The Making and Remaking

The Making and Re-making of Jewish-American Literary History
Author(s)： Wendy Zierler

Source: Shofar, Winter 2009, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 69-101
Published by： Purdue University Press
Stable URL： https://www.jstor.org/stable/42944448
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The Making and Re making of Literary History ♦ 69
The Making and Re-making of Jewish-

American Literary History
Wendy Zierler
Hebrew Union College
Until ten to fifteen years ago, Jewish American literary history was construed and
described in overwhelmingly mid-twentieth-century masculine terms. As a corrective to
this longstanding trend, this essay undertakes to Mremake° Jewish American literary
history in feminist terms. First, in an act of 隹 minist "readerly resistance/ it surveys recent
efforts to remake the canon to include women writers and to reflect the experiences of
women readers. Then it applies a variety of second-and third-wave feminist interpretive
methodologies to readings of both classic and lesser-known works of Jewish American
literature, including Henry Roths Call it Sleep, Philip Roths The Ghost Writer, Emma
Lazarus'"The New Colossus/ Anzia Yezierskas MThe Lost Beautifulness,° Cynthia
Ozick's"Putter- messer and Xanthippe/ Jo Sinclairs, The Changelings, and Dara Horns In
The Image.
I. Resistant Readings: Tradition and Male Talent

“To read the canon of what is currently considered American literature is perforce to
identify as male," writes Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader, one of the now-
classic feminist studies of American literature. Writing at a time when literary critics
had only begun to question the composition of the American literary canon, Fetterley
argued that the female reader of American literature, from Washington Irving to
Norman Mailer, was * co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is
explicitly excluded?1 Despite
ijudith Fetterley; The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. xii. Fetterleys critique of misogyny and male-
centeredness in American literature owes a great deal to two pioneering works of criticism, Mary
Ellmans Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Milletts Sexual Politics (1969).
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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70 ♦ Wendy Zierler
the frequent appearance in the works of such mainstream American writers as

Hemingway; Fitzgerald, and Mailer of the Castrating bitch" stereotype, °the
cultural reality" in American literature was * not the emasculation of men by
women but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and
scholars, women have been taught to think as men, to identify with a male point
of view, and accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values/ 2
Until ten or fifteen years ago, the same might have been said about Jew- ish-
American literature* American Jewish literary history begins well before the
twentieth century and includes a number of important women poets and prose
writers. And yet, until relatively recently; Jewish American literature was
construed and described in overwhelmingly mid-twentieth century male terms,
referring to a select group of post-Wbrld War II male writers who managed to
"break through0 (a term taken from the title of Irving Malin and Irwin Starks 1964
anthology3) into the larger American literary scene: Saul Bellow; Bernard
Malamud, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer, and Philip
Roth,4 Others, with a broader historical perspective, looked further back to the
Eastern European immigrant generation, to the work of journalist and novelist
Abraham Cahan or to the stunning modernist achievement of Henry Roths Call it
Sleep (1934), but often omitted any discussion of their Jewish female
predecessors or contemporaries. This is not to say that critics specializing in
American Jewish literature omitted all mention of women writers. Like Judith
Fetterley; however, who refers to certain exceptions to the generalization of
American literary maleness—"a Dickinson poem, a Wharton
'Fetterley; The Resisting Reader, p. xx.

'Irving Malin and Irwin Stark, eds., Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-
Jewish Literature (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
4
For example, in Ihab Hassans Contemporary American Literature 1945-1972: An
Introduction (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973) the only Jewish writers featured are Saul
Bellow; Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, and Arthur Miller. For a more recent
example, in Outline of American Literature, a pamphlet issued by the United States Information
Agency in 1994, the Jewish authors represented (with the exception of a brief reference to
Adrienne Rich) are all male, namely; Saul Bellow; Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. In an effort to present a less traditional image of
the American literary canon, the front cover of this small book features pictures of such
mainstream canonical books as The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass, alongside more ethnic
contribution—Saul Bellows Humboldts Gift, and Amy Tans The Joy Luck Club. Jewish women
writers, however, are included neither in this photographic sampling nor in the actual critical
discussion.
Shofar . An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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novel"'—female readers of Jewish American literature most often saw confirmation of
the rule rather than its exception.
Jewish American literary male-centeredness assumed several forms* In the most
well-known cases—Philip Roths Portnoy*s Complaint or Herman Wbuks Marjorie
Morningstar—it found form in misogynist stereotypes of the Jewish Mother and the
Jewish American Princess. In other cases, such as in Saul Bellows Dangling Man and
Herzog, male-centeredness assumed the guise of a male protagonist whose intellectual
explorations were carried out in opposition to and in isolation from a host of mindless
female characters, there for little else but to satisfy the protagonists sexual appetite, or,
as in the case of Moses Herzogs intellectually accomplished adulterous ex-wife
Madeleine, to serve as catalyst for Moses heroic journey of thought. In terms of
critical practices, this male-centeredness figured in the tendency of male anthologists
to under-represent women writers in collections of American Jewish literature or
criticism and, by extension, to generalize about the nature of Jewish American
literature based on exclusively male paradigms found in works written by male writers
like Bellow, Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth. According to this androcentric reading,
Jewish American literature was primarily a literature about the Jewish man of the city
as an everyman of modernity; an intellectual urban schlemiel inhabiting a modern
existence of alienation and marginality; set against a backdrop of ever-fading
immigrant Jewish cultural scenery.20 21 Irving Howes 1977 anthology; Jewish
American Stories,22 as well as his oft-cited critical introduction, exemplified this kind
of male-centered critical bias; the anthology included twenty-five stories, only four of
which were written by women. Later critical studies like Mark Schechners After the
Revolution: Studies in Contemporary Jewish Imagination (1987) and Sanford Pinskers
Jewish American Fiction, 1917-1987 (1992) demonstrated a similarly abiding
masculine focus: Schechners study included no female writers, while Pinsker included
only one chapter on a women writer, namely Cynthia
Ozick. Sam Girgus The New Covenant (1984), a study of Jewish American
literary engagements with the American Idea, is somewhat exceptional in its
treatment (albeit in varying detail) of works by three women writers: Mary Antin,
Johanna Kaplan, and Anzia Yezierska* Even so, Girgus willingness to describe
the Jewish American novelist as a marginal man "who seeks to unite himself with
America as metaphorically represented by the shik$e，8—the gentile woman——is
but one example of the way in which male experience (to the exclusion of Jewish
female experience) became normative in the critical writing on Jewish American
20'Fetterley; The Resisting Reader, p. xii.

21For versions of this reading of American Jewish literature see for example the essays in Irving
Malin, ed., Contemporary Americanjewish Literature: Critical Essays (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1973); Allen Gutrman,"Mr. Bellows America/ in The Jewish Writer in America:
Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and the sections in
Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) on
American Jewish literature..
22Irving Howe, ed., Jewish American Stories (New York: New American Library; 1977).
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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experience as a whole. Even Andrew Furmans Contemporary Jewish American
Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (2000), a work of criticism that argued for
the ongoing relevance of Jewish American literature to the enterprise of academic
multiculturalism and ethnic studies and which demonstrated far greater
receptiveness to womens writing than any of the previously cited volumes, skews
in a masculine direction, devoting seven chapters to male and only two to female
writers*
According to Fetterley; faced with this kind of male-centered tradition, “the
first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an
assenting reader, and by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising
the male mind that has been implanted in us7 9 Attempts at*exorcising* the Jewish
American "male mind" have been undertaken in publications such as Lilith, in
anthologies of Jewish American womens writing such as Julia Wolf Mazows The
Woman Who Lost Her Names, Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/ Kantrowitzs The
Tribe of Dina, Joyce Antlers America and I, and in such critical works as Diane
Lichtensteins Writing Their Nations, Ann R. Shapiros Jew- ish-American Women
Writers: A Bio -Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, Janet Handler Bursteins
Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters, S. Lilian Kremers Womens Holocaust
Writing: Memory and Imagination (1999), and more recently Lois E. Rubins
Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American
Womens Writing (2006), In all of these woman-centered publications, a strong
case has been mounted for the presence and importance of Jewish womens writing
in America, and for the existence of other, nonmasculine creative and critical
points of view. Sylvia Barack Fishmans Follow tny Footprints: Changing Images
of Women in American Jewish Fiction looked at images of women in modern
Jewish writing by men and women as a means of
Sam Girgus, The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (Chapel Hill and
8
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) p. 19.

‘Fetterley The Resisting Reader, p. xxii.

