Those Well-Raised Girls

At a high school for religious girls, 17-year-old Hava Keller is preparing to stage a play based on a story about 93 Jewish girls from Krakow who took their own lives during the Holocaust rather than be raped by soldiers. Before committing suicide, one of the girls, Haya Feldman, told the story in a letter that found its way out of the ghetto and into the newspapers, horrifying the Jewish world. Although it later emerged that this story of supreme chastity was invented, it became a defining myth among Israel’s religious community. Hava Keller, the heroine, is a strong-willed, independent thinker. In the play that she is planning at school, she herself will star as the girl who wrote the famous letter, just as her dead mother was supposed to do, many years before. At the time, however, the school found out that she was pregnant, and the role was given to another girl, Hani Gross. But Hani disappeared and only her underwear was found in a city park. Now, one of the actors in Hava’s play also disappears and Hava, in shock, sees history repeating itself.

Those Well-Raised Girls combines dark suspense with a tale of sexual awakening. But it also has a more serious purpose: it explores the power of myths—including those from the Holocaust—that feed into young girls’ fears and repressed desire. Blau condemns this way of exerting control and of presenting chastity-unto-death as a model for emulation. With great courage, she also exposes the emotional manipulations and hypocrisy of those who exploit these myths.