[This Wednesday,
my summer
hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicks
off (we’ll be starting with a discussion of Sui
Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!).
So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a
weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]
On the many distinctions
and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.
One evening about five years ago,
my younger son taught me more about the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a
couple-minute, mostly understandable and criminally cute narrative based on
stories they learned in their Jewish
Community Center preschool, than I had learned in my prior thirty-plus years
of life. There are various ironies of my personal and familial identity
illustrated by that anecdote, including the reason for all eight of my maternal
great-grandparents’ immigrations to America (to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in
late 19th century Eastern Europe), the complicated religious and
cultural continuities and changes across my maternal grandparents’ lives and
then especially my Mom’s, my own relationship to this Jewish American heritage,
and, most ironically and yet most tellingly of 21st century America,
the simple fact that my sons, who are a quarter Jewish American and a quarter
English-German American and half Chinese American, have (as attendees of that
JCC preschool for a few years) already learned and engaged with and performed
more of Jewish culture and story in their first decades of life than I ever
have and likely ever will.
While all of that is, of course,
first and foremost about myself and my multi-generational American family and
identity, past, present, and future, it can also connect to an interesting pair
of youthful literary characters—one real and autobiographical, one invented and
fictional, but both Jewish American children whose lives and voices have a
great deal to tell us about family, faith, and our national identities and
stories—created by talented women writers in the early 20th century.
Young Mary Antin
is the protagonist of Antin’s cultural autobiography, The
Promised Land (1912), a book that takes its readers from the Pale of a
Russian village to a nearly unequivocal celebration of the American Dream as
this particular family and narrator find and live it; young Sara Smolinsky is
the narrator and heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s
realistic and modernist novel Bread
Givers (1925), a work which begins with its ten year old narrator and
her family already in New York and chronicles especially the cross-generational
struggle between Sara and her domineering scholarly father Reb. Like their
works and tones, the two writers seem in many ways fully distinct: Yezierska
published half
a dozen novels and multiple collections of short stories in a long and
successful literary career that led her to Hollywood and a romantic relationship
with John Dewey; Antin’s few published works, including the autobiography
and one other book, They Who
Knock at Our Gates (1914), a political argument for tolerant
immigration policies, appeared within a few years of each other, after which
she traveled for a few more years giving speeches about immigration before
largely disappearing from the public eye.
They are indeed two very
different Jewish American women and authors, and these books, like their
others, certainly deserve to be read and analyzed on their own terms. Yet one
very interesting and telling similarity lies in the emphasis that both authors
and texts place on the wisdom and awareness possessed by their very young
protagonists. (A feature shared by another, slightly later Jewish American
novel, Henry
Roth’s Call it Sleep [1934].) These
young women are, of course, being created by older authors, and yet I would
argue that neither the thirty-something Antin nor the forty-something Yezierska
implies that young Mary’s or Sara’s perception and prescience are creations of
their older selves. Instead, it is precisely these protagonists’ youth, and
concurrent their explicitly hybrid Jewish American identities, when contrasted
with the older voices and more static identities illustrated by both their more
Old World-centered family members and their initial encounters with native
Americans, that seems to give Mary and Sara their unique and impression
perspectives, their visions (whether, again, more positively or negatively) of
the communities (familial, spiritual, cultural, and national) in which they are
growing up. A compelling lesson for all Americans, and one more reason to read
these unique works by two hugely talented women writers.
Next writer tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise) you’d
highlight?
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