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies discovering
developments in the lives of Jewish women in America, as well as "changing values
in American society as a whole/23 24 led SolotarofF and Nessa Rapoports Writing Our
Way Home: Contemporary Stories (1992) served as an important counter-statement to
Irving Howes 1977 anthology insofar as women writers constitute a "small majority 0
in the collection of stories by Jewish men and women?1 The Norton Anthology of
Jewish American Literature (2001)," which included womens voices in all its
historical sections, even the Colonial Period, effectively re-visioned the very notion of
the American Jewish canon. Paul Zakrzewskis 2003 anthology; Lost Tribe: Jewish
Fiction from the Edge, half of the stories in which are by Jewish women authors, has
also helped re-constitute American Jewish literature as something other than a male-
only congregation* In writing this essay; which applies a variety of second- and third-
wave feminist interpretive methodologies to the readings of both classic and lesser-
known works of Jewish American literature, I join this process of re-making Jewish
American literary tradition, an ongoing mission of Jewish feminist°readerly
resistance?
A writer or a critic need not be a blatant misogynist to pirovoke female
M
readerly resistance/ Building on Fetterleys argument, Patrocinio P. Schweick- art
argues that that in many cases, the androcentricism of a text "is a sufficient
condition for the process of immasculation... ・ For the male reader, the text
serves as a meeting ground of the personal and the universal Whether or not the
texts approximate the particularities of his own experience, he is invited to
23Sylvia Barack Fishman, “The Faces of Women: An Introductory Essay/ in Sylvia Barack
Fishman, ed” Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction
(Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1992), p. 2.
24In 1977, Irving Howe argued in the introduction to his anthology that American Jewish
fiction had "probably moved past its high point," insofar as the Jewish community had gone beyond
the immigrant experience, having become fully acculturated and assimilated into American life. Today
critics and editors such as SolotarofF and Rapoport reject that argument, contending that in recent
years Jewish American literature has been revitalized, building upon but also moving beyond the
themes of immigration, assimilation, and alienation to re-engage traditional and sacred Jewish sources,
themes, and issues, as well as to confront the issues surrounding the Holocaust and the State of Israel.
(See also Alvin Rosenfeld, °The Progress of the American Jewish Novel/ Response, Vol. 7 [1973]:
115130; S. Lillian Kremer,M Post-alienation: Recent Directions in Jewish-American Literature/
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No 3 [Fall 1993]; and Andrew Furman, Israel Through the
American Literary Imagination [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997].) At the forefront
of this process of revitalization are a group of women writers, including Cynthia Ozick, formerly
secular feminist activist writers such as Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Roiphe, who
over the past decade have been re-examining their Jewish heritage, as well as others such as Allegra
Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, and Nessa Rapoport, who, as Ted SolotarofF notes, , are anchored in
the present-day observant Jewish community and who are drawn to the intense and growing dialogue
between Jewish and modernity under the impact of feminism, the sexual revolution and the Holocaust/
See Ted SolotarofE HMarginality Revisited/ in Richard Siegel and Tamar Sofer, eds., The Writer in
the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1993), p. 64.
Louies Chametsky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, Kathryn Hellerstein, eds,, Jewish
American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: W W Norton, 2001).
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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validate the equation of maleness with humanity 1*13 In contrast, the female reader
is taught to identify against herself inviting "隹 male complicity in the elevation of
male difference into universality^ and accordingly; the denigration of female
difference into otherness without reciprocity 014
Allow me to provide two Jewish American illustrations of this phenomenon,
The first is perhaps an unlikely source, Henry Roths Call It Sleep, a novel which
did not achieve a ** breakthrough0 on the American literary scene until it was
reprinted in paperback edition in 1964, but which Alfred Kazin has called °the
most profound novel of Jewish life I have ever read by an American? 151 speak of
Call It Sleep as an unlikely example because in many ways, it stands in opposition
to works like Portnoys Complaint or Marjorie Morningstar, Henry Roths novel
does not present in the figure of Genya SchearL the protagonists mother, a flatly
misogynist stereotype of the castrating, overbearing, smothering Jewish Mother,
In a critical survey of the Jewish mother type in American Jewish fiction, critic
Melvin Friedman looks back almost nostalgically to Call It Sleep, describing
Genya Schearl from Roths novel as "the most appealing of this type of Jewish
mother.... She is a true figure of the Diaspora, with a built-in sense of suffering
and survival* Her devotion to her son David is one of the most compelling
relationships expressed anywhere in the history of the novel.” 16 From Friedmans
reading, of course, Genya Schearl emerges not so much as an individual, but as a
more positive version of an entrenched stereotype, Even so, one cannot deny the
power and beauty of David and Genyas relationship—Sylvia Barack Fishman
dubs Genya a Mheroine to her needy
l3
Patrocinio P. Schweickart/* Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Read- ingf
in Elaine Showalter, ed., Speaking cf Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 26-7.
l4
Schweikart,M Reading Ourselves/ p. 27.
15
Alfred Kazin, M
Introduction/ in Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Noonday Press,
1991), p. ix.
l6
Melvin J. Friedman, "Jewish Mothers and Sons: The Expense of Chutzpah," in Malin, ed.,
Contemporary Americanjewish Literature: Critical Essays, pp. 157-158.
Shofar ■ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies son" i7—and the

poetic mamaloshen of their conversations^ The androcentrism of Call It Sleep inheres,
then, not in the portrayal of Genya but in Roths portrait of David Schearl: the young
immigrant Jewish American artist, whose development requires him to disentangle
himself from his profound Oedipal attachments to his mother and whose sense of
power and inspiration is often elaborated through a scheme of blatantly phallic sexual
images.
It has been a commonplace among readers of Call It Sleep to speak of Roths
indebtedness to James Joyce/8 and in this discussion, the analogy to Joyces Portrait cf
the Artist is especially pertinent. As in Joyces novel, where readers are invited to
experience and identify with the alleged universality of Stephen Daedalus male sexual
and artistic awakenings, the reader of Roths novel is asked to identify with Davids

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distinctly masculine Oedipal fear and awe of his father muscular body and virility and
to accept his fascination with and conflation of all forms of male power, whether they
be physical, sexual, prophetic, or divine. Roths description of the Statue of Liberty at
the beginning of the novel as a castrated female presence, “charred with shadow her
depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane," brandishing what looks in
the ^flawless light* like * the blackened hilt of a broken sword/ 25 26 27 suggests quite
clearly that Davids story of initiation will involve an awakening of a more vital,
masculine form of sexuality;
Accordingly; phallic images of swords and rods and images of male sexual
release figured as light, power, even transcendence, abound in the novel. One
important instance of this nexus of power, light, and phallic sexuality occurs when
David is first brought by a band of street kinds to the rail tracks and forced to dip a
zinc sword into the tracks:
The point of the sheet-zinc sword wavered before him, clicked on the stone as he
ftimbled, then finding the slot at last, rasped part way down the wide grinning lips like a
tongue in an iron mouth. He stepped back. From open fingers, the blade plunged into
darkness.
Power!
Like a paw ripping through all the stable fibres of the earth, power, gigantic,
fetterless, thudded into day! And light, unleashed, terrific light bellowed out of iron lips.
The street quaked and roared, and like a tortured thing, the sheet zinc sword, leapt
writhing, fell back, consumed with radiance.28
Inasmuch as power, light, and transcendence are allied here with a rather violent
version of male sexuality and orgasm—with Davids sword wavering before him,
plunging into the dark lips of the rail tracks, “ripping through the stable fibers* of
the (female/mother) earth, ending with the consummation of "radiance"—this
passage is necessarily experienced differently by a female reader who does nor
have the male sexual equipment and, most likely; the phallic imagination of the
author. If spiritual or artistic epiphany is figured universally here in terms of a
male penetration of the femininely figured 4 slot* or "wide grinning lips* of the
earth, the result is a reinforcement of the longstanding opposition between male
activity or creativity and female passivity or procreativity;
At the climactic end of the novel, Roth adds a prophetic basis to this phallic
imagery. When Davids father accuses him of being the son of a gentile organist
with whom Genya once had an affair in the Old Country; David, who believes
that the purifying coal—a prophetic image from Isaiah that he has learned about
in heder—is located in the car tracks, rushes madly back to the railway track to
experience its transcendent power again and completely; Dipping a milk ladle
into the rail, like a4 sword in a scabbard” (as Lynn Altebrand notes, the word
25"Barack Fishman, “The Faces of Women/ p. 26.

26See for example, Kazin," Introduction/ pp. xiii-xiv.
27Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York, Noonday Press, 1991), p. 14.
28Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 253.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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scabbard is the Latin word for vagina 21)/ David once again experiences a surge of
shocking electric power that eventually knocks him temporarily unconscious.
This climax and Davids eventual reawakening have been interpreted in various
ways, as a Christ-like messianic redemption,22 as the culmination of a story of
artistic awakening23 or the birth of a new American consciousness?4 Common to
all of these interpretations, however, is their pervasive male-centeredness» As
David throws the ladle onto the tracks, Roth records, in true Joycean style, a
stream of conversations which occur in the symbolic American background—a
multiethnic, multilingual, panoply of voices and references^ Among these voices
is yet another reference to the female figure of the Statue of Liberty this time not
as a threatening, shadowed, hardened statue, but as a symbol of a pliant, quiescent
feminized America, a “kindly faced American woman," waiting to be entered and
possessed: *And do you know you can go all the way up her for twenty five
cents, mind you! Every
2l
Lynn Akebrand/An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roths Call It Sleep ； ' Modern
Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 1989): 678.
22
Altebrand/An American Messiah；' pp. 673-687.
23
Kazin, ° Introduction/ p. xx.
24
Sam Girgus, The New Covenant, p. 96.
Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies man, woman and

child ought to go up inside her, its a thrilling experience!**29 The Statue of Liberty
may be open for entry to the general public, but this particular passage about the
statue, occurring alongside Davids sexualized experience of electric shock, invites
masculine entry or penetration, in particular.
My second example of Jewish American literary androcentrism, taken from
Philip Roths The Ghost Writer (1979), the first novel of his Zuckerman trilogy,
concerns the fictional representation of Jewish literary history as a legacy passed
down from father to son. In this short novel, the talented young writer, Nathan
Zuckerman (modeled, perhaps, on the younger Philip Roth, in the days immediately
following the publication of Goodbye, Columbus), who has become estranged form
his own father as a result of his determination to write irreverent stories about Jews
(including members of his own family), makes a literary pilgrimage to the Berkshires
to meet his self-appointed Jew* ish literary father, E. I. LonofE During an evening
spent sipping cognac with the married but inveterate loner LonofE Nathan offers his
thumbnail sketch of modern Jewish literary history—a male literary family tree with
Isaac Babel and Kafka at the base, and Lonoff (a fictional version of Bernard
Malamud) and Abravanel (a version of Norman Mailer) serving as the various
branches. “Ybu havent finished/ LonofFcomments. *Arent you a New World cousin
in the Babel clan too? What is Zuckerman in all of this?° 30 The literary conversation
29Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 415.
30Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 49.

