[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the many
distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.
One evening about a decade 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 early years) already learned and engaged with and
performed more of Jewish culture and story in their first couple 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 Modernist 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 Modernist
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 Modernist writers.
Next Modernists
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for
the weekend post?
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