June Sochen

SOURCE: "Identities within Identity: Thoughts on Jewish American Women Writers," in Studies in American Jewish Literature, No. 3, 1983, pp. 6-10.

[In the following essay, Sochen describes the defining quality of the Jewish-American woman writer as her continual effort to forge a personal and creative identity.]

It is said that the twentieth century is the time in which artists and philosophers are preoccupied with the issue of identity. Perhaps so, but one could argue that Jews have always been obsessed with the question: "who am I?" Living as marginal, separate people throughout most of their history, they have always been required to be introspective collectively and individually. Identity has been an especially vital, active issue in the life of Jewish Americans where the interaction with Gentiles is commonplace. Jews raised within the Jewish tradition must question, test, and confirm their identities, their links to the Judaic past and present, and their connections to American culture as well. Jews who only had nominal or no Jewish upbringing had to create their identities in heterogeneous America.

For Jewish American women, the identity problem becomes multi-layered. Until very recently, the role of women in both the Jewish and American cultures prescribed behavior patterns and values different from that planned for men. Where the public world of work and prayer featured Jewish men, while the Jewish woman's sphere was confined to the home, it was very difficult for Jewish women to identify themselves in ways other than the traditionally prescribed one. Jewish American women writers faced the additional identity crisis of entering the male domain of literature and creativity. While women writers have always been part of the American cultural landscape, Jewish women writers become a sociological phenomenon only in America and largely in the twentieth century. Because they did not enter a socially acceptable identity role, they had to define themselves and create their own identity.

Jewish American women writers had to, and have to, wrestle with each and all of the components of their being. They have to sift through their personal experiences and their philosophical views to determine which aspect of their being will be highlighted in their work. This problem, of course, is universal to all artists. The particular dilemma for Jewish women is the merging of the various parts, the creation of a new identity type, one rarely seen in society. For some women writers in this genre, their Jewishness leads the list of identity traits; their writing reflects their primary interest in being Jewish in America. For others, being female is the defining feature of their being; and for still others, it is the successful merger of American and Jewish values that predominates. During the writer's career, each, or all, of these themes may emerge and occupy some of her work.

It is assumed herein that there is an intimate connection between the personal biography of a writer and her writings. That is not to say that it is a one to one relationship, but rather that a writer's imaginative work expresses, in however transformed a manner, governing themes and images that concern her own mind and being. The artistic process, of course, is a transforming one, but if identity, as I contend, is a major concern for all creative artists, then determining her identity will be a major personal and creative activity of a Jewish American woman writer.

Indeed, it is possible to survey the work of major Jewish American women writers of this century within this concept: identities within identity. Edna Ferber (1887-1968), for example, displayed interest in being a strong female, a Jew, and an American. Her personal preoccupation with these issues was reflected in her creative works. In her autobiographical novel Fanny Herself ( 1917), she selects perseverance as one of the Jews' most admirable traits and lauds the majesty and mystery of the Jewish ritual in the synagogue. But the bulk of her creative work focuses upon a strong woman overcoming enormous odds to succeed. She incorporates the growing experiences of America with the growing experiences of a woman and juxtaposes her major themes of women's strength with the greatness of America. In Cimarron, Giant, So Big, and the Emma McChesney stories, she portrays able, dynamic women in the newspaper business, in the Texas oil fields, in the prairies of Illinois, and in the business world. The harmonious identity she creates is that of a woman experiencing the success of American enterprise and American family. Though Ferber's women often express feminist sentiments, they usually marry and have a family—the necessary structure within which to experience personal success.

Fannie Hurst (1889-1968), who along with Ferber created some of the most popular fiction in America in this century, also focused more on her women characters' development than on other themes. In her autobiography, she commented that the label woman writer meant that she was fascinated with women; living in the suffrage days of the 1910s in New York, Hurst believed that "It is excitingly possible that, as her (woman's) participations and experience widen, the creative golden era of woman is about to begin." Hurst's women, however, often meet more tragic ends than Ferber's precisely because they seek roles and identities previously reserved for men. While men do not have to pay for their sexual adventures, women end up determined by their sexual indiscretions. Hurst's back streets became the home for the discarded mistresses whose tragic end is melodramatically told by both Hurst and her many imitators.

Both Ferber and Hurst would be good examples of Jewish American women writers for whom the Jewishness is a pale adjective describing American women's lives in the twentieth century. Their fictional characters' identities did not contain large doses of Jewishness but rather their femaleness defined and determined their destinies. For Hortense Calisher (b. 1911) and Grace Paley (b. 1922), born a generation later, the multiple identities take on different emphases. Their experiences, growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, as opposed to the 1890s and early 1900s, played an important role in their interpretations of their parents' backgrounds. Their parents seemed to have done a lot of assimilating so that the daughters' search for identity took different turns.

In Paley's case, her parents' Socialism was more important than their Judaism. Indeed, it was to the secular Yiddish culture that she identified as a Jew, not to synagogue Judaism. The Depression, of course, became the dramatic event in her growing years and the idealistic commitment to a democratic Socialist future to override the evils of capitalism became an important part of her intellectual heritage. Paley's stories about the Darwin family portray three generations in which the eldest had the Socialist faith, the middle (as represented by the daughter Faith), became a social activist for black peoples' rights, and the youngest, Faith's children, became street children who visit their friends in various institutions on the weekends. The characterizations of the elder Darwins' commitment to Socialism and Zionism is lovingly and respectfully presented but the next two generations show no comprehension or commitment to the same faiths.

Calisher also displays her cool dismissal of the Jewish ingredient in her identity in some of her stories. In "The Rabbi's Daughter," for example, neither Judaism nor the Jewish culture was discussed. The focus of the story was upon the daughter, Eleanor Goodman, and her yearnings for a return to her career as a pianist after her marriage and the birth of a child had taken her away from her music. Eleanor muses: "A man, she thought jealously, can be reasonably certain it was his talent which failed him, but the women, for whom there are still so many excuses, can never be so sure." The fact that Eleanor was the daughter of a rabbit merely established her background, her context, but it played no role in her dilemma, in her struggle for selfhood. It is marriage and motherhood, the fate of women, that decided her future.

For some Jewish women writers, of course, the Jewish content within the author and her protagonist is critical. In Hannah Arendt's nonfictional biography of Rachel Varnhagen, an assimilated 18th century German Jew, the dilemma of self-denial fascinated Arendt. Varnhagen devoted her life to separating herself from Judaism and the Jewish people. But her constant disavowal of Judaism never achieved the desired effect. The Gentile society within which she lived, knew of her Jewish origins and she never found an adequate substitute identity to replace Judaism. Arendt noted that "Without a stage-set, man cannot live. The world, society, is only too ready to provide another one if a person dares to toss the natural one, given him at birth, into the luberroom." But in Varnhagen's case, the role provided by society was not able to replace the natural one. Arendt's conclusion seemed to suggest that no substitute could ever be adequate.

All writers choose subjects that speak to them, that engage their interests, their values, and their very essences. Whether nonfictional or fictional, the creatures created, the situations described, and the struggles enacted all reflect aspects of the writer's own being. Writing is both a self-identifying and a self-clarifying process. When a Jewish American woman writer, for example, writes a rags-to-riches novel, albeit with a Jewish immigrant rather than an Irish immigrant protagonist, she is operating within a tried and true genre. She is identifying with a literary tradition in America and in so doing allying herself with a whole set of American cultural beliefs. She is accepting the view that progress is a real phenomenon for newly arriving immigrants, that all of them must struggle, and that many will succeed if they observe the Protestant values of hard work, self reliance, and patience.

The tension of preserving the old in the new setting, of assimilating and of retaining aspects of the old culture, is another accepted theme in the rags-to-riches genre. The conflict between the generations adds yet another ingredient. In the plethora of immigrant novels written by contemporary Jewish women, these themes inevitably play a major role. The process of writing also is a self-clarifying experience. It enables the writer to examine, in concrete form, her own values, her own conflicts, and her own resolutions. She must struggle with the problems of her heroines and heroes and emerge with conclusions that are both artistically and personally satisfying. The gift is often harmonizing these two dimensions. Unsatisfying ends often reflect the ambiguous views of the author. Unhappy conclusions mark the emotional state of the writer at the time of the work's completion. Distancing, a very desirable trait for writers and people in general, is more wished for than achieved. Because a story requires a beginning, middle, and end, the story's end may well be a tentative solution, one adequate for that moment only.

A writer's identity may change many times during a life time. In youth, she may reject the Judaic part of her identity only to reexamine it, and reintegrate it, at a later point in life. Or she may attempt to create a multidimensioned character who successfully (or unsuccessfully) grapples with each and all parts of herself. Just as in life, fiction is often sloppy and inconclusive. Gail Parent, for one, can only deal with the Jewish part of herself in a mocking, often sick joke form. Perhaps she will move from this pose to a more sympathetic one as she ages. The process of discovery and rediscovery is life long. That is the hope, the frustration, and the excitement that accompanies the experience of being a Jewish American woman writer.