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gives way to a sharing not just of literary history but also sexual fantasies, with Lonoff
musing about his desire to run off to Italy with a woman other than his long-suffering
wife, Hope, an idea which is reduced later in the conversation to a more vulgar quest
for a "piece of ass?31 This interlude of shared male sexual fantasy is no mere
digression from the central issue of the novel: at the heart of this taut, elegant, and
serious novel about the responsibility of the Jewish writer after the Holocaust is the
added question of the place of rhe woman and the woman writer in the world of male
literary creativity; Allusions to James, Tolstoy; Kafka, and Joyce notwithstanding, the
literary ghost that haunts this novel (as indicated by the title), both literally and
figuratively; is that of a dead female writer, the Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. In an
effort to convince Nathan to write and publish different kinds of stories about Jews,
Judge Leopold Wapter, an esteemed acquaintance of the Zuckerman family; had
urged Nathan to go see the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne
Frank, a properly philosemitic work. Instead of prating 4<in platitudes to please
adults/28 however, Nathan uses the figure of Anne Frank to "ghost-write" his own
magnificently inventive, Jewishly concerned drama, which plays out its story at
the Lonoff house in the Berkshires.
Soon after arriving at the LonofF residence, Nathan meets a "striking girl-
woman* named Amy Bellette, whose capacious and beautiful head seems
disproportionately larger than her body; Nathan has become used to viewing
women primarily for their bodies; Amys cerebral endowments (coupled with her
slight frame) seem to throw ofF Nathans sense of balance. Odd proportions
notwithstanding, Nathan immediately begins fantasizing about bedding down
and/or marrying this woman whom he assumes is Lonoffs daughter. When he
learns she is not, he does not imagine for Amy a relationship of literary
parenthood or patronage, but rather one of a strictly sexual variety/'Who is she
then, being served snacks by his wife on the floor of his study? His concubine?'29
Nathan later learns that Amy is a former student of LonofFand an exceedingly
talented writer. Amy Bellettes belle-lettristic capabilities, however, do not
dislodge Nathan from his view of her as his potential consort and Muse. When in
the middle of the night, sexual fantasy catches up with reality; and Nathan
overhears Amy Bellette begging "Da-da" LonofF to run off with her to Italy;
Nathan begins to weave his own magnificent fantasy about Amy Bellettes true
identity as a twenty-six year old Anne Frank, one who actually survived the
Holocaust but has remained incognito so as not to take away from the power of
her published diary as the story of a Holocaust victim* The climax of Nathans
fantasy is his resolution to bring Saint Amy/ Anne home to his parents as his
lawfully wedded wife, the perfect Jewish mate/martyr, who will allow him to
write his irreverent stories and yet absolve him of the charge of Jewish
selEhatred.
Critic Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky interprets Nathans imaginative transformation
31Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 71.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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of Amy Bellette as an adaptation of Stephen Daedalus similar transfiguration in
Joyces Portrait cf an Artist of the bird-girl on the strand "into the Virgin Mary; a
virgin whore and then finally; into a personification of Artistic Inspiration?
According to Rubin-Dorsky^ Nathan ^transmogrifies Amy Bel- lette from an
ordinary college student with a crush on her writing teacher, into, first, a* Femme
Fatale/ second, the quintessential Jewish martyr heroine,
28
Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 106.
29
Shofar ■ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Anne Frank* and

third, an alter ego for himself as a young writer? 32 What Rubin-Dorsky fails to
observe in his reading of The Ghost Writer and Mliterary heritage/ however, is that
from the very beginning Amy Bellette is no ordinary college student; both she and
Anne Frank are identified quite early on in the story as gifted writers, women who
might very well be Nathans competitors for the a place in (Jewish) literary pantheon.
Lonoffs praise for Amy Bellette is no less generous than his praise for Nathans four
published stories."She has a remarkable prose style/ LonofF says. "The best student
writing Ive ever read. Wonderful clarity; Wonderful comedy; Tremendous
intelligence/33 As for Anne Frank, Nathan himself (enviously) acknowledges that
"she's like some impassioned little sister of Kafkas/ 34 35 a comment both elevating, in
its association with the genius of Kafka, and belittling in its relegation of Frank to the
diminutive status of° little sister/ Clearly; Amy/Anne makes Nathan anxious. Writing
from the comforts and achievements of North Jersey; Nathan knows he cannot begin
to approach the monumental nature of Anne Frank's subject, its simultaneously Jewish
and universal import, its awesome, spare reality; its precocious insight. "If only I
could invent as presumptuously as real life!* >33 Nathan exclaims to himself as he
overhears the love murmurs of Amy Bellette and LonofF in the room upstairs, a
comment which seems equally relevant in light of the contrast between Nathans
Newark fictions and Anne Frank's story of real life.
In their study of the place of women writers in literary modernism, San* dra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe a story by Max Beerbohm called "The Crime/ in
which a man of letters, vacationing in a rented cottage, picks up a copy of a novel by a
woman novelist of "immense vitality* about a ^successful woman of letters/ and then
impetuously flings the book into a fireplace only to find that the book cannot burn.
Gilbert and Gubar read this story as a ^masterfully comic satire on the futile rage with
which men of letters greeted female literary achievement? 36 My "resistant" reading of
32Jeffrey Rubin Dorsky/4 Philip Roths The Ghost Writer: Literary Heritage and Jewish
Irreverence/ Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1989): 179.
33Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 28.
36Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Mans Land: Volume L The War of the Words (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p.128.

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Ghost Writer situates this novel within a similarly anxious, masculinist Jewish literary
context. By
imaginatively transforming writer Amy Bellette into Femme Fatale, and then into an
Anne Frank who can no longer assume her literary identity because the power of her
story is too invested in the idea of her having died in the Holocaust, Nathan essentially
flings both Amy and Anne—as images of rival female artist—into the fire. When
Nathan confronts Amy about the physical resemblance she bears to Anne Frank, and
Amy declares/Im a&aid I am not she/ 35 Nathan finally accomplishes his goal of
inventing "as presumptuously as real life? How much greater an artist is he for
thinking up Anne Franks "real" story; for subsuming her diary and making it all his
own! By the end of the novel, the exceptional Amy Bellette is indeed rendered an
ordinary college student, Anne Frank is laid back in her grave, made an important
writer only by virtue of the circumstances of her death, while Nathan lives on as the
writer and hero of his own bildungsroman. And yet, as in the case of Max Beer-
bohms man of letters who cannot get the womans book to burn, the ghostwriter
Amy/Anne continues to hover over this novel even after its conclusion. Nathans
copious citations from and effusive praise of Anne Frank in the novel virtually send
his reader scrambling back to re-read the diary by a writer who might have been even
more precociously accomplished than Roth himself
II. Woman-Centered Readings: The Idea of a Jewish Female Literary

Tradition
According to Patrocinio Schweickart, the importance of counter-readings of male
texts, like the readings of Henry Roths Call It Sleep and Philip Roths The Ghost
Writer which I offer above, is not to eschew all readings of male or androcentric texts,
but to remedy the problem of pervasive female literary °immasculation7 As a feminist
critic, I hope that other feminist readers will recognize themselves in my reading of
these novels, and join in the struggle to transform 0 Jewish American literary culture?6
The other task of the Jewish feminist critic is to look to Jewish womens writing for
instances in which a womans point of view has indeed been expressed. Indeed, an
essential project of feminist scholarship is to read back "through our mothers 0—those
early Jewish women writers who somehow managed to break into the male literary
culture against all odds.
But what do we read for? As far back as 1975, in a pioneering dialogue/ essay
entitled ^Theories of Feminist Criticism/ American feminist critics Car-
35
^Schweickart, °Reading Ourselves/ p. 34.
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olyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, dubbed critic X and Y, debated the end goal of
feminist criticism of literature, with critic X imagining a time, beyond the feminist
denunciation of patriarchal writing and interpretation, when the critical imagination
might cross the river into a "promised land for humanity the Egypt of female servitude
having been left behind?37 In a later essay Elaine Showalter later takes issue with
"critic X；' arguing against the idea of a Mfeminist pilgrimage to the promised land in
which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal like
angels? According to Showalter, an advocate for the"gynocritical" study of the
specificity of womens writing and culture, we may never and may never want to reach
the Promised Land as understood by critic X as a realm of "serenely undifferentiated
universality;0 Rather, Showalter argues, an examination of the distinctiveness of
womens writing indicates that it is "nor a transient by-product of sexism, but as a
fundamental and continually determining reality" Instead of looking forward to an
elimination of gender as a marker of difference in our culture, then, we may elect
through a study of womens culture to revel in the ^tumultuous and intriguing
wilderness of difference itself,38
The poetic career of American-born Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) is particularly
relevant to all of these aspects of feminist criticism, before and after "the promised
land," if you will Until recently; Lazarus literary contributions were largely forgotten,
and thus a reading of her work entails an exposure of the fissures in and biases of
masculinely constructed literary criticism and history; As a woman writer, Lazarus
also provides an occasion for the examination of the special history of Jewish womens
writing in America, A descendant of assimilated Sephardic Jews, Emma Lazarus had
already published four books by the time she was 28 years old, works of both poetry
and prose dealing mainly with Classical Greek and European subjects* It was not
until the early 1880s, with the news of the antijewish pogroms in Russia as well as
firsthand exposure to the Russian Jewish refugees at Wards Island in New York, that
Lazarus began to embrace her Jewish identity and turn her poetic attentions to Jewish
subjects. In 1882, Lazarus published Songs of a Semite, what one scholar of American
Jewish literature has called "rhe first important work of Jewish poetry in America? 39
By her untimely death in 1887, Lazarus had become an important literary and
polemical voice for the Jewish people, pleading the cause of Russian Jewish refugees,
calling in a series of essays entitled Epistle to the Hebrews for a rebirth of the Jewish
nation and the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine/ 0 In the words of one
of Lazarus eulogists, the famous abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, w [s] ince
Miriam sang of deliverance and triumph by the Red Sea, the Semitic race has had no
37Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson,"Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dialogue/ in

