marriage, but immigration. The novel also is somewhat atypical for the girlhood literature genre in that it focuses on the collective rather than the individual experience. Dineh is largely episodic with multiple short chapters discussing people Dineh is curious about, like the blacksmith family across the street that she is not allowed to talk to. Dineh’s character is perceived through her observations of the world around her. The novel is not necessary a portrait of her, but of the village she loves. As Dineh gets older, she is more present in the narrative, eventually becoming the lead in her own story.

Maze’s novel contains a common theme among girls’ books published in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, that of young women challenging authority by bettering themselves through education. For example, in Little Women (1869) by Louisa May Alcott, Jo bemoans how she cannot go to college because she is a girl. And in the Anne of Green Gables (1908) series by L.M. Montgomery, Anne Shirley complains to longtime chum and future husband, Gilbert Blythe, that the Avonlea women tease about her desire for education. The struggle between Dineh’s ambition and the patriarchy begins when she is about four and her father notices her mouthing the Kiddush and reciting the ha-Moytse, “offering Dineh a large piece of bread and listened to her recite the blessing. ‘You should have been a boy,’ he said, seemingly to himself. Dineh ate the smallest bite of challah and hid her piece under the table so that no one would see” (22). Her father’s comment and the hiding of the challah becomes a metaphor for the conflict between the expectations attached to Dineh’s gender and her desire to learn.

Dineh’s longing for learning yields some of the most lyrical moments in the novel. For example, when a new teacher arrives, and Dineh’s mother makes her daughter stand in front of the classroom to recite the Psalms in Yiddish, Dineh thinks that if she could prove herself, it would please the teacher, her mother, and the other children. Maze writes, “She deeply inhaled, like someone poised to dive into cold river waters, and began her recitation—trembling at first, and then a bit more boldy…And on and on, chapter after chapter. Everyone sat around the table and listened in amazement to Dineh’s melodic recitation of the words” (34). However, Dineh’s schooling is rarely productive. During this recitation she is interrupted because the boys start fighting. This continually happens at the various schools she attends. Eventually Dineh becomes the only girl among the boys and loses interest in learning because there is no encouragement. Thus, the narrative shows how the system disenfranchises girls’ learning.

As both Garman and Taub discuss, Dineh can be read as a feminist text because Maze is concerned about issues that are unique to women. Dineh’s frustration at not getting the support she needs is mirrored by the various stories about the precariousness of women’s lives in the shtetl. For example, one of the episodes involves Dineh’s Aunt Golde and her daughter, Altke, who die in the same month. When Golde marries an irresponsible, abusive man, and becomes very ill, knowing that she is going to die, she tries to match Altke with a good husband. However, a little while later Golde dies. Mourning her mother and afraid of marriage, Altke describes her father’s abuse and tells Dineh’s oldest sister, Malkeh: “‘If I get married my husband will beat me too…I won’t get married…do you hear me Malkeh? I won’t’” (147). Eventually succumbing to what is clearly a mental health episode, Altke dies. While Dineh is not present, Altke’s story illuminates the realities of what could happen if a woman makes a bad marriage—and it is clear that this is a possibility for Dineh.

As in other girls’ historical narratives, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (the series was published in the 1930’s and 1940’s) and Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series (published between 1940 and 1955), Dineh’s growth is connected to the changing world around her. While Wilder’s and Lovelace’s protagonists’ perceptions expand as they grow up, so, too, Dineh must leave the comfort of her home to another village to go to school, eventually having to flee Belarus because of the government’s increasing antisemitism—something she does not want to do. As Taub says, “By the book’s end, we come to see that Dineh’s bildung stems not from her deep scholasticism but also from a growing mindfulness of the realities of life confronting so many in the tsarist realm, as well as from her connection to her family…all of the beloveds around her” (255-256). Although the novel begins from Dineh’s strong desire for traditional learning, as the novel expands, the scope of her learning encompasses the realities of the world she lives in, and that eventually propels her migration.