Sylvia Barack Fishman

SOURCE: "The Faces of Women: An Introductory Essay," in Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction, edited by Sylvia Barack Fishman, University Press of New England, 1992, pp. 1-60.

[In the following essay, Fishman explores the roles of Jewish-American women as the creators and subjects of fiction in the twentieth century.]

OUR LITERATURE, OURSELVES

Literature shapes and reflects popular conceptions of the nature and capacities of women, and the self-images of many contemporary American girls and women are influenced not only by changing political, social, and economic conditions but also by a lifetime of contact with literary portrayals of female characters. Such portrayals exist on many brow levels and are derived from diverse religious, cultural, folkloric, and mythic traditions. Many have been nurtured by images from ancient heritages, such as classical Greek and Latin myth and drama, and by narrative characters and allegorical women in the Old and New Testaments.

In the open environment of modern American society the mix of literary heritages describing female nature is rich indeed, including widely divergent pictures. Some have become so familiar that their very names evoke an emotional ambiance: the earnest and spunky problem-solving heroines of books for young girls; the orphan told she "should have been a boy" who surmounts the limitations of her environment through her intense imagination (Anne of Green Gables); empowered and powerless Shakespearean characters such as Lady Macbeth, Portia, Juliet, and Desdemona; the independent heroines of novels by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and George Eliot; the pure-hearted martyr doomed and betrayed by honorable and dishonorable men alike (Tess of the D'Urbervilles); the bitchy, manipulative survivor (Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind); the fickle, shallow love-object with money in her laughter (Daisy in The Great Gatsby); the grasping, greedy wives of Philip Wylie and the overbearing mothers of Philip Roth. In the late 1960s and 1970s, feminism opened the doors for new themes, and readers encountered the courageous experiments in integrity of Doris Lessing's protagonists, embattled modern women struggling with Small Changes and attempting to break out of The Women's Room, and the sexual adventures of women trying to conquer their Fear of Flying.…

DISLOCATION AND SURVIVAL IN IMMIGRANT AMERICA

When European Jewish women and their families emigrated to America, the contexts of Jewish life were radically altered. Although many immigrants came to the New World hoping for comfort and opportunity, they found confusion, poverty, and exploitation instead. Society was often turned upside down, as formerly middle-class, well-educated families found themselves plunged into abject poverty, while formerly impoverished and ignorant emigres became entrepreneurial successes. Most jobs demanded a six- or seven-day work week, and religious traditions were quickly or reluctantly abandoned by immigrants who faced starvation if they did not meet the requirements of their employers.

Life for immigrant women was especially difficult. Few families were able to survive on the earnings of the husband alone, and both girls and married women worked long hours. Women who came at the beginning of the mass emigration period (1880-1924) often worked as seamstresses at home or peddled food or worked in a small family store. Many took in boarders, further increasing the congestion of their tenement domiciles and decreasing any hope of privacy. Later immigrants provided the major work force in the mushrooming garment industry, with girls typically working in the factories and married women doing piecework at home. In his memoirs, Alfred Kazin describes the pivotal role of the mother, which was typical of many immigrant households:

The kitchen gave a special character to our lives: my mother's character. All my memories of that kitchen are dominated by the nearness of my mother sitting all day long at her sewing machine, by the clacking of the treadle against the linoleum floor, by the patient twist of her right shoulder as she automatically pushed at the wheel with one hand or lifted the foot to free the needle where it had gotten stuck in a thick piece of material. The kitchen was her life. Year by year, as I began to take in her fantastic capacity for labor and her anxious zeal, I realized it was ourselves she kept stitched together.

Ironically, laws enacted to do away with home sweatshops actually imposed greater privations on the family, for poor women were forced to leave very young children so that they could work in the factory, rather than working at the kitchen table and caring for young children at home. A vignette from Samuel Ornitz's novel The Bride of the Sabbath describes the mother of a nursing infant called back to work. An older child carries his baby sister and a pot with his mother's dinner up five flights to the factory loft. His mother nurses the baby while she eats, and when the baby is satisfied, so is she. She turns back immediately to her work, without the time to look back at her children as they leave.

Jewish immigrants found themselves in an environment where few of the traditional values seemed to apply. Contemporaneous nonfiction pieces such as the memoirs of women like Mary Antin and E. G. Stern (alias Leah Morton), as well as the descriptive essays of observers such as Hutchins Hapgood, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Lincoln Steffens, and Jacob Riis, provide us with pictures of a society in the midst of violent transitions, with enormous cultural gaps often opening up between one generation and the next. American-born or -raised Jewish daughters and sons often longed fiercely to blend in with the American landscape and were mortified by the European accents and habits of their parents. American Jewish writers during the period of mass immigrations described a world in which female strength and aggressiveness was still needed but was already beginning to be derided. In immigrant settings characterized by poverty and danger, to be an enabler was a calling requiring intelligence, skill, and shrewdness as well as great reserves of physical and emotional strength; however, in this caldron of dislocation and adaptation, both societal and literary attitudes toward the competent, forceful soldier woman—in particular the Jewish soldier woman—began to change.

Many immigrant women felt confused and almost powerless in this strange new society. Their clothes, their language, and their attitudes toward life did not seem to fit their new homes. Those who did not find employment outside the home often learned English slowly and found their way around their new cities more slowly still. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American Jewish writers often described the plight of such immigrant American Jewish women with great sympathy and sensitivity. Abraham Cahan's Gitl in "Yekl" (upon which the movie Hester Street is based) is an innocent creature who loses her vulgar husband to the assimilated charms of another woman but eventually finds a better man.

Cahan's Flora, in "The Imported Bridegroom," on the other hand, is a bright, ambitious, and manipulative girl who schemes to achieve her goals. The sophisticated, elegant daughter of a wealthy and seemingly Americanized Jew, Flora has a very clear sense of what she wants from life; however, like most women of her time, she must accomplish her goals vicariously, by manipulating the men in her life. Although manipulation is not a much-admired behavior in postfeminist America, for American Jewish women who aspired to marriage and a traditional life-style at the turn of the century, there were basically two choices: to act upon others or to be acted upon by others. Existence, therefore, often became a power struggle between husband and wife and between parents and their children. The third option—to pursue an independent and often single course in life—was too intimidating for women like Flora to contemplate. Flora yearns to marry an uptown doctor, and it seems for a time that she will be able to trick her father and her fiance into fulfilling her dreams. In the end, however, she is defeated by circumstances and the equally strong wills of the men, and she may have lost them both.

One of the most lyrical descriptions of a disoriented and yet heroic Jewish mother is found in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, a novel that movingly exposes the way in which dysfunctional families sometimes survive through the sacrificial efforts of women. Genya, the protagonist's mother, speaks an eloquent, expressive Yiddish but can barely string an English sentence together. When she wanders outside a few-block radius of her home, she gets lost and is terrified. And yet, in Roth's novel, the seemingly passive, cautious Genya is shown to be a woman with great reserves of strength and hidden sensuality. Singlehandedly, she provides an oasis of sanity and love for her sensitive, terrified son and her psychotic husband and quietly saves her family.

Genya's character is primarily revealed through the reactions of the men who desire her: her vulnerable, adoring son; her tormented, dependent husband; and Luter, the lecherous lodger. Although Genya has little use for authoritarian religious structures and homiletics or for rigid pieties, she maintains traditional Jewish customs on Sabbaths and holidays, and her identity is enriched by the imagery of the Sabbath mother in the eyes of her son. Additional facets of Genya's personality are revealed when her flaming-haired, vulgar, irrepressible sister Bertha arrives on the scene. Bertha, impulsive, openly defiant, a domineering Jewish female who would be instantly recognizable to audiences of the Yiddish theater as well as to later Jewish satirists such as Woody Allen and Philip Roth, serves as a foil for Genya. With Bertha, Genya's careful, protective reserve is dropped, and the reader learns much about Genya's tragic past and motivations. Henry Roth's portrayal of Genya, like the complex heroines of some Yiddish writers, serves as a potent reminder that the literary imagination can indeed transcend gender.

While Genya is clearly a heroine to her needy son, even in immigrant society, Jewish mothers already suffered from the belittling gaze of their American children. For some second-generation Americans, the raw energy and aggressive behavior of their mothers was suspect—it was un-American. The best chronicler of the rejection of immigrant mothers is Anzia Yezierska, herself a child of the tenements. She writes with equal skill of the agony of the mothers and the agony of the children as they faced each other across a seemingly impassable chasm.

One of Yezierska's most searing works, ironically called "The Fat of the Land," tells the story of Hannah Breineh, who manages to raise many children despite dire poverty. When family finances improve, as her children grow older, they move uptown to the prestigious "allrightnik's row"—that is, Riverside Drive. But Hannah Breineh is wretched on Riverside Drive, despite the luxury, because she has no freedom to shop, to cook, to conduct her life as she pleases. Her children provide for her physically but do little to hide their scorn for her foreign and uncouth manner. Hannah Breineh's daughter Fanny, especially, is openly appalled and humiliated by her mother. For many daughters in immigrant Jewish literature, the major issue was becoming American. They wanted to be well-educated, soft-spoken, elegantly dressed, refined American ladies. These daughters saw their European Jewish mothers as the antithesis of all of these things. Their mothers did not dress like American women; they spoke too loudly and often with accents; they looked at the world through different eyes. Many of the daughters felt ashamed of their mothers. Moreover, they felt their mothers were ruining their chances for getting ahead. As Fanny tells her brothers, a girl is "always judged by her mother."