Josephine Donovan, ed., Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory (Lexington, Kentucky:
University of Kentucky Press, 1975,1989), pp. 64-8.
38Elaine Showalter,MFeminist Criticism in the Wilderness/ in The New Feminist Criticism:
Women, Literature Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 266-67.

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The Making and Re-making of Literary History ♦ 81
braver singer? 41
Whittiers invocation of the biblical Miriam is significant in that the typical

American reference to the biblical story of the Exodus is now gendered
femininely; linking Lazarus to a biblical foremother, a bold, triumphant woman
poet and prophet. As such, Whittier's eulogy might serve as an emblem for the
feminist re-vision of Lazarus as a founding Mother, if you will, of American
Jewish Literature. And yet, it is important to note the masculine bias in Whittiers
praise for Lazarus and her poetry; Even Whittier, who seems quite comfortable
equating Lazarus poetic endeavors with the brave prophecy and poetry of Miriam,
also makes sure to call attention to her "rhythmic sweetness*—a poetic quality
which would conform more readily to stereotypical, Victorian notions of feminine
compliance and piety; In the other eulogies written about Lazarus after her
untimely death, the need to affirm Lazarus essential femininity in the face of her
(aberrant) poetic achievements and rhe- toricar*bravery 0 is even more
pronounced/* I cannot hesitate/ writes Edmund Stedman,
to write a few words of tribute to the memory of a noble woman, enthusiast and poet.
While thoroughly feminine, and a mistress of social art and charm, she was—though
without the slightest trace of pedantry—the natural companion of scholars and
thinkers. Her emotional nature kept pace with her intellect; as she grew in learning
and mental power, she became still more earnest, devoted, impassioned.42
39
Allen Guttman, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 21.
Êpistle to the Hebrews was first published in serialized form in The American Hebrew in
fifteen sections between November 3, 1882 and February 23, 1883. These fifteen sections were
reprinted in 1987 with notes and an introduction by Morris U. Schappes (New York: Jewish
Historical Society).
4l
John G. Whittier/A Brave Singer；' The American Hebrew (December 9,； 1887): 3.
Edmund Stedman, 'A Contagious Inspiration in her Ardor," The American Hebrew
42
(Emma Lazarus Memorial Number, December 9,1887): 4.

In this paean to Lazarus, Stedman foregrounds Lazarus femininity and her related
qualities of emotionalism before all else. Lazarus ability to play the role
of'Companion" to scholars and thinkers notwithstanding—it is interesting that she
is elected a companion, rather than a scholar and thinker in her own right—she is
first and foremost a "noble woman/ "thoroughly feminine/ a "mistress of social art
and charm? Stedmans parenthetical dismissal of any trace of "pedantry" in
Lazarus intellectualism suggests that in most cases, a literary or scholarly woman
was typically regarded as a Mbluestocking, and a pedann
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously argued in their classic study
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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The Madwoman in the Attic that the traditional association of authorship with
masculinity afflicted the nineteenth-century woman writer with an “anxiety of
authorship*—a "radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never
become a precursor/ the act of writing will destroy her? 39 Consequently; these
women writers developed various literary "swerves" in order to clear an
imaginative place for themselves in the masculine realm of literature, actively
seeking out a female precursors and employing poetics of "duplicity" so that their
literature could be read and appreciated even when its vital concern with female
dispossession and disease was ignored.40
Gilbert and Gubars theory of female literary creativity helps shed con*
siderable interpretive light on the gynocritical "specificity'' of Lazarus best known
poem, “The New Colossus/ which Lazarus was commissioned to write for a
campaign to raise money for the erection of rhe State of Liberty; To be sure,
Lazarus'"The New Colossus" offers a different portrait of the feminized Statue,
and by extension, America, than what we saw earlier in Roths Call It Sleep:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to
land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with torch,
whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her
beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged
harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me, I Eft my lamp beside the golden door!""
In this sonnet, Emma Lazarus deliberately opposes the national character of

America, as represented by the Statue of Liberty to that of the great European
nations as represented by the Colossus. In contrast to the classical, masculine,
conquering, “storied pomp" of Europe—a cultural matrix which has been the
chief source of Lazarus poetic inspiration in the earlier part of her poetic career—
the America of Lazarus* sonnet is a place where the humble, marginal, unstoried,
alien is prized, where the outsider, schooled in homelessness, is welcomed as a
source of new energy and industry; Unlike the Colossus of Rhodes, which stands,
fixed in its position, “with conquering limbs astride from land to land," this statue
stands by an*air-bridged harbor," a geographical space characterized by airiness
or an openness of spirit, not yet concretized or limited by hoary; European forms
of patriotism. Similarly noteworthy is the repetition of hyphenated word forms in
the description of the State of Liberty and her new-world constituency—sea-
washed, air-bridged, world-wide welcome, tempest-tost—a set of word patterns
that gesture toward the idea of the America as a place that allows for hyphenated
forms of identity that embraces ethnic diversity and affiliation even as it hopes to
39Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale
University PRess, 1977), p. 49.
40Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 72.

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unite all of its newcomers into one new nation.
Especially significant here is the attention given to the feminine gender of
the statue, as well as Lazarus decision to situate this feminine figure with in a
distinctly biblical/Jewish context. As Esther Schor argues in her recent biography
of Lazarus, M， [d]efying the storied pomp of antiquity; precedent, and ceremony;
the statue speaks not in the new language of reason, but in the divine language of
lovingkindness/46 In place of the old Greek Colossus, a symbol of masculine,
pagan, authority; Lazarus revisits and re-imagines her cultural past and offers a
Jewish feminine counter-myth. Michael Kramer has astutely observed that
Lazarus Liberty is both "the mighty woman with torch," reminiscent of the
biblical prophetess/poetess Deborah who is referred
45
Emma Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co.,
1889): pp. 202-3.
46
Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Nextbook Schocken, 2006), p. 189. For more
on Lazarus see also Ranen Omer-Sherman, Diasporism and Zionism in Jewish American
Literature (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2002), pp. 15-67.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies to in the book of

