The Smallest Woman in the World

The author’s perspective in the story “The Smallest Woman in the World” is deeply influenced by her own experience as an outsider in society. Clarice Lispector was a Jewish Ukrainian who immigrated to Brazil with her family in 1922 when she was a child. Chaya Lispector was her birth name, which her family changed upon arrival in Brazil in order to blend into the new country.

Clarice Lispector was born in the shtetl (a Jewish village) of Chechelnyk in the Russian Empire (today’s western Ukraine) in a situation of extreme poverty and persecution. The Lispector family suffered tremendously in the wave of pogroms during the Russian Civil War (1917-1923). As Benjamin Moser writes in his biography of Clarice Lispector, “[W]hat befell the Jews of the Ukraine around the time of Clarice Lispector’s birth was a disaster on a scale never before imagined. Perhaps 250,000 were killed: excepting the Holocaust, the worst anti-Semitic episode in history” (Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 11). Clarice’s mother, as Moser and Clarice herself attest, was the victim of sexual assault during one of the pogroms. She thereby contracted a venereal disease, which went untreated because there was no cure for it yet.