Similarly, Rachel Ravinsky, the protagonist of "Children of Loneliness," another Anzia Yezierska story, feels that her parents are dragging her backward "by the hair into the darkness of past ages." Thinking about the gentile man she has grown to love at college, Rachel wonders how she can "possibly introduce such a born and bred American to her low, ignorant, dirty parents." Mrs. Ravinsky, caught between her husband's rigidly righteous convictions and her daughter's scathing rejection, shrivels and grows "old with a sense of her own futility."

For Hannah Breineh and Mrs. Ravinsky, as for many impoverished immigrant mothers, the difficult acquisition and preparation of food became the focus of daily activity. For many mothers, that nurturing activity remained the one link that connected them to their increasingly sophisticated and scornful Americanized offspring. When their children, like Rachel Ravinsky, rejected even their food, such mothers were wounded to their souls: "Ain't even my cooking good no more either.… God from the world, for what do I need yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my child is no use no more.… How I was hurrying to run by the butcher before everybody else, so as to pick out the grandest, fattest piece of brust.… And I put my hand away from my heart and put a whole fresh egg into the lotkes, and I stuffed the stove full of coal like a millionaire so as to get the lotkes fried so nice and brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done." Yaakov Ravinsky laughs bitterly at his wife's continuing love for their daughter. He tells her, with cruel yet accurate brutality, that Rachel "makes herself so refined, she can't stand it when we use the knife or fork the wrong way; but her heart is that of a brutal Cossack, and she spills her own father's and mother's blood like water."

Michael Gold's fictionalized autobiography of life on the lower East Side describes Jewish women who drifted into lives as prostitutes and madams, as well as a vivid, energetic mother who speaks her mind on dishonesty and injustice in the best tradition of the Woman of Valor and has very definite ideas on the ingestion of proper foodstuffs:

She woke at five, cooked our breakfast at home, then had to walk a mile to her job. She came home at five-thirty, and made supper, cleaned the house, was busy on her feet until bedtime. It hurt my father's masculine pride to see his wife working for wages. But my mother liked it all; she was proud of earning money, and she liked her fights in the restaurant.… The manager there was a fat blond Swede with a Kaeserliche mustache, and the manners of a Mussolini. All the workers feared this bull-necked tyrant, except my mother. She told him "what was what." When the meat was rotten, when the drains were clogged and smelly, or the dishwashers overworked, she told him so. She scolded him as if he were her child, and he listened meekly.

"Your food is Dreck, it is fit only for pigs," she told the manager bluntly. And once she begged me to promise never to eat hamburger steak in a restaurant when I grew up. "Swear it to me, Mikey!" she said. "Never, never eat hamburger." "I swear it, momma." "Poison!" she went on passionately. "They don't care if they poison people, as long as there's money in it."

Almost four decades later, Philip Roth would describe Sophie Portnoy making a similar demand of little Alexander in Portnoy's Complaint, but rather than seeing such a mother's behavior through bemused and basically admiring eyes, as Gold does, Philip Roth would see her fiery admonitions as a symptom of crippling and controlling behavior.

Interestingly, few writers in the first two decades of the twentieth century chose to focus their short stories and novels on the successful activism of Jewish women. In 1909-1910 about two-thirds of the women employed in the garment industry were Jewish; within that industry, Jewish women—described with admiration as vunderbare farbrente meydlekh (wonderful, fervent girls)—provided the primary leadership and support for the emerging unions, partially because many had brought socialist values with them from Eastern Europe and Russia. Newspaper reporters and other observers of the scene described the ferocity and eloquence of the Jewish girls who led the strike of twenty thousand shirtwaist workers on November 22, 1909, for example, as Howe summarizes:

As the evening dragged along, and speaker followed speaker, there suddenly raced up to the platform, from the depths of the hall, a frail teen-age girl named Clara Lemlich.… She burst into a flow of passionate Yiddish which would remain engraved in thousands of memories: "I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now." … Thousands of hands went up: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I raise."

Immigrant and second-generation fiction by Cahan, Yezierska, and many others does capture, however, the tremendous importance of education in transforming the lives of American Jewish women—and in exacerbating the chasm between mothers and daughters. A study of working women in evening schools in New York City in 1910 and 1911 showed that 40 percent of the women were foreign-born Jews; 25 percent of Hunter College graduates in 1916 were Jewish women of Eastern European origin. Those who were successful were able to go on to get jobs as secretaries, bookkeepers, or salesclerks in the finer stores; these jobs were seen as highly desirable, and indeed they represented a very different life from twelve-hour days in factories. Many educated second-generation Jewish women became schoolteachers and social workers in numbers far disproportionate to their place in the immigrant population; early on, teaching and social work came to be considered "Jewish professions."

Later, American Jewish authors who wrote out of the Depression did depict the social activism of women, but much of the proletarian fiction of such writers as Tess Slesinger and Leane Zugsmith has little focus on the Jewish identity of characters or Jewish subject matter. Similarly, Jo Sinclair's (Ruth Seid) early proletarian fiction, such as "Tony and the WPA" (1938), has little direct connection to her Jewish roots as the daughter of immigrants; not until the publication of The Wasteland in 1946 did Sinclair incorporate Jewish themes into her fiction for general audiences.

The price of acculturation was very high, and for many Jewish women it amounted to a jettisoning of crucial areas of their inner life. The areas of loss depended on the woman. For some, traditional religious behavior was sacrificed as un-American. For others, Jewish religious ritual had long since been abandoned in the struggle for socialist equality. Some, especially those living in urban centers, were able to continue with their socialistic endeavors on American shores, and these women were extremely influential in creating and supporting union movements in the United States. For those women who were isolated from such centers of socialist struggle, however, the revolutionary fervor that was the core of their lives before emigration found no outlet in America. Women who lost the opportunity to live out their dreams found themselves bereaved, with no vocabulary to articulate their loss and grief.

Tillie Olsen writes frequently both of women who have lost their sense of direction and of strong women involved in socialist activities, but only in Tell Me a Riddle does the Jewish identity of her characters become obvious or salient. In Tell Me a Riddle, Eva, a brilliant, eloquent young Russian revolutionary, comes to this country, marries, and has seven children. Her husband, according to the American custom, is the one who is usually out of the house—at work, at meetings, at clubs—while she remains at home with the children. She is an affectionate, creative mother who takes the wash basin outside to do her laundry on a beautiful day and shows her little ones how to blow soap bubbles with the hollow stalks of wild onion in the yard.

But Eva has no time to read, no time to listen to music, no time to discuss politics with friends. As an older woman, she is very bitter, hating her husband for the way he allowed their family life to divest her of her intellectual and spiritual birthright. She withdraws emotionally from her husband and children and even her grandchildren, yearning for time before she dies to move to the rhythms of her own heart. On her deathbed, she sings snatches of songs she remembers from the revolution. One of them longs for a time when each individual will be valued for him or herself, "every life a song."

THE EVOLUTION OF LITERARY TYPES: THE JEWISH MOTHER AND THE JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS

It was to be a long time before American Jewish women, within and outside of novels, would be free to explore their own inner natures. Instead, the midtwentieth-century American literary scene proliferated with books that ridiculed or discouraged the ambitions of Jewish women for intellect, vocation, or self-esteem. The soldier woman qualities that were so admirable to the Yiddish writers were infuriating to midtwentieth-century American Jewish novelists. The world had changed dramatically for American Jews, and different female qualities seemed necessary and admirable in this changed world. Most American Jewish women during and after World War II lived in pleasant neighborhoods, not in grimy tenements. They had 2.8 children, not 8 or 10 children. They washed their clothes in laundromats or in their own washing machines, instead of boiling vats of water on the stove. But they were as smart and as aggressive and as articulate as ever; like Asch's Rachel-Leah, they dramatized their lives and were on the lookout for ever-present dangers that might threaten them and their families. But because the very real dangers of Jewish life in Europe had disappeared from the American Jewish environment, their level of anxiety seemed inappropriate. In lieu of outside employment and in the absence of external challenges such as war or poverty, many American women became caught up in a cycle of consumerism that was easily satirized and mocked. In the hands of American Jewish novelists, both the consumerism and the satire were given a Jewish flavor.

The attitude of Jewish authors toward Jewish women was in many ways symptomatic of their attitude toward middle-class Jewish America. Some of the most widely read midtwentieth-century American Jewish writers were second-generation American men whose lives had been permeated both with consciousness of their Jewishness and with an acute awareness of the differences between Jewish mores and values and those of the United States in its most conformist mode. Jewish women seemed to personify the foreignness of Jewish culture. Apple-pie America might be represented by a blond, sweet woman with a kind of childlike prettiness, a woman who always supported her man and seldom contradicted him; conversely, America might be embodied in the glorious, uninhibited sexuality and putative stupidity of the ubiquitous "blond bombshell" or "sex kitten."

