On a Saturday morning in the winter of 1899, Michalina Araten left her Hasidic family's home and entered the Felician Sisters' convent in Krakow. The story of Michalina running away, which was later called the “Araten Affair,” is the starting point of Rachel Manekin's fascinating and thrilling book. Manekin explores what she calls the “embarrassing chapter” (192) of the lost generation of Galician Jewish women at the turn of the century. The book is dedicated to the challenges young Jewish women had to face in the new reality of Western Galicia regarding different aspects of social and traditional life, such as compulsory education, Polish acculturation, and the growth and spread of feminist ideas. The new reality and the tension between the old and the new led to an intergenerational gap and family conflicts. The runaway phenomenon had many faces: while some girls chose to convert or to move to bigger cities, others emigrated abroad or joined left-wing political movements as different expressions of rebellion in the old world. The above-mentioned fissures and conflicts caused not only the runaway phenomenon but, according to Manekin, also acted as impetus and contributed to the establishment of the Beit-Yaakov school network for Orthodox girls in interwar Poland.
The first of six chapters provides an illuminating discussion of the social and cultural transformation within the Jewish community in Galicia. The following three chapters, which are the core of the book, sketch with exceptional precision the stories of three out of the hundreds of runaway daughters: Michalina Araten, Debora Lewkowicz, and Anna Kluger. All three stories are based on archival sources including records of police investigations, court records, governmental correspondence, law codes, and press reports in various languages. The motivation for running away was different in each story, and Manekin analyzes unique factors such as religion, romantic love, and thirst for knowledge. Michalina Araten's story, which became the most publicized young Jewish runaway story, is rooted in Araten's true identification with Polish culture and Catholic religion. Araten grew up in Krakow and, like many other Hasidic girls of the time, was educated in a prestigious Polish Catholic school. The long years she spent in the Polish education system led her to identify with the culture and religion of the outer world and to run away to the Felician Sisters' convent and convert.
Unlike her parents, Debora Lewkowicz attended public primary school and was in constant contact with the Polish surroundings. This openness to the non-Jewish world led her to a friendship with a young Polish boy that later developed into romantic love. In order to consummate their relationship, Lewkowicz ran away from home and also found shelter in the Felician Sisters' convent in Krakow. The last story in the book is that of Anna Kluger and her sister Leonore. The sisters ran away from home due to Anna's “Wissensgier” (138), passion for learning. Anna, daughter to a well-established and politically involved Hasidic family, encountered her parents' resistance to her wish to continue pursuing a university education. After the sisters left home, Anna finished her Ph.D. at Vienna University.
The fifth chapter focuses on the runaway phenomenon's reflection in the Jewish literature of the era. Manekin presents a collection of relevant Jewish literature, especially S. Y. Agnon's Tehilla. The last chapter is dedicated to Manekin's conclusions in regard to the long-term influence of the runaway phenomenon in the Second Polish Republic. Manekin adds another layer to the existing historiography regarding Beit-Yaakov. She claims that beside the Neo-Orthodox, German, and Polish influences on the establishment of the girls-only school network, we can spot a Galician influence as well. Manekin rightly claims that it was no mere coincidence that the first Beit-Yaakov school opened in Krakow, the capital of Western Galicia. Sarah Schenirer, the founder of Beit-Yaakov who grew up in Krakow, was of the same generation as the runaway daughters, and their stories surely influenced her to create the school network. The appendix includes translated letters and personal statements of the girls at the center of the discussion.
Manekin centers the voices, not only of those who ran away from home, but of their entire era. She does so by using a microhistorical methodology that allows her to draw conclusions about wider phenomena. However, Manekin chooses not to refer to or analyze the emotional factors which accompanied the process of decision-making and the act of running away (7), such as despair, unhappiness, hope, and shame. But the most prominent example is romantic love. While love played a critical role in the runaway phenomenon—as in the tension between arranged marriages and love marriages—emotional motivations are not referenced specifically. Mapping the sets of emotions that motivated the rebellious daughters as well as their parents, siblings, lovers, and relatives could have contributed to a better understanding of those specific stories, as well as the “emotional regime,” emotional codes, and the character of the “emotional community” of the Orthodox Jewish society undergoing transformation at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, The Rebellion of the Daughters is an important and fascinating study that offers readers a lucid and accessible analysis of central, thus far neglected issues in modern East European Jewish history.