Dineh as a Canadian Feminist Novel

Ida Maze was writing Yiddish literature in Canada during the early twentieth century when Canadian (English) literature was looking to define itself as something distinct from its British heritage and American neighbors. And although Maze’s writing might be more likely to be read as separate from the English-language sphere of Canadian writing, I believe she belongs in this context as much as she does to the world of Yiddish letters. In “Mrs. (Ida) Maza’s Salon,” Canadian author Miriam Waddington (b. 1917) reflects on her family’s relationship with the Maze family and the author’s influence on Waddington’s career. ^{8 8} Waddington, Miriam (1996). “Mrs. (Ida) Maza’s salon”. Canadian Woman Studies. 16 (4): 119–22. The essay demonstrates the ways that Maze’s Yiddish writing belongs within the broader scope of Canadian women’s writing. She describes meeting Maze as a young child, the apartment which housed many “salons,” and Maze’s mentorship. When she discovered that Waddington was interested in writing, Maze suggested several writers, including Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Waddington writes:

Occasionally she would read me one of her own Yiddish poems. I listened but I confess that I didn’t give her poems my fullest attention. Most of them were children’s poems, playful and tender; or else they dealt with the relationship between mothers and children, not a subject of great to interest to an adolescent girl. I have since gone back to read Ida Maza’s poems with an adult eye, and find them full of warmth and a lyrical charm that manages to shine through even a rough translation.

This quotation places Maze and her work in a multilingual Canadian literary framework—even if Waddington initially did not appreciate its charm. Waddington’s personal essay describes not only Maze’s origins as a Canadian Jewish woman writer, but also the importance of her influence on the Jewish community in Montreal during the first half of the twentieth century.

Maze’s legacy is an important part of the history of Canadian Jewish and Canadian women’s writing, making a noteworthy comparison with another classic Canadian text, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). Montgomery—before modernist critics turned against her in the 1930s—was a bestselling author and Maze’s contemporary. While Montgomery stayed up to date on the latest literary trends and read widely, she would probably not have access to (or an awareness of) texts written in Yiddish and would not have read Maze’s work. Yet, both authors have characters live in small, religious communities with specific gendered expectations. Both authors have protagonists whose gender is contentious: the Cuthberts of the Anne books wish for a boy to help with the farm and get a girl instead, while Dineh’s father wishes his daughter had been a boy because she was so good at studying. Both authors have protagonists who have a desire for higher learning and wish to be a writer. Montgomery and Maze also focus on women’s role in the community. And both authors have novels that feature a protagonist who is the conduit for other people’s stories. For example, in Montgomery’s novel, Rilla of Ingleside, Anne becomes a supporting character to the plot.

Good historical fiction will provide the personal, social, and political details that are not always told in traditional history books. While the novel may be filtered through Maze’s nostalgic memory, the details about how she saw her community makes this an important text. Maze wrote in the 1930s, a time in which the Canadian government, under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, had shut its doors to Jewish immigration. As stated previously, Maze worked tirelessly for the community, later helping many writers and cultural leaders get Canadian visas. Given that Maze was always too busy to return to the novel, it raises questions as to what propelled her to tell this story in this way. Did she (like my own Jewish immigrant family) find her past too difficult to discuss?

The publication of Maze’s novel in English translation brings new attention to a Jewish women writer in Canada whom readers outside of Yiddish literature (like myself) most likely do not know about. It’s surprising to me that despite growing up in Canada, going to Jewish day school, living in Montreal for seven years, and studying Canadian literature for over twenty years, I did not once hear her name. This shows how very separate the Yiddish and English spheres of Canadian writing have tended to be. This translation, therefore, will serve as a corrective and bring another Canadian Jewish woman writer’s perspective to a larger community, giving voice to parts of our history that have been silenced or forgotten. And for writers like me, the publication brings new opportunities to examine representations of Jewish girlhood written by Jewish women writers.