In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
Additionally, this choice of narrative texts also illustrates how the American Jewish women’s approach to Judaism was undergoing a transformation between the years 1980 and 2005, laying emphasis on its post-modern, fluid and dynamic nature. Generally, the literary explorations of attitudes toward Judaism in post-modern and largely secularized United States range from indifference or total rejection to its wholehearted pious embrace, with the attempts at its (feminist) reconstruction situated halfway between these two opposing approaches. In her study of the Ultra-Orthodox in the American Jewish imagination, this is how Nora Rubel explains the extent of this transformation:
Some Jews welcomed the freedom from religious obligation, choosing to secularize completely. Others chose to adapt their religious practices to their host culture rather than abandon them completely. And some chose to fiercely resist the seductions of modernity as best they could, resisting secularism and retaining a semblance of Jewish continuity. (2010: 3)
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The literary analyses of the narratives by the above-mentioned American Jewish female authors reveal that essentially the same attitudes towards Judaism are demonstrated by their fictional female protagonists whose negotiations of the intersection between Judaism, secularism and feminism lead to various outcomes in their lives. They include embracing Orthodox Judaism as a patriarchal tradition (Allegra Goodman’s Kaaterskill Falls (1998)); staying within Orthodox Judaism but trying to transform it internally, employing feminist ideals (Pearl Abraham’s The Romance Reader (1995), Tova Mirvis’ The Ladies Auxiliary (1999), and Nessa Rapoport’s Preparing for Sabbath (1981)); living on the border between the sacred and secular worlds and trying to ameliorate the friction inside the world of Orthodox Judaism with the help of feminist ideals from the outside world of secularism (Tova Mirvis’ The Outside World (2004)); returning to Judaism – very often Orthodox Judaism – as ba’alot teshuvah, rejecting the ideals of feminism (Anne Roiphe’s Lovingkindness (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), and Allegra Goodman’s Paradise Park (2001)); and lastly the female protagonists’ partial or total rejection of the Jewish faith and their eager embrace of the secular world through intermarriage (Rebecca Goldstein’s “Rabbinical Eyes” (1993)).
In my study, I put forward a thesis that there is a strong connection between the identity of American Jewish women and Judaism, and the simultaneous need to modify it in the face of socio-political transformations occurring in the American society at the end of the twentieth century, in particular feminist movements, which in the United States were predominantly initiated by American women of Jewish descent. In order to prove that, I concentrate on those works of fiction produced by the third-generation American Jewish female writers that by exploring complex fates of their characters, attempt to reveal what it means to be an American Jewish heroine in post-modern and largely secularized America at the turn of the twenty-first century. Such analysis is, of course, accompanied by references to the works by the first and second generations of American female writers of Jewish origin in Chapter 2, which provide both context and contrast to the future characterizations of the American Jewish heroines. In addition to discussing problems related to spirituality, Jewish identity and religion from the perspective of American Jewish women, and depicted in the socio-cultural context, the secondary aim of Chapter 3 is to take a cursory glance at these works of fiction from the perspective of literary studies, usually revealing rather limited use of experimental or post-modern narrative and stylistic solutions by the American Jewish female writers of the third generation.
This book’s methodological basis lies in feminist literary criticism, and the work itself relies on feminist close reading, to be more specific. This feminist approach to literature is needed because it questions and defies the hegemony of male-centered master narratives of American Jewish identity, which were prevalent in the American Jewish literature until the 1970s. I believe that addressing the issue of American Jewish identity and spirituality from a female perspective will only complement and enrich the research on the construction of post-modern Jewish ←14 | 15→identity in America. By looking at different realizations of femininity and spirituality which permeate the formation of American Jewish female identity at the turn of the twenty-first century, my study demonstrates that female protagonists have finally found a permanent place in the literary imagination of American Jewish writers.
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Chapter 1 Jewish Women in American Society
The year 2020 commemorates the 366th anniversary of Jewish settlement on the North American continent. On American soil, the Jews built a new life and devised new, effective methods of expressing their Jewish heritage and beliefs. Although not completely devoid of anti-Semitism and discrimination, the experience of the Jews in the United States has been regarded as uniquely positive. Successive waves of Jewish immigrants and their descendants, including Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Holocaust survivors, and Soviet Jews have defined the development of the American Jewish community, and the organizations and institutions established in the United States have, in turn, changed the ‘outward appearance’ of Judaism itself. Today, the American Jewish community together with the Jewish community in the modern State of Israel constitute two major centers of world Judaism.
Chapter 1 discusses Jewish immigration to America from the perspective of Jewish women. Moreover, the second part of this chapter is devoted to the presentation and discussion of the vital role of Jewish women in the development of the four branches of American Judaism, that is: Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, its offshoot – Reconstructionist Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism as well as more radical Jewish movements such as Humanistic Judaism and Jewish Renewal. The third part of Chapter 1 attempts to assess the impact of the general feminist movement and Jewish feminism on the American Jewish community, paying special attention to the changes in Jewish women’s lives.
1.1 Jewish Immigration into the United States
There have been four major waves of Jewish immigration, and Jewish women played a vital role in each. Indeed, it was the arrival of women that marks the beginning of Jewish settlement in America. As it is widely recorded, Jews date their presence on the North American continent to September 1654, when twenty-three Jewish settlers, including men, women, and children, arrived in New Amsterdam (present-day New York). They were Sephardim1 of primarily Portuguese origin, ←17 | 18→fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Recife, Brazil. History also records that other Jews had arrived earlier, but unique to the Recife group were the six women among the twenty-three settlers, whose presence meant that families could grow, and communities could be built. The Recife group are considered the first Jews to ever settle down and form a permanent Jewish community in North America (Ben-Ur, 2008: 2). Later generations, while looking back at the past, celebrated these refugees as the “Jewish Pilgrim Fathers.”2
In each immigration group, women came as members of families, as wives and daughters. Quickly they set down family roots and added stability to the developing Jewish communities. However, a large majority of them also came as single women, pioneering spirits who had to face the dual challenges of being uprooted from their homes in the old country and adapting to a new culture and language in the New World (Greenberg, 2006: 554).
Pretty quickly, the first Sephardic Jews in New Amsterdam were granted by Governor Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch administrator of the colony of New Netherland, the right to settle down and trade openly throughout the colony as well as they won the right to worship in the privacy of their homes (Sarna, 2004: 2–3). Although they did not call themselves Orthodox – the term ‘Orthodoxy’ did not enter the lexicon until the mid-nineteenth century, in response to the rise of European Reform Judaism – their religious behavior and manners of worship were governed by the same principles of Rabbinic Judaism that later was designated ‘Orthodox Judaism.’
Up until 1720, the Jews in the New World were predominantly descendants of Iberian Jews, and even when some Ashkenazim3 arrived they adopted the ←18 | 19→Sephardic rites and rituals. The synagogue-community