In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
emergence of a second wave of feminism in the late 1960s justifies the analysis of women’s literature as a separate category, not because of automatic and unambiguous differences between the writings of women and men, but because of the recent cultural phenomenon of women’s explicit self-identification as an oppressed group, ←10 | 11→which is in turn articulated in literary texts in the exploration of gender-specific concerns centered around the problem of female identity. (1989: 1)
My book consists of three chapters, the first two of which constitute a theoretical framework for the empirical considerations included in Chapter 3. I begin Chapter 1 with a historical introduction to the subject of Jewish emigration to America, discussing it in a diachronic manner, that is from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Special attention is paid to the emigration of Jewish women from Central and Eastern Europe to America as well as the dilemmas encountered by the immigrant Jewish women in the New World, such as the preservation or rejection of the Old-World culture, tradition and religion, and conversely, the enthusiastic embrace of, or bitter hostility to the mores of the new culture. Apart from discussing the problems of assimilation and acculturation as experienced by the Jewish immigrant women, I also examine the situation of women in the particular branches of contemporary American Judaism, that is Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox and Jewish Renewal movements in this chapter. I focus mainly on the role that Jewish women have played in the development of these denominations in the United States as well as on their evolving position in the particular varieties of Judaism in the twentieth century. At this point I want to emphasize that my primary interest, however, lies in the area of Orthodox Judaism because the majority of the female protagonists from the narratives selected for a literary analysis in Chapter 3 hail precisely from this conservative branch of American Judaism. This chapter ends with a discussion of the influence of feminism on the current status of women in Judaism, which was criticized by Jewish feminists in the 1970s. The socio-historical-cultural background presented in Chapter 1 constitutes the starting point for the review of the American Jewish female literature, which is presented in the next chapter.
Divided into three sections, Chapter 2 provides an overview of the chronological and thematic developments in American Jewish women’s writing in the United States in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, however, I attempt to define American Jewish literature referring to various approaches offered by such American Jewish scholars as, for example, Tresa Grauer, Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. The analysis of all those various approaches, however, indicates that the definition of American Jewish literature seems to be rather vague and equally difficult to arrive at as the definition of American Jewish identity, which is in Stuart Hall’s words, “never finished or completed, but keeps on moving to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings […]” (1990: 229). Then I move on to the presentation and discussion of the three generations of American Jewish female writers who differ greatly in their attitudes towards the role of Judaism in their lives, their Jewish identity, and assimilation into the mainstream American culture. The immigrant Jewish women writers of the first generation, such as Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska focused in their fiction mainly on the Jewish immigrant experience in the early twentieth century America, whereas American-born Jewish writers of the first ←11 | 12→generation, for example, Gertrude Stein, Edna Ferber, and Fannie Hurst tended to avoid overtly Jewish themes and direct focus on Judaism. These acculturated Jewish female writers (as well as their fictional heroines) along with such Jewish female writers of the second generation as, for example Hortense Calisher, Tillie Olsen or Grace Paley, perceived their ethnicity, their Jewishness, to a greater or lesser extent, as a narrowing and limiting experience, as an obstacle to their full Americanization. This assimilationist point of view, as Werner Sollors explains, was typical of all ethnic Americans prior to the 1960s (1986: 20). Apart from the theme of acculturation to the American mainstream, the literature produced by other female representatives of the second generation, for example Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, E. M. Broner, Erica Jong, Tova Reich, and Anne Roiphe, also discusses the Holocaust and early feminist issues. Finally, the literature produced by the representatives of the third-generation American Jewish female authors marks a clear departure from the themes and literary preoccupations of the previous two generations of writers. The younger female writers of the third generation, for example Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, Allegra Goodman, Tova Mirvis, Dara Horn, Myla Goldberg together with their male counterparts including Melvin Jules Bukiet, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Rosen, belong to the ‘new wave’ of Jewish writing who have contributed, according to numerous literary critics, to a renaissance in American Jewish literature in the closing decades of the twentieth century. This new fiction is marked by what critic Morris Dickstein calls “the return, or the homecoming” of American Jewish writers to the ethnic origins of their ancestors (“Never Goodbye, Columbus,” 2001: 30), which is in fact grounded in Marcus Lee Hansen’s Law of “third-generation interest or return” (see Chapter 2, Section 2.1). A variety of striking themes comes to the fore in this new wave of American Jewish literary creativity. Dominant subjects include an unprecedented attention to religion (especially Orthodox Jewish life); a persistent search for Jewish roots, identity and spirituality; an exploration of such themes as Jewish history and heritage; and a fascination with Jewish women’s lives and with questions of gender. Chapter 2 ends with a brief presentation and discussion of the profiles and major works of the selected American Jewish women writers representing the youngest generation, who have already succeeded in achieving both a relatively secure position in American literature and immense popularity among the readers.
Chapter 3 is devoted to a critical comprehensive analysis of selected fiction by contemporary American Jewish women writers, representatives of the third generation, namely Anne Roiphe, Nessa Rapoport, Rebecca Goldstein, Pearl Abraham, Allegra Goodman and Tova Mirvis. It is this group of the younger American Jewish female writers and their works published between 1980 and 2005 that are of particular interest in my book. Apart from Roiphe – who, although born in 1935, is regarded as a representative of the third generation (see Chapter 2, Section 2.2.3) – all of the female writers, whose works are discussed in Chapter 3, were born between 1950 and 1980, and are thus the ‘rightful’ representatives of the third generation of American female writers of Jewish origin. Another characteristic ←12 | 13→feature of the above-mentioned Jewish women writers (except for Roiphe) is the fact that they were born and raised in Orthodox families, and continue to adhere, to a greater or lesser extent, to the principles of Orthodox Judaism.
My selection of contemporary narratives of American Jewish female imagination for a literary analysis is based on the following works of fiction: Nessa Rapoport’s Preparing for Sabbath (1981), Anne Roiphe’s Lovingkindness (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s “Rabbinical Eyes” (1993), Pearl Abraham’s The Romance Reader (1995), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Tova Mirvis’ The Ladies Auxiliary (1999), Allegra Goodman’s Paradise Park (2001), and Tova Mirvis’ The Outside World (2004). On the whole, the fiction produced by the third-generation American Jewish female writers can be described as realistic, non-experimental fiction which largely sets itself the goal of sociological analysis (a mirror) of the Jewish community in the United States, narrowed down to the role of women. In fact, contemporary fictional narratives have been employed successfully by numerous American Jewish sociologists, including Marshall Sklare (1964), Sylvia Barack Fishman (1992, 1995, 2000) and Nora Rubel (2010), as a way of unearthing and analyzing a variety of cultural changes occurring in the American (Jewish) community in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Fishman and Rubel, in particular, have used literary fiction and cinematic motifs in order to shed light upon the problematic position of women in (Orthodox) Judaism as well as to discuss the impact of feminism, intermarriage and education on the whole American Jewish community. In general, then, it may be claimed that American Jewish literature functions in one way like a lens, that not only reflects, but also comments on contemporary cultural life in the United States, and clarifies the sense of identity, wishes, desires and fears of its individuals.
The selection of texts for this study is directly connected to the issue of religiosity in the context of American Jewish literature and highlights the importance