An image of an uprooted woman in New Hebrew prose on the basis of short stories by Isaac Dov Berkowitz

The uprooted hero is one of the leading themes in Hebrew prose at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also occupies a central place in the stories of Isaac Dov Berkowitz. The uproot metaphor reflects the hero’s alienation in many aspects of life. In a broader sense, it is a reaction to the sense of suspension between the traditions of their ancestors and the progressive secularization of their world. The exceptions are stories whose protagonist is an uprooted female figure. This is a unique phenomenon considering the lower hierarchical position of women in Judaism and the limited access to religious and secular literature at the time. The female uprooting results from other factors. Women do not follow science or ideology, they want to free themselves from the norms of Jewish customs, escape loneliness and experience individualism. The objective of the paper is to present the image of Berkowitz’s heroines and compare them from the perspective of alienation. The starting point for consideration is the classification of the uprooted and the division of Berkowitz’s heroes according to Nurit Govrin and variants of the uprooting by Simon Halkin.