[On
June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming
the first
Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories
of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special
weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]
On the many
distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.
One evening about eight 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 Jewish American writers.
Next journey
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?
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