Judges as Me$het LapidoC literally; "a woman of torches*41 and a "Mother of Exiles/
evocative of the matriarch Rachel, who is depicted in the book of Jeremiah as a
mother weeping for the exiled Children of Israel42 Lazarus dual invocation of
Deborah, the warrior poetess, and Rachel, the weeping mother—opposing images of
femininity—represents a poetics of duplicity; resulting in a feminine image which is
simultaneously acceptable and subversive. Lazarus use of conventional feminine
imagery in this poem, her description of the female statues "mild eyes" and "silent
lips," as well as her maternal, nurturing qualities, conforms to a Victorian domestic
definition of femininity; not unlike that evinced by the critics I cited earlier. At the
same time, as Diane Lichtenstein observes, Lazarus Deborah-like Liberty*stands as a
symbol of womanhood which defies traditional stereotypes of passivity and
demureness/43 This mother is both mild and mighty; nurturing and authoritative. More
than that: in the sestet of Lazarus sonnet, this silent-lipped mother of Exiles breaks her
silence, as it were, and becomes a woman poet, uttering verse about the meaning of
America. According to this interpretation, the octet image of °imprisoned lightning*
might be understood as a figure for the capturing or encapsulation of electric motion
and feeling in the fixed, crafted form of the written sentence; the sestet image of the
lamp held by the Golden Door becomes a similar figure for the literary illumination of
American experience. Read this way; “The New Colossus* not only articulates a
vision of the America dream, but also offers a model for the American (Jewish)
female poet or writer who derives her inspirations and authority not from classical,
patriarchal traditions, but also from the"unsioried" lives of Jewish women and other
oppressed or marginalized people of rhe world.44
The idea of a Jewish American female poetic based on the "unstotied" lives
of Jewish women or oppressed minorities becomes equally important if one reads
the work of such immigrant Jewish women writers as Anzia Yezierska (1880?-
1970). Like Lazarus, Yezierska was a relatively forgotten figure until the 1970s,
when she was rediscovered by feminist historians and literary critics, In contrast
to the wealthy American-born, and highly educated Emma Lazarus, however,
whose social connections, education, and style of writing would more readily
41See Judges 4: 4.
42See Jeremiah 31:14-16. Michael Kramer made this point about the biblical sources of Lazarus
Liberty in a paper presented at the 1998 AJS conference entitled, 0How Emma Lazarus Built the Statue
of Libertyf
43Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American
Jewish Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 36-7.
44Dan Vogel gestures toward a similar reading oF'The New Colossus* in his brief and
lukewarm appraisal of the well-known poem. "It is not too much to say;" Vogel writes/that the sonnet
can stand as a kind of allegory of a literary spirit that itself yearned to break free but did not know
how, and finally learned what freedom really is” (Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus [Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1980], p. 159). For a more feminist appraisal of Lazarus work see Carole S. Kessner,
"Matrilineal Dissent: Emma Lazarus, Marie Syrkin and Cynthia Ozick," in Women of the Word:
Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 197-215.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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associate her with aristocratic Old New York than with the M wretched refuse* of
New Yorks "teeming shore/Yezierska was literally and figuratively MunstoriedM
—a complete newcomer to American culture and literary tradition. Throughout
her career as a fiction writer, in which she published two collections of short
stories and four novels and was awarded a prestigious national literary prize and
two lucrative film contracts, Yezierska continually doubted her ability and
ruminated over the implications of her immigrant female identity Perhaps more
than any of her female contemporaries, Anzia Yezierska made the search for a
female immigrant idiom a primary subject of her fiction^
Yezierskas obsession with the idea of a female immigrant language or idiom
lends itself to a reading that incorporates the feminist theoretical approaches not
only of Anglo-American critics, but also of such French feminist theorists,
influenced by Jacques Lacan?1 such as Helene Cixous and Luce Iri- garay; who
imagine a kind of womens writing (*ecriture feminine*) that displaces the
symbolic order of the "phallus" and retrieves the repressed Female Imaginary
Often discussions of °ecriture feminine* draw on a complex set of metaphors
based on the female body: images of fluidity and flux based on menstruation,
lactation, and amniotic fluid, as well as images of "wandering excess" and
multiplicity that build on the experience of female orgasm. In her
5l
There are several reasons why Lacans re-reading of Freud has become influential in
French feminist theory; First is Lacans staunch anti-essentialism and anri-biologism, a critical
stance that allows for radical rejection of patriarchal definitions of the female self According to
Lacan, there is no such thing as an essential, predetermined identity or subjectivity; male, female,
or otherwise. Unlike Freud, who describes human development in fixed biological terms, for
Lacan, the Oedipus complex is a symbolic rather than a biological construct Unlike Freud, then,
Lacan makes a strong distinction between the penis, the male anatomical organ, and the phallus,
its representational symbol. As Diana Fuss explains, according to Lacan, the phallus is a
M
signifier, a privileged signifier of the Symbolic order which may point to the penis as the most
visible mark of sexual difference but nevertheless cannot be reduced to it." See Diana Fuss,
Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 7.
Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies famous essay

^Castration or Decapitation/ Helene Cixous describes a afemi- nine text:" which is
pervaded by a sense of touch, movement, and outpouring, a "primitive, elementary;'' a
**fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow,** a "throwing up, disgorging/ 45 Similarly; in
This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray opposes the phallic notion of literary unity
and coherence to the idea of a pluralistic and multiplicitous womens writing based on
a female sexual/anatomical metaphor* ° Perhaps/ she writes,
it is time to return to that repressed entity; the female imaginary. So woman does not
45Helene Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation/ trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1
(Autumn 1981): 54.
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have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones.
Indeed she has many more. Her sexuality always at least double, goes even further: it
is plural... [Woman] is indefinitely other in herself This is why she is said to be
whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious... not to mention her language, in
which she sets off in all directions leaving him unable to discern the coherence of any
meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason,
inaudible for whoever listens co them with readymade grids, with a fully elaborated
code in hand.46
On the one hand, these theorists reject essential definitions of 4 woman0 as

part of the binary thinking of patriarchal Western culture that would define
woman as a ^subjugated difference within a binary opposition: man/woman,
cukure/nature, positive/negative, analytical/intuitive? 47 On the other hand, they
embrace these essential oppositions in metaphorical terms for the sake of
celebrating the repressed ^feminine Imaginary;" Similarly; Yezierska seizes upon
the conventional dualistic categories of male/ 隹 male, head/heart, culture/ nature,
for the sake of advancing a female immigrant poetic. Repeatedly in her essays
and fiction, she dramatizes this opposition, composing fictions in which
immigrant women artists experiment with American-born forms of beauty and
language, only to find themselves turning back uneasily to the mamaloshen
(Mother Tongue) of the ghetto, the rude and raw, passionately unrestrained
Yiddish idiom of the immigrant.
Yezierska clearly dramatizes this aesthetic conflict in an early story called
"The Lost Beautifulness? In this storys the protagonist Hanneh Hayyeh Saf- ran
sky is presented as a kind of domestic artist—"an artist laundress" as her
American employer Mrs. Preston somewhat condescendingly calls her because of
the passion and care with which she launders Mrs. Prestons linens and laces*
Hanneh Hayyeh is so filled with quixotic love and yearning for American beauty,
as represented by the cleanliness and refinement of Mrs. Prestons Stuyvesant
Square mansion and the elegant fineness of her linens and frocks, that she longs
to reproduce it in her own Lower East Side tenement flat.
The story begins as Hanneh Hayyeh stands marveling at her newly- painted
white kitchen, an almost chimerical vision of beauty and light in the dark, ill-
smelling tenement. For weeks she has been scrimping and saving to buy the paint.
Now as her beloved son Aby a soldier in the American army; is returning on leave
from his tour of duty in World War I Europe, Hanneh Hayyeh has finally painted
the kitchen as a gift to the son she adores/ 4 If only you could give a look how I
46"Luce Irigaray; This Sex Winch Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 28-9.
47Linda AlcofE°Cukural Feminism Versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory/ Signs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1988): 417.
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painted up my kitchen!” Hanneh Hayyeh tells her employer, Mrs. Preston/* It
lights up the whole tenement house for blocks around. The grocer and the butcher
and all the neighbors were jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they
seen how I shined up my house? 55 From the outset, the naively hopeful
Americanizing ambitions of Hanneh Hayyeh are contrasted with the skepticism
and practicality of her immigrant husband Jake, who considers her painting
escapade foolhardy and wasteful evidence of her longing to be something she can
never be.
Despite her husbands misogynist excoriations, Hanneh Hayyeh continues to
revel in her artistic accomplishment, inviting all of her friends in to see her newly
painted kitchen. The dream soon turns to nightmare, however, when Hanneh
Hayyeh makes the mistake of showing off* her paintwork to her tough-nosed
landlord. Before long the Safranskys receive notice that their rent has been raised,
for now that the flat has been painted new, the landlord has decided he can get
more money for it. When only a few weeks later, the merciless landlord raises the
rent on their flat a second time, the Safranskys face eviction, and the happy vision
turns dark. "Black is my luck! Dark is for my eyes!" 兌 Hanneh Hayyeh cries out
to her neighbors when she receives her first and then second rent increase. The
scene turns completely black at night, when in a fit of rage against both of her
male adversaries, the landlord as well as her husband Jake who blames her for
their misfortune, Hanneh Hayyeh sets out to destroy the beautifulness she had
worked so hard to create:
55
Anzia *zierska,"7he Lost Beautifulnessf in How I Found America (New York: Persea
Books, 1991), p. 35.
56*zierska,"The Lost Beautifulness/ p. 37.
Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies With savage fury; she

seized the chopping axe and began to scratch down the paint, breaking the plaster on the walls. She
core up the floor-boards. She unscrewed the gas jets, turned on the gas full force so as to blacken the
48
white- painted ceiling. The night through she raged with the frenzy of destruction.
This story; which starts with Hanneh Hayyehs creation of one refined form art
dedicated to the more conventional maternal/oedipal purpose of regaling her
beloved American-soldier son, culminates, then, with her creation of a completely
opposite form, a kind of female anti-art created from rude sharp edges of wood,
dark scorched panels of paint, a furious and frenzied display of uncontrolled rage.
This plot development is embodied in the three names assigned to Yezierskas
protagonist. The first name Hanneh allies her with the maternal, artistic, and
national aspirations of the biblical Hannah, who prayed for a son, composed
48Yezierska, °The Lost Beautifulnessf p. 41.