As Philip Roth characterized the assimilative hunger of second-generation American Jewish men, "O America! America! it may have been gold in the streets to my grandparents, it may have been a chicken in every pot to my father and mother, but to me, a child whose earliest movie memories are of Ann Rutherford and Alice Faye, America is a shikse nestling under your arm whispering love love love love love!" And if America at its most attractive was the sunny smile and smooth yellow hair of a non-Jewish woman, then Jewish women were both un-American and undesirable.

The problematic, distinctive nature of American Jewish women was presented in two basic stock characters: the "Jewish mother" and the "Jewish American princess." Some European Yiddish writers had already created the figure of the overbearing Jewish matron, but their actual targets were the ineffectual husbands who created the necessity for their wives' forcefulness. In America, however, the rationale for criticism shifted. The forceful Jewish woman was compared unfavorably with more restrained gentile women. In Jewish literature the aggressive, verbal, clever Jewish woman was often caricatured as pushy and unattractive compared to the refined, polite, domestic, docile, and ornamental image of the "real" American non-Jewish woman.

Interestingly, Jewish daughters came under fire first, and satirical stereotypes of unmarried Jewish women remained prevalent throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, when undergraduates in a spring 1991 class on "Women in Jewish Culture" were asked if they ever thought of the Jewish woman in terms of the stereotypical Jewish American princess the most forthright and fulsome descriptions came from Jewish females. Significantly, some students were resistant to the idea that the JAP image was fundamentally either misogynist or antisemitic, despite ample documentation. As one student put it, "I come from the Five Towns [Long Island], and where I come from calling someone a JAP is a compliment. Being a JAP means that you've made it. Being a JAP means you have money and prestige, and you know how to use both. A JAP knows and wears what is stylish—she knows exactly where to buy it and how to put things together. And a JAP knows how to get other people to do things for her. Isn't that power? What's more American than power? Being a JAP is being a powerful woman."

This unironic and remarkably naive description of the so-called Jewish American princess is a fundamentally accurate depiction of the sociological beginnings of this stereotype. The yearning to be American, to fit in, was translated in many upwardly mobile families into providing both sons and daughters with every advantage that would enable them to appear and behave as real Americans. For both boys and girls this meant acquiring secular education far beyond the norm for their non-Jewish cohort; for boys it meant being helped with a start in business or professional life as well. But for women, who in the American consumer culture that surrounded them were steered toward being attractive and being effective and conspicuous consumers, a different kind of "higher education" was necessary.

American Jewish writers satirically describe the young woman whose parents were grooming her to fit into upper-middle-class American norms, as they saw them. Although some Jewish writers satirize Jewish men as well, depicting a variety of vulgar, aggressive, materialistic Jewish males, their discomfort with Jewish family life is more often channeled into a preoccupation with Jewish women. Ironically, the negative literary stereotypes of materialistic, manipulative Jewish women that were promulgated by American Jewish writers were only the most recent in a long line of antisemitic literary stereotypes of materialistic Jews in the annals of English literature. As Francine Klagsbrun notes, "All the old stereotypes of Jews come into play in the term JAP. In this day, polite Christian society would not openly make anti-Jewish slurs. But JAP is okay. JAP is a kind of code word. It's a way of symbolically winking, poking with an elbow, and saying, 'well, you know how Jews are—so materialistic and pushy.' What is interesting is that this code word can be used in connection with women—the Jewish American Princess—and nobody protests its intrinsic antisemitism." Eventually, this stereotype was articulated in a genre of humor called JAP jokes. Such jokes, which are often vicious in nature, continue to circulate, although they have now been exposed for their intrinsically antisemitic and misogynist content; JAP humor often suggests that Jewish women are sexually manipulative or unresponsive, that they are obsessively materialistic and exploit their husbands financially, and even that they should be physically exterminated.

A gap often developed between the way Jewish women felt about their families from the inside of the experience and the way they looked from the outside. That gap is brilliantly captured by Herman Wouk in his depiction of one of the best-known Jewish princesses, Marjorie Morningstar. As Wouk's protagonist, Marjorie Morgenstern, walks down the aisle on her wedding day, she looks into the face of the man she almost married, her beloved nemesis, the playboy playwright Noel Airman. At that moment, Marjorie sees her wedding through Noel's eyes as if she were looking through a ghastly green filter, and she knows that through the filter of his perceptions her spectacular and long-awaited wedding is nothing more than "a blaze of silly Shirley glory." To view her family and the man she really loves and wants to marry through her own affectionate eyes, she must brush away the green filter of Noel's jaundiced attitudes.

It is Airman who first fully describes the princess stereotype to the young and inexperienced Marjorie early in the novel, under the generic name of "Shirley." The youthful appearances, lighthearted personalities, and ostensible career aspirations of unmarried Jewish women are all a sham, Airman insists, because they really are after what women have always wanted "and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs." Although they insist that they despise "domestic dullness," says Airman, in the end they marry "dentists, doctors, woolen manufacturers, lawyers" and settle in for a lifetime of shopping and bourgeois social events. Marjorie correctly condemns Airman's caricature of the Shirley and spiritedly tells him he is "a damned intellectual snob … and a bit of an antisemite."

The character of Marjorie actually has more depth than is sometimes appreciated, as does her pragmatic, dryly witty mother. Both mother and daughter would prefer to maintain control over their surroundings and other human beings, but only because they wish to accomplish certain practical ends, not simply for the acquisition of power itself. In this, each resembles the character of Cahan's Flora in "The Imported Bridegroom" (1898). Vital, brave, complicated, and charming—as well as unfailingly manipulative—Marjorie struggles valiantly with a culture that sends her mixed messages about the nature of femininity, sexuality, and the purpose of life. Marjorie takes genuine chances, sleeping with Airman and falling in love with Eden, a secretive, drug-addicted, anti-Nazi hero. However, although she clearly grows and matures through these experiences, Wouk punishes her for the chances she takes. When Marjorie finally meets and agrees to marry a solidly responsible Jewish professional, both he and she are grief-stricken and distraught that Marjorie is no longer a virgin. Marjorie confesses her affair—"every word like vomit in her mouth"—and both of them regard her sexual experience as "a physical deformity, like a crippled arm."

Wouk indicates that Marjorie has done the correct thing, that she has followed her inescapable and life-affirming destiny, when she ultimately discards inappropriate dreams of glory and chooses the traditional religion and values she has grown up with, a stable man she has grown to love, "and children, and a warm happy home." Narrator Wally Wronken comments at the conclusion of the novel that Marjorie now sounds just like her mother, a woman he has always liked. Contemporary readers may well find troubling Marjorie's abrupt abandonment of her career dreams, as well as her obsession with physical virginity, but there is no doubt that Marjorie's feelings accurately reflect normative attitudes among American Jews in the 1950s.

In contrast to searching yet practical Marjorie, Brenda Patimkin, heiress to the Patimkin plumbing fortune in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, loves power for its own sake and fights fairly or unfairly as the need arises to maintain the competitive upper hand over every significant person in her life. Neal, Roth's poor but intellectual protagonist from urban Jewish Newark, reflects that Brenda, who has had her nose "fixed" so that it will look less Jewish, tries to "fix" her relationships with people as well. She competes with her mother, her father, her little sister, and Neal. Through the pages of Roth's novella, the reader sees both Brenda and her younger sister being shaped by their parents into self-centered and power-hungry women. Because they are both bright and energetic, they absorb these lessons well.

Moreover, Brenda does not feel that she must be a productive person. Her parents have sent her mixed messages about what life requires of her, the primary message being that she is required only to please herself and to be a loyal daughter. Sporadically, however, her mother, perhaps remembering her own, more deprived adolescence, castigates Brenda for her parasitic behavior. In one memorable fight with her mother, Brenda angrily rejects the notion that she ought to contribute in any way to the household community:

"When's the last time you lifted a finger to help around here?"
"I'm not a slave.… I'm a daughter."
"You ought to learn what a day's work means."
"Why?" Brenda said. "Why?"
"Because you're lazy," Mrs. Patimkin answered, "and you think the world owes you a living."
"Whoever said that?"
"You ought to earn some money and buy your own clothes."
"Why? Good God, Mother, Daddy could live off the stocks alone, for God's sake. What are you complaining about?"
"When's the last time you washed the dishes?"
"Jesus Christ!" Brenda flared, "Carlota washes the dishes!"

The Jewish mother was the next target of the satirical efforts of Jewish men. In a epoch when psychiatrists advised women that the only road to feminine fulfillment and happiness was acceptance of a submissive and supportive role, Jewish male writers often portrayed Jewish women in a grotesque mirror image of the proverbial Woman of Valor. These fictional Jewish women had their own ideas and tried to conquer their husbands and sons; they used food, hygiene, and guilt as weapons of domination.

