In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
in Reform synagogues, they hoped to bring the men back to services, which to a certain extent turned out to be a successful move (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 123–125; Diner, 1998: 506–507).
The period of the German Jewish immigration brought approximately 200,000 Jews to the United States from Central and Eastern Europe. Women accounted for half of the immigrants, and as Diner accurately describes, they played a vital role, “[…] in the functioning of a family economy that allowed for steady and modest economic mobility, for the formation of communities from the ground up, which in turn provided services for the needy and for the emergence of a modern, American Judaism” (1998: 507). Moreover, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the position of American Jewish women had evolved from being “the domestic helpmeet[s]; of the main religious actors,” that is Jewish men, into “the true guardians of Jewishness” in both home and the community, to borrow Diner and Benderly’s expressions (2002: 126).
The major immigration wave of Jews began in the later part of the nineteenth century. From 1880 until 1924, when the American government imposed a restrictive quota system, more than 2 million impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived, fleeing anti-Semitic persecution, discrimination, and poverty in their countries of origin. 44 percent of all Jewish immigrants to the United States were women, a figure far greater than for other immigrant groups arriving during the peak of mass immigration (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 346).
It was the established German Jews4 in the United States who were affected badly by the arrival of the new group of mostly Orthodox Jews. The Eastern European Jews, the majority of whom came from the Pale of Settlement,5 did not fit the modern, sophisticated profile that the ‘German Jews’ had worked for decades to ←22 | 23→achieve in the American milieu. They were traditional in religious practice, Yiddish-speaking, little educated in modern ways, and destitute.6 Their intention was to settle down in America, make new lives as Americans, and raise American families. Their gradual acculturation in America took a heavy toll on their traditional way of life, which is clearly demonstrated by the fact that a substantial number of both Orthodox men and women quickly abandoned the religious restrictions with which they had grown up. Yet, those who remained Orthodox, were deeply committed to their way of life, and this commitment reflected itself in their work for their families and communities in which they lived. The highest piety and social prestige for any Orthodox Jewish man was to devote himself to religious learning in the house of study. A Jewish woman, on the other hand, expressed her piety not by participating in the scholarly discourse or synagogue worship, but through the sacred work of making and running a Jewish home, thus making the life of her scholarly husband possible and bearable. In many cases, however, that sacred woman’s work included earning some or all of the money to support her scholarly husband and her family (c.f. Greenberg, 2006: 555; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 137–142, 176). In practical reality, as Diner and Benderly remark, “the breadwinning mother, responsible not only for the household’s daily functioning but often also for its finances, frequently dominated family decision-making” (2002: 143). This model of the Jewish family, in which the wife takes the role of the family’s breadwinner, whereas the husband studies, still prevails even nowadays in the stricter Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish communities, particularly among the Hasidim (Jacobs, 1995: 593).
Immigrant Jews, both female and male, arrived in America with considerable experience of urban life in a capitalist economy. Unlike many other migrants to America, they had not been peasants in the old country. In the Pale of Settlement as a whole, Jews constituted 38 percent of those living in cities or towns (Hyman, “Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 346). On arriving in the United States, Eastern European Jews settled primarily in the cities in the eastern part of the country. Crowding into ethnic enclaves, such as New York’s Lower East Side, Boston’s North End, Philadelphia’s downtown, and Chicago’s West Side – to name a few of the better known of these densely populated ghettos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Eastern European Jews lived side by side with German Jews, in Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), creating congestion and drawing the attention of non-Jews (cf. Nadel, 2008: 29; Goren, 1980: 581). Many Jewish immigrants worked in the thriving garment industry or in shops which were often owned by descendants of an earlier immigrant wave ←23 | 24→of Central European Jews. On the whole, immigrant Jewish males usually entered the American economy as skilled workers and peddlers, whereas the majority of newcomers from other European immigrant groups began their working lives as unskilled laborers during the peak of mass immigration to America.
The relationship between the prosperous German Jews and the newly arrived penniless Easterners was full of tension. Fearing that the Easterners’ distinctive appearance would provoke anti-Semitism, the high-status German-Jewish community established extensive social service organizations and sponsored a number of settlement projects such as the Jewish Alliance of America, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the Galveston Plan, and the Industrial Removal Office, in order to disperse the Eastern Europeans into rural settlements and to make improvements to their condition (cf. Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538; Nadel, 2008: 34, Sorin, 2008: 40–41). Jewish philanthropic associations also spent a lot of money from their budgets on assisting the families of deserted wives, and the families of widows.
Apart from that, German-Jewish leaders, who were themselves mostly Reform, funded the revitalization of the Jewish Theological Seminary to reinforce Conservative Judaism with a view to providing a more traditional synagogue where the new immigrants would feel more comfortable than they did in the established, more liberal Reform congregations (Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538). Indeed, many Eastern European Jewish immigrants did their best to preserve as much of the old piety they knew from the Old World as the new circumstances in the New World would allow. Although many private, ritual practices and old customs, such as wearing tefillin (phylacteries) and tallit (prayer shawls) by Jewish men for daily prayers, or wearing sheitels (wigs) and attending mikveh (the ritual bath) regularly by married Jewish women, were abandoned, there are examples of some more visible public observances which endured. The great majority of immigrant balebustes (Jewish housewives), for example, carefully maintained kashrut and made elaborate preparations for the holidays such as Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover throughout the Jewish calendar year. In the great majority of Eastern European immigrant households in America, the traditional Sabbath continued to be observed with the candles being lit and a festive dinner being served for all the family members on a Friday night. Despite the above-mentioned examples of the maintenance of traditional piety and Sabbath observance, the statistics indicate that by 1906, fewer than 10 percent of East Europeans remained strictly Orthodox, in the sense of adhering to the many rules, requirements, and restrictions of their faith. Under the glare of Americanization, Sabbath observance declined, so did synagogue attendance, membership, and Torah study within the group of Orthodox Jews (Diner and Benderly, 2002: 228–229).
The position of women in immigrant Jewish society in America was influenced by two groups of factors, namely cultural and economic ones. Both the Ashkenazi Jewish culture brought from the Old World, and the American culture encountered in the United States as well as the economic realities of urban capitalistic America had a great impact on the position of Jewish women in the late nineteenth ←24 | 25→and early twentieth centuries. Once settled in America, Jewish women worked together with men to support their families because they could not survive on the husbands’ wages alone. Their work patterns depended on their domestic obligations. Married women had full responsibility for managing the household, and the obligations of mothers were particularly heavy. As Paula Hyman notices, “[i];ndeed, women and men alike assumed that wives would quickly develop skill in stretching their husband’s wages; their role as baleboostebs [efficient housewives] – shopping, cooking, and cleaning – complemented their husbands’ role as breadwinners” (“Eastern European Immigration,” 1998: 348). Many autobiographies, works written by the children of immigrant women as well as fictional texts praise not only the Jewish mothers’ self-sacrifice and their ability to deal successfully with economic hardships but they also emphasize the central role that the Jewish mothers played in the emotional life of families.7
Apart from the involvement in the household responsibilities, many married Jewish women and most adolescent girls worked outside the home, especially in the garment industries, in order to contribute