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poetry upon his birth, and then sent him to Shiloh to undertake holy national
service as a servant to Eli the priesn Her second name Hayyeh, meaning both "she
lives" and "animal," seems to underscore the more primitive, physical, vital
aspects of her personality; while her last name, Saf- ransky, literally meaning "of
the book/ identifies her with literature or poetics. Hanneh Hayyehs white kitchen,
a symbol of her yearning for conventional maternal as well as economic/national
kinds of gratification, thus becomes a kind of blank slate against which she writes
a new living book. Yezierskas juxtaposition of notions of the maternal, the
animal, and the aesthetic, her bringing images of white-America, as represented
both by Mrs. Prestons linens and Hanneh Hayyehs painted kitchen, with counter-
images of raging, destructive blackness, is especially interesting in light of Helene
Cixous metaphorical description of feminine writing in her famous essay "The
Laugh of the Medusa," as a "dark continent/ 49 dangerous and destructive. "When
the repressed of their culture and their society returns/* Cixous writes, °it s an
explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed
and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions/50 Hannah Safranskys destructive
rampage at the end of "The Lost Beautifulness, might be read as precisely this
kind of "staggering return"—an unleashing of a new artistic energy released from
repression.
Significantly; the passage describing the creation of this second work in-
cludes no dialogue, concentrating instead on melodramatic physical gestures,
evocative of the pre-Symbolic, pre-lingual stage of development, of the body and
the physical medium of dance. Over the course of the night, Hanneh Hayyeh
enacts a veritable dance of destruction, in which she seizes, scratches, breaks,
tears, unscrews, turns, blackens, rages, flings herself on the lounge, her nerves
quivering and her body aching. Hanneh Hayyeh does not revel in this second piece
of art work formed out of the remnants of the first. Like Yezier- ska herself this
ghetto artist never feels entirely comfortable falling back on images of woman as
uncontrollable, irrational, creatures of passion, and never entirely relinquishes her
desire to emulate (masculine) American-born style. And yet, even as she mourns
the lost beautifulness that she herself created and destroyed, she cannot help
noticing the vitality of her newly ruined kitchen. As in her essay w Mostly About
Myself* where Yezierska describes herself writing feverishly day and night in
order to create stories which are a M living picture of living people/ 60 Hanneh
Hayyehs feverish nocturnal rampage results in a remarkably vibrant expreission of
49Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schock- en
Books, 1980), pp. 247-48. Cixous argues in this essay that it is impossible to define or limit the
feminine practice of writing. She does, however, offer various metaphorical descriptions of this
writing through images of darkness, the mother, the body, bisexuality and heterogeneity.
50Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," p. 256.
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her immigrant anger and disappointment. "These walls that stared at her in their
ruin, were not just walls. They were animate—they throbbed with the pulse of her
own flesh/61 Here artistic creation becomes synonymous with ethnic and gender
identity: the "wall"—and by extension, the word—made Resh.
This effort to create an idiom and form which reflects a female Jewish
(immigrant) identity; to imbue ones writing with a vibrancy of female flesh and
blood can also be discerned in the work of Canadian writer Adele Wiseman,
particularly in her immigrant novel, Crackpot (1974), a work which bears distinct
similarities with Henry Roths earlier-discussed Call It Sleep. Like Roths Call It
Sleep, Crackpot is a coming-of age novel, as well as a narrative of the immigrant
experience set against a background of poverty squalor, social Darwinism and
insecurity; Again like Roths novel, which alludes to biblical and mythological
sources (particularly to the Book of Isaiah as well as certain Christological
images), Crackpot is shot through with references to biblical as well as kabbalistic
lore, all with a female/feminist twist. The novel opens with a quasi-biblical quasi-
comical litany oF'begats"—"Out of Shem Berl and Golda
Ânzia Yezierska, ^Mostly About Mysel£' in How I Found America, p. 136.

61
Yezierska,MThe Lost Beautifulness,°p. 42.
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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies came RacheL Out of

Danilk and Rachel came Hoda. Out of Hodaf Pipick came, Pipick born in secrecy and
mystery and terror, for what did Hoda know?062 But unlike the typical biblical
genealogy which may or may not include the mother and typically drives toward the
male son who will be the focus of the story; Wiseman centers her story on the
development of Hoda rather than her son, David, whose nickname Pipick, the Yiddish
word for belly button or navel, ties him back umbilically to his mother Hoda. Hodas
story of initiation, like that of David Schearl in Call it Sleep, takes on a mythic or
mystical quality; which is greater than itself Unlike Roths noveL however, which
consistently casts Davids development in phallic terms, the story of Hodas coming of
age takes on a frank, female sexual form, not just in its audacious explorations of
Hodas sexual experiences as a neighborhood prostitute in Winnipeg but also in the
repeated female sexual/reproductive imagery of vessels and containers. Strewn
throughout the novel, as suggested by the title, are images of pots that crack or
overflow, that bring forth their flawed, radiant offspring or break into various
fragments, shards which Hoda endeavors throughout her life to rejoin and repair. In its
recurrent use of images of cracked, fragmented vessels Wisemans Crackpot seems to
answer the call of such French feminist critics as Luce Irigaray for a representation of
female sexuality which is not*conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters/*
which is not fixed and unified, but rather plural, expanding and limitless. 51 52
What Wiseman adds to this French feminist paradigm, of course, is the richness
of Jewish mystical tradition.53 The epigraph to the novel, taken from Lurianic story of
Creation, provides the mystical context for this recurrent vessel imagery; According
to Lurianic Kabbalah, in the beginning God*stored the Divine Light in a Vessel, but
the Vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with
sparks of the Divine, scattered
through the Universe?65 Reminiscent of this kabbalistic legend of Creation, both
Rachel and her daughter Hoda become vessels for something to grow inside and
burst out from them. Rachel first engenders the obese, unstoppable Hoda. She
then becomes a vessel for a lethal growth or cancer that ultimately overwhelms
and kills her. When Hoda becomes a practicing prostitute as a way of supporting
herself and her blind father after her mothers death, Hoda herself becomes the
unknowing vessel for the gestation of a baby that bursts out of her one night and
51 Adele Wiseman, Crackpot (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 7. Originally

published in Canada in 1974 by McClelland Stewart Ltd., Toronto. All citations will be from the
University of Nebraska edition.
52Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 23-31.
53For interesting readings of Wisemans Crackpot, see Michael Greenstein, "The Fissure-Queen:
Issues of Gender and Post-Colonialism in Crackpot" Room of Ones Own: A Feminist Journal of
Literature and Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sept. 1993): 20-31; Francis Zichy/'The Lurianic
Background: Myths of Fragmentation and Wholeness in Adele Wisemans Crackpot ； ' Essays on
Canadian Writing, Vol. 50 (Fall 1993): 264-79; and Marco Lo~ Verso/* Language Private and Public:
A Study of Wisemans Crackpot；' Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1984): 78-94.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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almost rips her to pieces emotionally and physically; Terrified by the mystery;
secrecy and violence of the babys birth, Hoda clum* sily severs and knots the
cord, wraps up the baby in rags and abandons him on the doorstep on the local
orphanage of which her rich uncle is a major patron. That she feels she must give
up the baby is evidence of yet another form of tragic fragmentation, just like the
kabbalistic vessel that breaks up into so many shards which need to be gathered
back in order for the world to be repaired and perfected.
Vessel imagery also figures earlier in the story of Hodas development when
Hoda attempts as part of a public speaking assignment at school to tell the
fabulous story of her parents marriage in the old country—an Eastern European
hieros gamos in the graveyard, reminiscent of the marriage of Ginv pel and Elka
in I. B. Singers"Gimpel the Fool/ Hunchback Rachel and blind Danille are
brought together in marriage in an effort to bring an end to a plague that was
ravaging the village* Hoda, as vessel for the transmission of this story; is a kind
of overflowing * superabundant0 physical and storytelling presence in the class.
Her sexually repressed teacher Miss Boltholmsup becomes "posi_ tively sick to
rhe stomach with the vividness 。。 of her story; however, and thus silences Hoda
before she is able to bring the story to its proper conclusion. °Ybur whole display
this afternoon/ Hodas teacher tells her, “was inappropriate/ the result being that
Hoda makes a career out of being inappropriate. The teachers name, which Hoda
mockingly re-writes asMBottoms Up," evokes the twin images of a bare bottom
and of a glass being turned over and emptied, as in a drinking contest where the
shot glass is turned over when it is empty and placed on the bar. Hodas teacher
has to empty herself of Hodas story of sacred copulation in the graveyard. But
Hoda refuses to empty and repress herself in the same fashion. When not given
recognition in school for the amazing story of her family and for her oral/literary
powers of self-creation, she
65
Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 1.
^Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 97.
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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies embarks on the

various sexual adventures that result in her setting up shop in her broken-down house
in the corner of town, where she copulates regularly and religiously with anyone who
wanders by;MBundle for Britain/ she cheers her clients on during World War
II/*Fornicate for Freedom/54 David Schearls sexual initiation is figured in Roths Call
It Sleep with images of fragmentation, the whole world breaking "into a thousand
little pieces, all buzzing, all whining, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them
except himself?*55 Like David SchearL Hoda undergoes a similar mixture of
revulsion and exaltation as a result of her early sexual exploits. Ultimately; however,
Hodas sexual initiation does not serve, as in David Shearls case, as a catalyst for her
isolation from the various menacing social forces around her, but rather as an outlet in
which she is able in her own highly unorthodox way to bring the various frag ments of
her existence together.
While it may be treading on shaky ground to adduce a novel in which the
female protagonist is a prostitute who eventually has sex with her own son as a
feminist representation of female sexuality; Wisemans Crackpot somehow
convinces us that Hoda is not an exploited figure but rather a proletarian revo -
lutionary; an expert in the art of "making" fleeting bits of love in a world that
sorely needs it. The conclusion of the novel, in which Hoda assents to marry a
physically and emotionally broken Galician Holocaust survivor, recapitulates the
theme of sacred marriage in the graveyard, suggesting another one of the ways in
which "crackpot" Hoda has helped bring about tikkun olam (repairing the world).
III. Postfeminist Readings

Cynthia Ozicks 1983 novella ^Puttermesser and Xanthippe" is another work of
contemporary fiction that builds a female plot on the foundation of kabbalistic
lore and the mystical imperative of tikkun olam. When the novella begins, Ruth
Puttermesser, a middle-aged, unmarried lawyer/bureaucrat, autodidact and Soviet
Jewry activist, has just lost her lover and is about to lose her job. Having always
fantasized about having a daughter, she suddenly discovers in her bed the form of
a naked teenage girl—a female golem—that apparently; she herself has
unwittingly fashioned out of the soil taken from the potted plants in her
apartment. In writing this half-comic, half-tragic story about a female
intellectual/functionary who creates and breathes life into a female golem, Ozick
makes feminist literary history; supplying a female version of several religious as
well as secular male plots—the Pygmalion story where a male sculptor carves the
statue of girl who then comes to life, the Frankenstein story where a male
scientist creates and animates a monstrous human using the tools of modern
science, the biblical Creation Story where a male-gendered God first creates a
54Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 270.