Fear of maternal domination was far from an exclusively Jewish preoccupation in midtwentieth-century America. Indeed, Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers (1942) scathingly accused "dear old Mom" of tying all of male America to her apron strings through heavy-handed emotional manipulation. Erik Erikson in 1950 wholeheartedly accepted the notion of "Momism," the phenomenon of the pathologically dominating mother who infantalizes and emasculates both husbands and sons. Although fear and loathing of the domineering mother began as a culture-wide systemic misogynistic impulse, it soon became highly associated with the Jewish mother in particular. The Jewish mother, like the Jewish American princess, became a staple of American Jewish fiction. And, like the princess, the cartoon figure of the omniscient, omnipotent Jewish mother has enjoyed an amazingly long shelf life in the popular imagination, no doubt due partially to the talents of Jewish writers and filmmakers.

Jewish mothers were repeatedly caricatured as the apotheosis of the crippling "smothering mother," absurdly exaggerating whatever dangers she might find on the midtwentieth-century American landscape. The Jewish mother as terrorist is a peculiarly American hybrid, very assimilated and yet very Jewish. Herbert Gold's mother in Family, for example, is worried because her divorced son is thin, "skin and bones," so she prepares a breakfast of strangely brown scrambled eggs. When he vomits over the polished marble hallways at a job interview, his mother is puzzled: with traditional Jewish maternal solicitude—but with highly nontraditional methods—she had put quantities of religiously prohibited bacon grease in the eggs to fatten him up.

The hysterical mother par excellence is surely Roth's Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy's Complaint. Sophie Ginsky Portnoy is so obsessed with her son Alex that she tries to control every aspect of his life, especially those connected to the alimentary canal. When Alex is at the table or when Alex is in the bathroom, Sophie Portnoy wants to know exact details on the nature of his meal or his defecation. She feels that through knowing and controlling every aspect of his life she can protect him from as yet unknown dangers: "'He eats French fries,' she says, and sinks into a kitchen chair to Weep Her Heart Out once and for all. 'He goes after school with Melvin Weiner and stuffs himself with French-fried potatoes. Jack, you tell him, I'm only his mother. Tell him what the end is going to be. Alex,' she says passionately, looking to where I am edging out of the room, 'tateleh, it begins with diarrhea, but do you know how it ends? With a sensitive stomach like yours, do you know how it finally ends? Wearing a plastic bag to do your business inP"

Not only is Sophie Portnoy's overprotectiveness satirized, but her intelligence, strength, and articulateness is denigrated as well. She is, the novel tells us, an intelligent woman with poetic sensibilities. She encourages Alex in his schoolwork and listens to him attentively for hours, praising him as though he were "the Pope." She is, as well, a generous woman who, like Asch's Rachel-Leah, moves about the kitchen with energy and joy and is tirelessly concerned about others, a principled woman who, like Grade's Mother Vella, expects high religious performance from her children. However, Roth pillories Sophie Portnoy for many of the same female qualities that Asch, Grade, and earlier Jewish writers admired. Few Jewish writers looked beyond the surface of women's lives. The woman of valor had fallen upon hard times.

REAL WOMEN: JEWISH MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS EXPLORE NEW PATHS

If the typical woman in Old Order societies gained some measure of self-esteem because she knew, like Rachel-Leah, "her duty and her own value," women in the changing society of midtwentieth-century America were often unhappy partially because of confusion about their proper role. Many, no longer content to follow in their mothers' footprints, had not yet defined what they wished to be instead. For some, the exploration of new paths was further complicated by anguished feelings of resentment and guilt toward the mothers they loved and hated and, at least psychologically and often physically as well, were leaving behind. They feared to be too close to their mothers because they did not wish to become like them, but they felt that in abandoning their mothers' life-styles they were adding to the burdens that had already oppressed and diminished the older women.

Explorations of mother-daughter relationships, already an intriguing element in earlier American Jewish fiction, emerged as a major motif in mid- and late-twentieth-century novels and short stories. Indeed, although Jewish fiction shared in a culture-wide, growing American interest in the mother-daughter dyad, the Jewish presentation of the relationship had some special characteristics. Marianne Hirsch demonstrates that "the mother/daughter plot" has been a powerfully evocative motif in literature; she asks important questions that are germane to this discussion, such as "What is unique about the attachment between mothers and daughters? Do cultural, ethnic, and class differences, and differences in sexual preference shape the details of their interaction? And where are the voices of the mothers, where are their experiences with maternal pleasure and frustration, joy and anger? … What explains the fact that in fiction and theory we find only rarely the most common aspects of mother-daughter interaction, anger for example?"

For women who derive from distinctive ethnic groups, especially those with strong hierarchical traditions, such as traditional Jewish, Chinese, and Japanese societies, the stakes in the conflict between mothers and daughters are complicated even beyond their general psychological import. Partially because of the high cultural stakes of the struggle between American Jewish parents and their offspring, in American Jewish literature anger is a freely expressed emotion. Starting with mother-daughter relationships in the literature of Yezierska and Olsen and moving forward to works by Piercy, Gornick, Goldstein, Broner, Chernin, and Roiphe, among others, one repeatedly finds mothers and daughters confronting each other; one might easily say that anger is the signature emotion of the genre. Moreover, Jewish authors seem somewhat more likely than average to present the world as viewed through the eyes of a mother, and the mother's perspective is vividly represented in the fiction and memoirs of Peretz, Asch, Yezierska, Olsen, Chernin, and Roiphe.

The prevalence of anger and of maternal viewpoints in Jewish-authored mother-daughter stories arises partially because such motifs are powerfully symbolic of the ambivalence of American Jewish women in a transitional world. Many women find themselves caught, like Yezierska's immigrant heroines, between feelings of loyalty to their traditional Jewish mothers and attraction to their gentile lovers; that conflict is a vivid and graphic symbol of the pull of the past and the lure of the new. The painful predicament of women caught between American and Jewish values was perhaps most pronounced for those families in which poverty exacerbated the division between generations. Several outstanding pieces of fiction explore the confusion of urban women who try to straddle two worlds, without even the financial backing to assure them that they can fully enter American culture if they are willing to leave the Jewish world.

Bernard Malamud's works deal with the conflict between the humanistic values of prophetic Judaism—which he characterizes as "the Jewish heart"—and the amoral materialism that lies at the heart of capitalistic American society. However, most often women are accessories to the action in Malamud's fiction, rather than central or fully developed characters. One of the significant exceptions is the character of Helen Bober in Malamud's 1959 novel, The Assistant. Helen, daughter of a kindhearted, impoverished grocer, Morris Bober, is a young woman of unusual integrity, moral fiber, and intellectual and spiritual potential. However, she is trapped by her socioeconomic position and fears she will never be able to escape her "miserable Bober fate." When a love affair develops between Helen and Frank Alpine, an Italian drifter with a criminal record who becomes her father's grocery assistant, Helen is torn by ambivalent feelings. Is she betraying her parents and her people by loving a non-Jew? Is she betraying her ambitions for higher education and the intellectual life by allying herself with an uneducated man?

To Helen's mother, however, the relationship between Frank and Helen is an unequivocal "tragedy." Helen's mother, Ida, confronts Morris—much as Sholem Aleichem's Golda confronts Tevye and accuses of him of bringing Pertschik into the house so that he may court Hodel—and accuses the grocer of bringing Alpine into the house for Helen. Malamud creates an affecting portrait of mother and daughter, revealing their characters both from within, through their own thought processes, and from without, in the way they are perceived by others. The ties that bind Helen and Ida together and the distances of experience and expectation that separate them from each other testify eloquently to the moral ambiguity that accompanies and complicates mother-daughter relationships in the best American Jewish literature.

Very often in American Jewish literature the intelligent, ambitious daughter feels that she has more in common with her father than with her mother; it is the father who is the kindred spirit. This alliance between father and daughter can leave the mother feeling displaced and alienated from her daughter's love when the daughter moves beyond the need for simple nurture. Thus, in E. M. Broner's novel, Her Mothers, Beatrix, the protagonist, for years makes her mother feel as though she is unworthy of Beatrix's friendship and regard. Beatrix's mother is acutely aware of the way her daughter snubs her, as she complains: "You had your father sign your report card; when you told about your day, about your night, you looked at your father; when you spoke of foreign affairs, money affairs, travel affairs you looked at your father." Because Beatrix is a mother as well as a daughter, she learns through her own experience how great a gift is the reconciliation of a daughter's embrace.

One of the most effective portraits of a confused young woman who feels drawn to her father and guiltily estranged from her mother is found in Seymour Epstein's 1964 novel, Leah. Many readers have expressed astonishment that Leah is authored by a man; the book's delicate, nuanced presentation of the protagonist's psychology illustrates yet again the gender-transcending power of the literary imagination. Leah is a sensitive, thoughtful woman whose empathetic personality draws many men to her. However, none of these men seems to meet her emotional needs, partially because she finds her father's dramatic personality and ostentatious joie de vivre so compelling that all other men suffer by comparison. Leah's father gives her advice about men that is somewhat similar to the advice Marsha Zelenko gives to Marjorie Morningstar: he encourages Leah to live life to the limit, to reach for beauty, truth, and imaginative excellence, rather than for materialistic security. This is especially difficult for a woman like Leah, who works because she must—for a paycheck rather than in fulfillment of inner-directed career goals, a woman who repeatedly meets seemingly ordinary men.

