Elana Nachman/Dykewomon  (1949 - )

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Beyond the Pale : A Novel by Elana Dykewomon

Encompassing much of the 20th century's political passions, this lesbian love story follows the lives of Jewish families, first in Russia and then in New York in the late 19th century. Immigrants torn between assimilation and preserving their traditions are as real now as a century ago.

Elana Dykewomon's Lambda Award-winning novel Beyond the Pale announces itself to the world with an infant's scream--"a new voice, a tiny shofar announcing its own first year." The midwife attending this birth is Gutke Gurvich, a half-Jew with different colored eyes and a gift for seeing into the spirit world. Beyond the Pale is Gutke's story, detailing her odyssey from a Russian shtetl to a comfortable Manhattan brownstone. But, as Dykewomon puts it, "Whenever you tell the story of one woman, inside is another," and this rich, multilayered novel is also the story of Chava Meyer, the baby girl Gutke delivered that day, as well as the story of the important women in both of their lives: mothers, sisters, neighbors, lovers, friends. After seeing her mother raped and killed during a particularly vicious progrom in her native village of Kishinev, Chava immigrates to America. There, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, both she and Gutke find themselves involved in the nascent labor union and suffrage movements. Dykewomon has clearly done her research here, and Beyond the Pale presents a beautifully detailed account of life among turn-of-the-century immigrant Jews, from classes at the Henry Street Settlement House to the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Through the lens of several lesbians' lives, Dykewomon draws a portrait of an entire Diasporan community living through the terror and uncertainties of both Russian progroms and life in the New World.

Novel Weaves Lives of Russian Jewish Lesbian Emigres

by Natalie Weinstein, Bulletin Staff, Jewish Bulletin of Northern California

Elana Dykewomon's name leaves more to the imagination than one might think. One might predict that the person behind the name would be a hardcore, radical lesbian activist.

But one wouldn't expect to meet a Jew proud of her parents' Zionist activism, a researcher obsessed with historical detail and an author whose latest book is a gracefully crafted tale about Russian Jews at the turn of the century.

Sipping tea at the kitchen table in her cozy Oakland home, Dykewomon didn't get to talk right away about her recently published novel, "Beyond the Pale." First, she had to answer a question she has been asked countless times:

No, Dykewomon is not her given name. It's Nachman.

She dropped it in 1976, after becoming intensely involved in feminist activism and completing her first novel, "Riverfinger Women." Nachman, she explained, "was associated with a long line of rabbis that I no longer wanted to be...tied to at the time..."

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