55Rorh, Call It Sleep, p. 55.
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male human out of the dust of the earth and breathes the breath of life into his
nose, and the golem tradition which begins with the sixteenth century Rabbi
Lowe of Prague who creates a male golem of great physical strength to help
protect the Jews from their adversaries, "This is a holy place/ the mute golem
writes to the confused Puttermesser, who initially thinks that this female creature
in her bed is a wayward girl who has broken into her apartment. "I did not enter. I
was formed. Here you spoke the name of the Giver of Life, You enveloped me
with your spirit. You pronounced the Name and brought me to myself Therefore I
call you mother?69
Puttermessers female golem, who calls herself the Greek name Xanthippe
after Socrates shrewish wife, who tended to Socrates earthly needs as Socrates
pursued the lofty matters of philosophy; first serves as Puttermessers domestic
helper and moves on to the loftier task of getting the unemployed Puttermesser
elected as mayor of the City of New York, so she can enact a broad-
ranging°PLAN FORTHE RESUSCITATION, REFORMATION,
REINVIGORATION, & REDEMPTION OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK? 70
Puttermessers golem, however, does not bring about genuine tikkun olam. As
Sarah Blacher Cohen observes, Xanthippe encourages Purtermess- er to become
sinfully obsessed with perfection. Both Puttermesser and her golem become
puffed up with their achievements and aspirations; Xanthippe literally swells in
physical stature as the story progresses, becoming a kind of monstrous
embodiment of insatiable desire?1 Ultimately; like Rabbi Lowe of Prague,
Puttermesser needs to destroy her Golem, to return her creation to the earth to
prevent the destruction of the city According to some critics, then, M Puttermesser
and Xanthippe0 is a story about the unlawful usurpation of the creative,
ameliorative powers of God and how this usurpation should be punished and
undone. Read in light of third-wave or "post 樓 minist" theory; however, Ozicks
M
Puttermesser and Xanthippe" takes on special relevance,
69
Cynthia Ozick, M
Puttermesser and Xanthippe/ in Levitation (New York; E.P Dutton,
1983), p. 97.
70
Ozick,HPuttermesser and Xanthippe,Mp. 123.
71
Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Oziclts Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 95-6.
Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies insofar as it offers a

statement on the shifting, unstable nature of gender and identity categories, and serves
as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of supplanting a patriarchal ^master
narrative* with an equally oppressive "mis~ tress narrative?
As Judith Butler writes in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity, the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is
some existing identity; understood through the categories of women, who not only
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse but constitutes the subject for
whom political representation is assumed.・.. [T]his prevailing conception has come
under challenge. The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or
abiding terms?56 At the same time, post-feminist critics are aware that the complete
disavowal of identity is impossible, for that would lead to the opposing problem of *
undifferentiation? According to Jane Gallop, then/*[id]entity must be continually
assumed and immediately called into question?57
In Ozick's "Puttermesser and Xanthippe* this kind of construction and
deconstruction of identity occurs and recurs beginning with the story (or lack thereof)
of the golems creation. In contrast to the biblical story in Genesis 2, where Gods role
in creating Adam from the dust of earth is made very explicit, Ozick provides no
direct description of Ruth Puttermessers fashioning of her golem, leaving the real
origins of this creature ultimately uncertain. One mo* ment, Puttermesser is
fantasizing about a daughter who recites Goethe, and the next, the golem is lying there
in Puttermessers bed. Puttermesser does not recall making her. Where then has she
come from? What is her essence? Her nature? The golem has a female form, but is she
a woman? "It was true she [Puttermesser] had circled the bed. Was it seven times
around? It was true she had had blown some foreign matter out of the nose. Had she
blown some uncanny energy into the entrance of the dormant body? It was true she
had said aloud one of the names of the Creator/ 58 This passage suggests an adaptation
of various traditions. Puttermessers circling of the bed recalls the traditional wedding
ritual in which the bride circles the groom, signifying his future centrality to her self-
definition, while the number seven recalls the seven days of biblical Creation and the
primeval marriage of Adam and Eve in Eden; here,
however, instead of a bride circling a groom, a female creator figure encircles a
female golem, suggesting a female-centered revision of the divine creation plot in
which all male figures are excluded. Here the golem becomes Adam and Eve to God
Puttermesser; and yet, as Puttermesser*s circling of this golem/groom suggests, an
intertwining of identity is about to occur, whereby it will be difficult to identify the
creator from the created. On one level, this passage offers a meta-fictive commentary
on the unintentionality of (literary) creativity; It has indeed become a commonplace
for writers to speak of the characters they create taking on lives and careers of their
own; in these terms,w Puttermesser and Xanthippe0 is Ozicks own unwitting
offspring* On another level, Xanthippes uncertain origins introduces a theme of
unstable identities and relationships which continues in the narrative, even as
567 勺 udith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), p.l.
57From Jane Gallop, The Daughters Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. xii.
Quoted in Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 104.
58Ozick,Puttermesser and Xanthippe,0 p. 97.
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Puttermesser becomes Mayor and witnesses through the inexhaustible efforts of the
golem, the utopian transformation of New York City; “The coming of the golem
animated the salvation of the City yes—but who Puttermesser sometimes wonders, is
the true golem? Is it Xanthippe or is it Puttermesser? Puttermesser made Xanthippe;
Xanthippe did not exist before Puttermesser made her: that is clear enough. But
Xanthippe made Puttermesser Mayor, and Mayor Puttermesser too did not exist
before* And that is also clean Puttermesser sees that she is the golems golem/, 59
In contrast to the conventionally masculine mode of linear cause and effect,
Puttermessers ability to be molded by a creature of her own creation suggests a
reciprocal or circular relationship of malleability and continual reformation, even
destruction. Nothing is given or fixed about the assumed roles and identity markers of
these two characters. They are both fragile fictions, a fact that becomes palpably clear
when Puttermesser destroys the overgrown, love-crazed golem and, by implication,
her mayoral identity and urban paradise. Puttermesser elegizes: "O Lost New York! O
lost Xanthippe!0 But were these lost objects ever truly found in the first place?
As a cautionary tale/4 Puttermesser and Xanthippe* suggests that replacing a
male-centered creation story with a female-centered one does not necessarily bring
about tikkun olam. In Ozicks novella, the same Promethean, patriarchal acts of seizing
power and assuming god-like perfectibility are performed by female rather than male
actors. Clearly; Ozicks insertion of this female golem story into a long masculine
literary history is a feminist achievement. All the same, in serving as a feminine
version of maculine myth, Puttermessers Xanthippe also runs the risk of becoming an
end in herselE a counter-myth or idol that must be destroyed before it becomes an
ossified form of feminist identity
The critical enterprise of de-centering our various notions of identity has become
an especially important strategy for post-feminist/queer theorists such as Butler, as
well as for contemporary posrcolonial and lesbian feminist theorists. Post-colonial
critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty; for example, has been instrumental in voicing
objection to the monolithic representation of Third-World women in Western feminist
literature, as well as to the notion of a universal notion of ° Woman *—of gender or
sexual difference—which would unite feminists throughout the world across all
national and class borders?6 Together with lesbian critic Biddy Martin, Mohanty has
also mounted a critique against the idea of "feminism as an all-encompassing
home"—that is, the âssumption that there are discrete, coherent, and absolutely
separate identities—homes within feminism, so to speak—based on absolute divisions
between various sexual, racial, or ethnic identities? 60 61 Using as their example an
59Ozick,HPuttermesser and Xanthippe," pp. 136—37.
60Chandra Talpade Mohanty "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses/ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993), pp. 196-220.
61Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohancy,MFeminist Politics: Whats Home Got to Do
With IiV in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary
Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 294.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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autobiographical essay by Minnie Bruce Pratt entitled M Identity: Skin Blood Heart/62
Martin and Mohanty advocate a critical perspective which is , multiple and shifting/'
in which the critic "re-anchors herself repeatedly in each of the positions from which
she speaks, even as she works to expose the illusory coherence of these positions? 63 64
These various critical perspectives are particularly relevant to a reading of the
writing of lesbian writer Ruth Seid/Jo Sinclair (1913- ), especially her 1955 novel,
The Changelings, which opens as a Jewish community in Cleveland begins to
"defend" itself against the arrival of blacks in their neighborhood, provoking them to
reconsider their notion ofMat-homeness° in America. On the margins of the
neighborhood is The Gully; a liminal space, neither street nor park, where the
neighborhood kids congregate. In "the summer the Gully really belonged to Vincent
and her gang""—Vincent, an androgynous, last-name designation for Judy Vincent, a
young street-wise adolescent girl who dresses up as a boy and presides over the gang,
which meets regularly on Friday nights. As a tomboy who is not quite a boy ("She had
never actually called herself a boy; but neither had she ever thought of herself as one
of the girls she despised for their soft, plaintive weakness* 65), leading a gang of Jew-
ish and Italian kids that meets on Friday nights in a club house that "was big enough
to hold ten people0 (a minyan that is not quite a minyari), where they light candles
melted into two wine bottles (a Sabbath ritual that is not quite a Sabbath ritual) Judy
Vincent is a walking representation of the plural, shifting nature of identity and home.
For a long time Vincent had lived in a three separate worlds: one that was the gang-gully;
one was the street, one was Manny-Shirley [her nephew and intermarried sister]. There
were three levels of thinking and feeling in her, to match these separate worlds in which
she had moved so methodically; Rather suddenly; lately; her worlds had been jumping out
of their boundaries, fragments from one mixing confusingly with bits from the other two,66
At least this is the sort of identity that she has always naturally embraced, until her
street and her gang members, facing the specter of the "Schwartze” in their midst,
retrench and reassert more essentialist notions of religious and gender affiliation. In
one particularly chilling scene early in the novel, Vincents gang members turn on her
and fbrceably strip her naked to demonstrate that she is indeed a girt At that very
moment in the novel, however, Judy meets and befriends Clara, a similarly tomboyish
black girl from the other side of the gully; an encounter that demonstrates Judys
62Minnie Bruce Pratt s ， 4 Identity: Skin, Blood Heart:" is part of a book co-authored by Pratt,
Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith entitled Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-
Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984), pp. 11-63.
63Martin and Mohanty; p. 295. For another Jewish application of these ideas see Laura Levitt,
Jeu/s and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Hotne (New Tork: Routledge, 1997). See also Janet
Handler Burstein, Telling Little Secrets:American Jewish Writing Since the
641980s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 76-115.
65吁。Sinclair, The Changelings (New York: Feminise Press, 1983), p. 3. "Sinclair, The
Changelings, p. 17.
66Sinclair, The Changelings, p. 12.