Leah's relationship with her father is intensified by his desertion of her mother, ostensibly because of her mother's lack of emotional responsiveness, her "granite" nature, her paucity of imagination. Leah, like many of the daughters of abandoned mothers described in American Jewish literature, blames her mother for her father's dereliction. She has shared her father's view of her mother for most of her life. However, when an emotional crisis in her own life makes her vulnerable enough to open up to her mother, Leah discovers that her mother exhibits warmth, responsiveness, and inner resources that she had never known or appreciated. She could not have been more amazed, she says, had "pink doves flown out of my mother's mouth."

For the first time in her memory, Leah consciously and positively identifies with her mother; this new identification increases her own sense of direction and self-esteem, making it possible for her to accept a suitor who has genuinely understood and cared for her for many years. For Leah, identification with her mother is liberating. It also makes it possible for her to confront her father with his own hypocrisy, as he grasps for the materialistic security he has always derided. The words with which Leah's out-burst erupts are instructive: "I have a mother!" Leah cries out to her father on a windy street corner. She is capable at last of making her own life.

Divided parental allegiances are additionally complicated when the daughters, like Epstein's Leah or Grace Paley's Faith Darwin Asbury, have more in common intellectually with their fathers than with their mothers. Faith, the frequent heroine of Paley's superb short stories in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later the Same Day, is a searching, idealistic Jewish woman with two sons, whose parents have decided to take early retirement in the Children of Judea Retirement Home. Paley presents an accurate but extraordinarily gentle and balanced picture of the infantilizing mother and her impatient daughter. In "Faith in the Afternoon" Mrs. Darwin greets the news that Faith's husband Ricardo has abandoned Faith by chiding, "Oh, well, Faithy, you know you have a terrible temper." In "Dreamers in a Dead Language," Mrs. Darwin holds Faith's hand and recalls the time when Faith was a baby who sucked applesauce off her fingers. Seemingly unable to comprehend that Faith is a grown, independent woman, she urges Faith to wash her hands more carefully.

Despite the fact that Mrs. Darwin treats Faith like a little girl who has forgotten to wash, she is a sympathetically drawn figure. Faith tolerates her mother's ministrations with reasonable aplomb. What Faith can't tolerate is a revelation her father makes to her later, that he would like to divorce his wife but he can't—because he never married her. When they were young, they were socialist idealists who didn't believe in marriage, he says. Faith bursts out angrily: "Oh, you were idealists.… Well, Pa, you know I have three lovers right this minute. I don't know which one I'll choose to finally marry.… I'm just like you, an idealist. The whole world is getting more idealistic all the time. It's so idealistic. People want only the best, only perfection."

Faith is angry because her father is acting like Ricardo, the gentile husband who left her to pursue other women. Her father speaks as though he will leave her mother a lonely, deserted woman like herself. "So," she shouts at her father, "You and Ricardo ought to get a nice East Side pad with a separate entrance so you can entertain separate girls." Although they are very different in terms of self-knowledge and intellectual capacity, Faith and her mother are both secularized, compassionate, caring women who retain much of the Jewish cultural ethos of concern for others. It seems they may end by having a very similar fate.

This tendency of history to repeat itself in the lives of women is at the heart of much mother-daughter conflict as reported in American Jewish fiction. A common pattern—indeed, a pattern that recalls some of the immigrant fiction as well—depicts a daughter whose entire life is lived in reaction to her mother. Obsessed by the conviction that she does not want to repeat her mother's mistakes, the daughter never truly achieves independence from the past. Frequently, behind the destructive mother-daughter relationship in these contemporary works of American Jewish fiction there is a man whose expectations and demands pit women against each other.

A world of such women is evoked in Vivian Gornick's memoir, Fierce Attachments, which focuses on thwarted women who turn inward, blighting the lives of subsequent generations of women. The Bronx apartment of the protagonist's youth is a rich and colorful world of women, in which her mother is powerful—and yet bitterly aware that she is removed from the patriarchal power structure of the world of work. The Bronx women send mixed messages about the world of men and work to the protagonist as she grows up: men are longed for, hated, admired, and disdained. Concomitantly, the women's ghetto in the apartment building is both safe and threatening, sometimes shimmering with lesbian overtones, sometimes as claustrophobic as the grave. It partakes of the characteristics of a literary community of women as described by Nina Auerbach, in that it is a kind of matriarchal society that both empowers women yet blocks the progress of young women toward independence and maturity in an outside world that is, finally, both patriarchal and heterosexual. Each of Gornick's women struggles to establish a workable relationship with the men in her life, often unsuccessfully. Seeing their personal potential stunted by male demands, priorities, and expectations, some women react with anger, some with denial, and some with apathy and despair.

Gornick's protagonist is obsessed by her mother and by the past partially because her mother withdrew from appropriate nurturing during a pathologically extended period of grieving for her dead husband. As an adolescent, Gornick's protagonist becomes convinced that she can keep her mother alive and functioning only through the sheer strength of her presence and her will. Mothers can withdraw from their daughters for other reasons, as Daphne Merkin illustrates in her novel Enchantment. In Merkin's novel, Hannah Lehman grows up in an affluent German-Jewish Orthodox home on New York's Upper West Side. In contrast with the more familiar stereotype of the "smothering" Jewish mother, Hannah feels that her mother ignores her. Both infatuated with her mother—enchanted—and alienated from her, Hannah finds that all of her subsequent relationships are disturbed. Her mother's emotional withdrawal controls Hannah's life just as surely as another mother's direct manipulation.

Daughters in many pieces of recent American Jewish fiction observe their mothers being neglected or abandoned, and their first impulses are to blame the mother for "provoking" mistreatment and to distance themselves from the mother's fate by showing how "different" they are from their mothers. In Leah and in "Dreamers in a Dead Language," one way in which daughters distance themselves from their mothers is to identify strongly with their fathers, until life circumstances thrust gender bonds upon them. In much American Jewish fiction, another effective way in which the Jewish daughter distances herself from the Jewish mother is to marry or become sexually involved with a partner overtly quite different from the man who married—and then neglected or abandoned—mother; the most "different" type of man is frequently non-Jewish.

Anne Roiphe, in Lovingkindness, makes these emotional currents between mother and daughter explicit. Lovingkindness expands the reactive mother-daughter pattern to three generations: the grandmother, a wealthy, heavily made-up, card-playing, dependent, and conventionally Jewish woman whose husband cheats on her; the mother, Annie, an independent, intellectual, assimilated woman who marries a non-Jew to escape the same fate her mother suffered; and the disturbed granddaughter, Andrea, an emotionally fragile girl who goes from a punk life-style to extreme religiosity in Yeshiva Rachel, a girl's school that educates and indoctrinates "born-again" Jews in Jerusalem, to escape her own mother's values system and behavior.

Roiphe's protagonist remembers her mother weeping day after day over her husband's philandering and neglect; Annie is sure it is her mother's fault: "I believed that if she tried harder she could make him kind and gentle, considerate and loving, that rosebushes could grow in our living room and that birds could fly free in our dining room. I believed that if she worked at it he would stop leaving lipstick-stained shirts on his armchair and come home for dinner and put his arms around her and whisper in her ear and they could put on a record and dance together."

Partially in order to protect herself from the emptiness of her mother's life, Annie seeks out a totally different kind of relationship. Annie determines that she will marry a spectacularly gentile man. Like Philip Roth's Jewish men who rejected Jewish women because they hope to buy American identity in the bed of a gentile, Annie too tries to buy acculturation in the arms of a true American:

I was wanting something exotic, something American, something that spoke of picket fences, white clapboard houses, Fourth of July parades in which children sold lemonade as the Lions and Elks wearing fezzes walked past to the sound of the trumpet and the Veterans of Foreign Wars waved to their families as they marched in uniforms that stretched across stomachs greatly sucked in for the occasion. I wanted to bed with a man who had drunk in the Declaration of Independence with his mother's milk, who knew the purple mountain's majesty because he had inherited the vision from the kind of man who had made stone boulders into even fences. I wanted a man who was not a tourist in towns where the white steeples stung the sky.… I wanted a man who couldn't tell a Yiddish joke.

Annie's choice turns out to be a poor one, and she finds herself increasingly neglected by and then widowed by (perhaps semi-intentionally) her drunken, poetic, gentile husband. Mother-daughter history repeats itself as Annie watches her daughter, named Andrea to evoke the Aegean Isles, reject her values and life-style as definitively as she had rejected her own mother's. Annie reflects long on the nature of mother love as it is depicted in Greek myth and drama and as it plays itself out in contemporary life. Although Annie is appalled by Andrea's coup de grace in becoming a born-again Jew, after traveling to Jerusalem, Annie's negative attitude toward Judaism softens. Annie—and Roiphe—bear witness to the beauty and depth of a woman's restricted life in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. We have come full circle from the writings of Anzia Yezierska. Yezierska describes the daughter's longing to escape from the foreignness and restrictions of the Jewish past. Annie's daughter wants to return to them.

