Dvorah Baron was born in 1887, in Belorussia, and published her first story, in Yiddish, in 1905. Her father, a rabbi, recognizing her genius, gave her the education normally restricted to boys, and most of her stories involve the characters who came to her father’s “court” in the shtetl with their daily problems.
In 1910 she emigrated to Palestine, where she continued to write and publish both in Yiddish and Hebrew. Baron is the first modern Hebrew woman writer, and her stories–minimalist, poignant and delicate–are always on the side of the “underdog,” but never judgmental or didactic. Baron died in Tel Aviv in 1956. A selection of her stories translated into English appeared in 1969 under the title The Thorny Path and Other Stories, followed in 2001 by The First Day and Other Stories.