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determination not to reside within set racial, religious, or gender categories. Dubbed a
"changeling" by her tubercular poet friend, Jules, because she is so different from her
family and the people on her street, Judy Vincent is /'borderland" character—to
borrow Chicana lesbian critic Gloria Anzalduas term67—whose mix of traits and al-
legiances provoke her continually to change and challenge the boundaries of her life.
Which brings us to the present moment in American Jewish literary history—the
"New Wave/* as it has been called by several writers and critics. 68 Despite Irving
Howes oft-quoted dire predictions for the post-immigrant period in Jewish American
literature,69 Jewish American literature is alive, well, and thriving in large measure
because of the extraordinary contributions of an ever-expanding group of young
women writers—Rebecca Goldstein, Al- legra Goodman, Tbva Mirvis, Nicole Krauss
Joan Leegant, and Dara Horn, to name a few——who continue to negotiate the ideas
ofjewish (feminine) American identity and home.
In her recent study of contemporary Jewish American literature, critic Janet
Handler Burstein observes that "[i]n much recent work by American Jewish women
writers of the new wave, this postmodern awareness of the complexity of selving* is
coupled with a persistent interest in the constructive power of search for origins? 70
This trend finds particularly significant expres* sion in Dara Horns remarkable debut
novel, In the Image, a novel which interweaves related stories of American Jewish life
with allusions to the biblical and Jewish literary past, 71 and where a female
protagonists quest for origins culminates in the fantastic dream-discovery of a lost city
of origins in the New York harbor beneath the Statue of Liberty; This arresting
chapter explicitly recalls Lazarus "The New Colossus" as well as the climactic
conclusion of Roths Call
67Gloria Anzaldua,MLa Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness/ in

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco, 1987), pp. 78-80.
68See Morris Dickstein, “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing/ Tikkun, Vol. 12,
No. 6 (1997): 33-36; Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural
Dilemma (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Janet Burstein, Telling Little Secrets:
American Jewish Writing Since the 1980s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). See
also Wendy Zierler, "A New Addition to the ,New Wave of Jewish-American Literature" (a review of
a book by Janet Burstein), Midstream (January/Febuary 2007): 33-36.
69See note 11; also Irving Howe, introduction to Jewish American Stories, p. 16-17.
708ânet Handler Burstein, Telling Little Secrets, p. 77.
71Dara Horn, In The Image (W W Norton & Co., 2002). The array of biblical allusions in the
novel is extensive, including references to Noah and the flood (p. 24), Lamentations (p. 36), the
creation accounts of Genesis 1 (p. 38), Job (p. 95 and larer), Ezekiel and the dry bones prophecy (p.
132), Rachel and Leah (p. 138).
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1004 Wendy Zierler
It Sleep, thereby providing a fitting coda for this feminist re-reading of Jewish
American literary history and criticism.
As mentioned earlier, the concluding sequence of Call It Sleep has David
Schearls escaping from his home with a milk ladle to the rail tracks, past the “old
wagon-yard, the lifted thicket of tongues; the empty stables, splintered runways,
chalked doors, the broken windows holding their glass like fangs in the sash,
exhaling manure-damp, rank. The last street lamp droning in a cyst of light. The
gloomy massive warehouse, and beyond it, the strewn chaos of the dump
stretching to the river?88 Horns final chapter re-enacts this same sequence with
Leora running against a backdrop of New York City urban blight, past
burned out factories and chemical swamps, past rail yards and landfills, past garbage
dumps and abandoned buildings, past rotting two-family houses and downed power
lines, past unused smokestacks and giant water towers, past empty streets, empty
buildings, empty houses, where not a single glowing window illuminated the dark
night.... In front of her, beckoning with a giant torch like a flare in a crime scene,
stood the Statue of Liberty;89
David Schearls journey reaches its climax when he plunges the dipper into tracks
and electrocutes himself knocking himself unconscious. Recalling Davids
moment of death and rebirth, Horns Leora plunges into the river; her visit to the
lost city however, serves to heighten rather than to erase her consciousness of
past choices and experiences. The lost city she plumbs
contains only things that we have truly abandoned, created exclusively out of what
we believe to be lost forever ... teeming and screaming and churning with all that was
have now forgotten, that it spills out over its walls, the wretched refuse of its teeming
shores pushing out in every direcrion until the walls surrounding its inner core
become little more than a technicality. In this underwater sanctuary; however, the
huddled masses all breathe free?90
After touring the city Leora departs not through its gates, but by springing herself
ofF the ocean floor and "projecting herself upward/—like the Statue of Liberty
herself Leoras visit to and departure from the lost city thus point to a desire to
supply new definitions of American liberty; as underscored by the explicit
allusions to Lazarus sonnet in the passage quoted above. If in Lazarus sonnet,
America offers immigrants the assimilationist opportunity to shed
88
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 408.
89
Dara Horn, In The Image, p. 271.
"Horn, In The Image, p. 273, emphasis added.


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their wretched past by the golden door, Leoras deep-sea dive suggests that the our
ability to breathe free en masse in America inheres in our ability to choose exactly
how much of our Jewish textual/religious/cultural past we wish to embrace and how
we wish to make or remake our Jewish American (feminine/ masculine91) selves. By
analogy; we as contemporary feminist readers of Jewish-American texts are
challenged to invent and reinvent our own critical selves, continually re-making the
multi-fold project of feminist interpretation, and re-shaping the contours of Jewish
American literary history to reflect our contemporary reality;
"For a fascinating discussion of the ways in which Dara Horns novel enacts "Gen~ der Trouble/
querying both masculine and feminine Jewish identities, see Helene Meyers, "Jewish Gender Trouble:
Women Writing Men of Valor/ Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006): 323-334.
Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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The Making and Re-making of Jewish-American Literary History

Author(s)： Wendy Zierler

The Making and Re-making of Jewish-

I. Resistant Readings: Tradition and Male Talent

ijudith Fetterley; The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction

Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

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the frequent appearance in the works of such mainstream American writers as

'Fetterley; The Resisting Reader, p. xx.

Shofar . An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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20'Fetterley; The Resisting Reader, p. xii.

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London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) p. 19.

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Shofar ■ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies son" i7—and the

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25"Barack Fishman, “The Faces of Women/ p. 26.

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies man, woman and

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Shofar ■ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Anne Frank* and

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II. Woman-Centered Readings: The Idea of a Jewish Female Literary

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

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37Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson,"Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dialogue/ in

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Whittiers invocation of the biblical Miriam is significant in that the typical

(Emma Lazarus Memorial Number, December 9,1887): 4.

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In this sonnet, Emma Lazarus deliberately opposes the national character of

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies to in the book of

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies famous essay

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On the one hand, these theorists reject essential definitions of 4 woman0 as

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Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies With savage fury; she

48Yezierska, °The Lost Beautifulnessf p. 41.

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^Anzia Yezierska, ^Mostly About Mysel£' in How I Found America, p. 136.