Stricken with ambivalence and doubt, Anne Roiphe's heroine wonders if women's liberation is after all a mere evolutional aberration, which will be erased by the growing forces of fundamentalism. She wonders if women in the future will be relegated, as her daughter has chosen to be relegated, to the quiet byways of the domestic realm. In her questions about the past and future of the personal lives of women and the entanglement of those lives both in Jewish values and in the lives of their mother and daughters, Roiphe's Annie is emblematic of an entire generation of women struggling to find their own path in a transitional society.

CONTEMPORARY SOLDIER WOMEN IN A CHANGING WORLD

American Jewish women struggled not only with their own mothers and daughters but with a plethora of challenges in the shifting landscape of America in the 1970s and 1980s. The whole world was seemingly open to them: they could pursue education as far as their intellectual capacities and ambitions could take them; they could enter any vocational field; they could follow their sexual inclinations into numerous or monogamous, lesbian or heterosexual liaisons; they could have seven children while pursuing a career in gastroenterology or postpone or avoid having children altogether. In terms of their relationship with Judaism, they could attain rabbinical ordination or they could completely estrange themselves from Jewish life. The choices were at times bewildering.

American Jewish literature has faithfully recorded the battles undertaken by Jewish women in this extraordinary time of change. The impact of external forces on the women portrayed in Jewish fiction has shifted perceptibly from decade to decade. Thus, despite the appearance of enormous external change early in the emergence of the contemporary feminist movement, Jewish female protagonists in the early 1970s were often depicted as being victimized by society, being deluded and denuded, being left with what were in actuality "Small Changes," as Marge Piercy insists in her diligent chronicle of the stormy, experimental cultural environment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Piercy portrays Miriam, a bright, talented, lively Jewish female professional who has affairs simultaneously with two gentile men, neither of whom accords her the respect she deserves and whose friendship with each other sometimes seems more real than their relationship with Miriam. Later she marries a seemingly stable Jewish man, but when she wants to augment motherhood with a very modest career, he is ready to leave his "pushy" "orange and purple" Jewish wife for a docile "pastel" non-Jewish subordinate.

Piercy's observation about society's punitive attitude toward vibrant Jewish women jibes with poet Adrienne Rich's essay about being half-Jewish, "Split at the Root." She recalls that the route to success for Jewish women until very recently consisted in their being able to suppress their Jewishness:

With enough excellence, you could presumably make it stop mattering that you were Jewish; you could become the only Jew in the gentile world, a Jew so "civilized," so far from "common," so attractively combining southern gentility with European cultural values that no one would ever confuse you with the raw, "pushy" Jews of New York.…We—my sister, mother, and I—were constantly urged to speak quietly in public, to dress without ostentation, to repress all vividness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamboyant. I suppose that my mother, pure gentile though she was, could be seen as acting "common" or "Jewish" if she laughed too loudly or spoke aggressively.

One thinks also of Hortense Calisher's memories of growing up Jewish in the South, dealing with a mother who, despite her activity in the Temple Sisterhood, "didn't want to be Jewish," who "sneered at the name of a high school friend I had brought home, whose head of blond fuzz she had termed 'kike hair.' … when I went uncombed or unkempt I was accused of having the same." And yet the young Hortense understands also that she is a vehicle for familial continuity, for "when we elders die, you will be our keepers."

By the late 1970s and 1980s, women in American Jewish fiction were most often not only doing active battle with their surroundings but achieving significant triumphs as well, in the fiction of some male as well as female authors. Pushiness—that is, assertive behavior and clearly and forcefully articulated opinions—made a comeback. The soldier woman was back in style, rescued by the general women's liberation movements and by Jewish feminist writing. Interestingly, women have become frequent protagonists of American Jewish short stories and novels during these two decades, not only because far greater numbers of Jewish female authors have recently published books than in earlier historical periods but also because the extent of change in the lives of contemporary Jewish women has been dramatic and full of conflict, offering a broad spectrum of themes to writers of fiction. Thus, a focus on female protagonists and significant supporting characters is found not only in the works of female authors and new figures on the American Jewish literary scene in the 1970s and 1980s but also in the recent works of some established male literary figures, who previously did not seem much interested in women except as accessories to men's lives.

Indeed, it might fairly be stated that feminist exploration is one of the most significant new movements in American Jewish literature, as it is in American Jewish life. This literary exploration has achieved a rather startling prominence in all varieties of literature, running the entire gamut from difficult, critically acclaimed fiction to glossy, melodramatic, shallow romantic novels. As a general observation, the female protagonists in popular Jewish romances are almost always breathtakingly beautiful, and no matter how agonizing their experiences, they almost always achieve the predictable romantic and material successes that are a sine qua non of the genre.… [It] is significant to note that, unlike such novels in the past, today's beautiful protagonists (1) are often identifiably, proudly Jewish, and (2) achieve their goals not through the ministrations of a handsome and mysterious gentleman but through their own intelligent, energetic efforts. The image of the woman in contemporary American Jewish literature has been rehabilitated and transformed even at the most basic, grass-roots level.

Jewish women now appear as protagonists in fiction whose scope extends far beyond "the Oedipal swamp" (to borrow a phrase from Philip Roth). Among major themes that have emerged in recent American Jewish fiction focusing on women, some of the most important include the role of the Holocaust in the identity of survivors, their children, and the broader Jewish community; Israel as a focal point of American Jewish identity and as a setting for the exploration of Jewish identity; a variety of religious and cultural subgroups within Jewish life, such as Sephardi Jewish communities, ultra-Orthodox communities, and feminist groups; sexual subgroups, such as Jewish lesbians and homosexuals; and the tension between intellectual and sensual, personal and professional, Jewish and humanistic agendas in the lives of contemporary American Jewish women. Moreover, feminist themes are often linked with Israel, the Holocaust, and Jewish subgroups and societies in recent American Jewish fiction.

Some feminist literature has been experimental in theme, style, or content. A good example of the creative freedom that marks some self-consciously feminist American Jewish literature can be found in E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, which describes a dozen women and three girls who dream of and plan for a feminist vision of utopia in Israel. They create their own Israeli/Jewish/feminist liturgy, together with its own ceremonial literature and myth. Broner's experimental style blends Hebrew, Yiddish, and biblical motifs within narrative, drama, and poetic forms. Her fiction is an example of what might be termed mythic exploration of feminist issues. Another example of this type of fiction is Kim Chernin's The Flame Bearers, which depicts a sect of Jewish women devoted to a female aspect of godhead called Chochma, the Bride. Other works by the prolific Chernin include feminist-oriented and Jewishly intense essays, such as those found in Reinventing Eve, and memoirs such as In My Mother's House. In one memorable episode in Reinventing Eve, Chernin experiences a spiritual epiphany with a unique Jewish "goddess" in an Israeli village, together with little girls and an aged woman, as the others pray in the synagogue on the High Holidays.

More commonly, however, feminist issues within Jewish and American culture have been explored in familiar American Jewish settings. The female protagonists of recent American Jewish fiction have had to struggle with a multiplicity of identities: they are Jewish, they are Americans, they are daughters and wives and lovers and mothers, they are moderns, they are heirs to an ancient tradition. Equally important, American Jewish women are not depicted as balancing these competing demands exclusively according to their own internal preferences; influences from sweeping historical events to the significant others in women's lives often distort the decision-making process.

The effect of history on the lives of individual women is movingly addressed in Gloria Goldreich's Four Days. While the novel focuses on the moral decision of Ina, a middle-aged daughter of Holocaust survivors, over whether to abort an unplanned pregnancy, an interrelated subplot examines the character of Ina's mother, Shirley Cherne. When Shirley, as a young mother, is incarcerated in a concentration camp with her little daughter, she is passionately maternal, a thin, tenderly loving, indomitable wraith of a woman who manages against all odds to keep her little girl hidden and safe. Once in America, however, Shirley metamorphoses into a plump, hard-edged, pragmatic, and phlegmatic businesswoman who has little time or energy for that same daughter. Ina puzzles over the nature of femininity and maternity and the true identity of her Holocaust mother.

The complex interaction between mothers who are Holocaust survivors and their daughters has been the subject of some of the most compelling recent literature. Rebecca Goldstein's story "The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish," for example, portrays a mother who engineers her daughter's personality through the strongest kind of emotional manipulation; she tries to create of her daughter a selfless, dispassionately altruistic saint, all in an effort to expiate her own profound moral failure within the hell of the concentration camps. Only on her deathbed does she acknowledge that she has been wrong to sacrifice her daughter's autonomy. Cynthia Ozick, in The Shawl, portrays a very different kind of mother, Rosa Lublin, who, like Goldreich's Shirley Cherne, struggles to hide, protect, and nurture her small daughter. But Lublin's daughter is betrayed, discovered, and killed. Rosa, like Demeter unwilling to abandon Persephone to the gods of death and darkness, wills her daughter Magda into life and existence within her own imagination. She imagines every detail of her daughter's physical and emotional existence, her talents, her attitudes, her feelings. Within Rosa's mind, her dead daughter is vital, beautiful, and fierce, "a tigress."

