In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka

Introduction

      The twentieth century is believed to have been the time when philosophers, artists, and writers were preoccupied with the issue of identity. However, we could argue that Jews, living as marginal, separate people throughout most of their Diasporic history, have always been obsessed with the question of personal and collective identity. Identity has been an especially vital and contentious issue for American Jews whose life has been marked by the interaction with Gentiles since the beginning of their settlement on the American continent. In general, Jews raised within the Jewish tradition in the Old World were forced to challenge, evaluate, and confirm their ethnic/religious identities, their links to the Jewish past, as well as their connections to American culture after emigrating to America. On the other hand, secular Jews or those with only nominal Jewish upbringing seemed to have more freedom in forging their identities in heterogeneous America, feeling unencumbered by their religious beliefs.

      The post-war period, in particular, the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the second wave of feminism, and multiculturalism contributed significantly to the development of the general interest in identity, ethnic pride and alternative lifestyles. The United States is undoubtedly the finest example of a multicultural society in which racial, religious and ethnic boundaries seem to be blurred as a consequence of the constant contact, interdependence and confrontation between one’s native culture and foreign culture. The search for identity by people living on the borderland between ‘two worlds’ is an issue that concerns members of all ethnic groups in America, that is, Native Americans, African Americans, Latin Americans, or Americans of Asian or European descent. Influenced by the revolutionary politics of the 1960s and 1970s, previously marginalized groups, including women from ethnic/religious minorities – who had borne the double or triple burden of race, gender and ethnicity/religion for centuries – began to demand the greater political inclusion, representation and recognition of their ‘true’ selves. In the light of this fact, it is unsurprising that the efforts and struggles made by the representatives of these ethnic groups to negotiate their identity/(ies) were reflected in the American ethnic literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Similarly, many American Jews who had once embraced the dominant cultural model of assimilation began to seek alternative strategies, allowing them to express their Jewishness and make their voices finally be heard as particularly ‘Jewish.’ In fact, contemporary American Jewish literature is characterized by a diversity of voices, and seems to be dealing with a fluid post-ethnic concept of identity which gravitates towards the ethnic and racial hybridity, rejecting previously fixed categories of identification.

      A proliferation of texts written predominantly by American Jewish women writers, which emerged over the next two decades, especially in the 1990s and beyond, tended to eschew the theme of integration into the American mainstream ←9 | 10→culture, turning inward to address particularly Jewish themes. As a consequence, contemporary American Jewish women’s fiction touches upon issues related to Jewish women but barely discussed before, such as the position of a woman in the patriarchal Jewish tradition and the ensuing demand for changes in her status in Judaism, as well as a Jewish woman’s desire for self-definition and self-realization within (Orthodox) Judaism. I would like to emphasize that the focus of my book on American Jewish women writers rather than on both male and female American Jewish writers mainly stems from the fact that it was women’s voices generally, and ethnic/religious minority women’s voices in particular, that have been neglected and marginalized in American literature for a very long time. I strongly believe that American Jewish women writers deserve to occupy an equally important place in the canon of multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial American literature as their male counterparts.

      Moreover, giving voice to American Jewish women writers also provides an excellent opportunity for them to “critique the male dominance of post-World War II Jewishness, and from there, to rethink Jewish identity more generally” (Brodkin qtd. in Gasztold, 2015: 9). Simultaneously, American Jewish women writers are given an opportunity to define themselves and negotiate their own identity, which is comprised of several components, that is being Jewish, being American, and being a woman. Sifting through their personal experiences, philosophical views, and religious beliefs, contemporary American female writers of Jewish origin struggle to determine which aspect of their being (or perhaps all of them) will be highlighted in their fiction. Thus, the various outcomes of their fictional heroines’ negotiations to find a viable identity, often reflecting the writers’ own struggles and dilemmas, are directly dependent on the level of their immersion in Judaism, and indirectly on their attitudes towards the social movements of the outside world, such as secularism and feminism. Indeed, American feminism in general and Jewish feminist movement in particular have had a profound impact on the lives of ordinary American Jewish women across the denominational lines as well as on the American Jewish female literature, which since the late 1970s has begun to be treated as a separate locus of attention and interest in literary and critical analysis. Similarly to ethnic women’s writing, American Jewish female literature has begun to identify women’s oppression predicated upon not only gender and ethnicity, but also upon religion. Employing a literary lens, American female authors of Jewish origin have begun to discuss openly the marginalization of Jewish women both in the mainstream American culture and in patriarchal Orthodox Judaism where women, because of gender, are also subordinated to Jewish men. In a nutshell, the impact of feminism on women’s writing can be best summarized