In her fiction, Esther Masserman Broner simultaneously experiments with narrative form and emphasizes the continuity of myth, folklore, and tradition. As her most recent novel, A Weave of Women , especially demonstrates, Broner succeeds in finding new forms for fiction, forms that incorporate both dramatic presentation and poetic language and, at the same time, encompass a radical feminist reordering of social and fictional hierarchies. Her most important contribution to contemporary literature is the way in which she employs an inheritance of Yiddish and Hebrew themes and tones in an experimental fictional mode that celebrates the female hero.

Broner was born in Detroit at the beginning of the Depression into a gifted family. It is not difficult to see in her work the influence of each of her parents. Now retired, her father, Paul Masserman, was a journalist and a noted Jewish historian, while her mother, Beatrice Weckstein Masserman, had...