The Holocaust also looms in the background of Saul Bellow's 1989 novella, The Bellarosa Connection. Narrated by an elderly Jewish man, the brilliant and wealthy founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia, the narrative ostensibly describes the relationship between two Jewish men, Holocaust survivor Harry Fonstein and the Broadway producer Billy Rose, who saves Fonstein and many other Jews from the Nazis; in reality, however, the book is animated and dominated by the figure of Sorella Fonstein, Harry's wife. Sorella Fonstein seems at first glance like a character created in order to poke fun: the narrator recalls that when he first met her, "Sorella's obesity, her beehive coif, the preposterous pince-nez—a 'lady' puton—made me wonder: What is it with such people? Are they female impersonators, drag queens?"

Significantly, the Jewish women portrayed in most of Bellow's previous novels are often misfits who display grotesque behaviors or appearances. The three main female figures in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1969), for example, are each devoted to the protagonist but are regarded by him as grossly inferior in their physical, moral, and intellectual capacities. Sammler's daughter Shula is genuinely mad, a pathetic, bewigged creature who scavenges Broadway trash baskets and goes about creating havoc in her own and other people's lives. Sammler thinks that Shula's emotional instability is somehow linked to her thin hair, a quirky symbol of her twisted femininity. Sammler also thinks that the widow, Margotte, who tries to take care of him is "sweet but on the theoretical side very tedious, and when she settled down to an earnest theme, one was lost … because mornings could disappear while Margotte in her goodness speculated." Perhaps most egregiously, Angela Gruner, the sexually hyperactive daughter of Sammler's generous cousin, emits a plethora of sexual odors, speaks constantly of her numerous affairs, and evokes from her otherwise kindhearted father such epithets as "'Bitch' when his daughter approached with all her flesh in motion—thighs, hips, bosom displayed with a certain fake innocence.… Under his breath, Gruner said 'Cow!' or 'Sloppy cunt!'"

In contrast, Sorella Fonstein, while certainly as physically grotesque as any of Bellow's previous female characters, is described with admiration, sympathy, and approval, an admiration all the more astonishing given her doorwayfilling, chair-straining size; she is, as the protagonist comments succinctly, "off the continuum." Bellow characterizes Sorella as a new and totally original type of soldier woman, a woman of immense honesty and courage as well as immense bulk and a woman who triumphs morally over the powerful, womanizing Billy Rose and over the soul-killing materialism of the "Shirley" stereotype.

For decades, Bellow has effectively explored the dialectic of appetite and repulsion that female sexuality evokes in some men. Although fascinating as a psychological phenomenon, the love-hate relationship that men have with women's bodies has been the basis of profound discrimination against women at many times and in many cultures. This discrimination has attracted the attention of Jewish women writing today, who often include in their fiction male characters who project their own psychological ambivalence onto female physical characteristics and virtually convert normal female physiology into a type of pathology.

One of the most devastatingly witty and accurate satires on the male projectionist fallacy is found in Cynthia Ozick's The Cannibal Galaxy, which portrays Hester Lilt, a world-renowned philosopher who enters her daughter in the Jewish day school of principal Joseph Brill. Lilt suffers socially because of her dual nature—at times she is isolated or even ostracized by a society that continues to insist, "either mind or body." Initially, Lilt impresses Joseph Brill as another order of being from most women, especially from other mothers, because she is rational, honest, and direct. Brill thinks that most mothers are like frenzied creatures on a hormonal flood but that Hester—the intellectual female—is necessarily different:

It was strange to think she had a child. Profoundly, illimitably, he knew the mothers; she was not like any of them. The unselfconscious inexorable secretion ran in all of them. From morning to night they were hurtled forward by the explosions of internal rivers, with their roar of force and pressure. The mothers were rafts on their own instinctual flood … that was why they lived and how: to make a roiling moat around their offspring … they were in the pinch of nature's vise.… And their offspring too would one day be the same: aggressive, arrogant, pervicacious.

Having decided that most mothers are all body, all instinctive frenzy to protect their offspring, but that Hester is different and all mind, Brill blurts out to her that her daughter is an inferior creature and is not worth the love of her intellectual mother. He is shocked by the white fury with which Lilt answers him. Brill decides that "she was like the others: nature's trick, it comes in with the milk of the teat."

Nature's trick, of course, is that both men and women have dual natures, a duality that has been expressed via many literary formulas down through the centuries. Both men and women are pulled between the demands of intellect and rationality, on the one hand, and the demands of emotion, passion, and compassion on the other. It is out of this conflict between priorities—each necessary to civilized human life—that individuals forge their own unique answers, in the words of Olsen's revolutionary refrain, "every life a song."

But because one of the formulas used to express human duality has been gender-related, women have often been relegated exclusively to earthly concerns, in literature as in life. Sometimes women's so-called earthliness has been seen as praiseworthy, in the woman of valor mode of the radiant enabler, and sometimes it has been seen as destructive, even demonic: man would soar to spiritual and artistic heights but for women's seductiveness or interference.

Ozick plays with these and other stereotypes in her short story "Puttermesser and Xanthippe." Puttermesser, a highly rational lawyer in her thirties working as a civil servant for the city of New York, is passionately devoted to improving the life of the city, but she has a relatively undistinguished position and little power. Attorney Puttermesser actually is drawn along the lines of a male stock figure of Yiddish comic stories: the luftmensch, or "skyman," the Jewish intellectual whose total lack of practical knowledge and ability cause failure at every endeavor. Although she is intellectually capable and is often given the task of training young male lawyers, she has no street smarts—her name means "butter knife"; she is not sharp—and she is never promoted.

After a series of humiliating demotions, Puttermesser unwittingly creates a female golem, a creature who insists on being called by the name of Xanthippe, Socrates' putatively shrewish wife. Just as the male golem in Jewish folktales begins by fulfilling the dreams of his creator and saving the Jews of the city, Puttermesser's lady golem begins by transforming New York. The city becomes a place of peace, joy, harmony, and prosperity. Puttermesser becomes mayor of New York City and is able to accomplish all of her goals. However, it is in the nature of the golem to continue growing and growing and to become more and more controlled by lust rather than rationality. Whereas the male golem becomes more and more destructive—all those androgens—the female golem fulfills male anxieties about the fully sexual adult female as she becomes a monster of sexuality—all those estrogens. She neglects her benign dictatorship of the city and sexually decimates all of the male civil servants. The city slips back into its old poverty and decadence. Eventually the golem—sheer, unthinking power—always threatens to destroy its superrational creator unless it itself is destroyed. Puttermesser must assume the agonizing task of destroying her female golem, and the overintellectualized female luftmensch is left without power or progeny.

American Jewish women still struggle with a variety of male power structures, according to recent American Jewish fiction. In another response to perceived misogyny and patriarchal oppression, some Jewish authors have championed lesbianism as both a physical/social orientation and a political statement. Such authors describe the worldview and experiences of those Jewish women who reject male-identified gender behavior and identify primarily with other women. Fiction depicting the lives of Jewish lesbians, once difficult to find, has begun to appear more frequently now: interested readers may enjoy Alice Bloch's novel The Law of Return; Leslea Newman's collection of short stories, A Letter to Harvey Milk; and Edith Konecky's A Place at the Table, among other fictional explorations of Jewish lesbian life. Although some Jewish lesbian writing is highly critical of Jewish tradition, which it perceives as hostile to its very existence, a significant amount of Jewish lesbian writing is deeply committed to Jewish peoplehood and Jewish survival, and several anthologies have been largely dedicated to Jewish-content feminist and lesbian writing.

Gloria Kirchheimer's story, "Food of Love," is drawn from one such anthology, The Tribe of Dina. Kirchheimer's story focuses on yet another subgroup in American Jewish life, the large Sephardi community of American Jews. Sephardi women have their own special relationship with patriarchal family and community systems. Many Sephardi Jewish women have stated that women in Sephardi society have been far more cloistered and restricted in their activities than women deriving from German or Eastern European Jewish societies. Beyond the boundaries of the Sephardi community, Sephardi Jewish women often suffer from a double discrimination: they are suspect because they are women and because they are not of Ashkenazi derivation. Ruth Setton, in her story "Street of the Whores" presents the struggles of a young Sephardi woman to find her own path and to survive repeated onslaughts upon her self-esteem. Both her femaleness and her Moroccan heritage are regarded by other characters as intrinsically dirty and unreliable. She must not only deal with their attacks but keep her inner life free from the temptation to internalize these destructive images.

The theme of continuing attacks on the self-esteem of Jewish women emerges as an important motif in recent American Jewish fiction. As in the past, discomfort with the fully sexual adult female presence is sometimes absorbed by women themselves. The framework of fear of the overtly female has, of course, shifted with time and changing mores: Peretz's overbearing matron warned her daughter that female sexuality could lure men and women into sin, which men could overcome through scholarship and piety but which would surely doom the careless woman; today the religious scaffolding of misogyny is far from ubiquitous. However, some women in contemporary American Jewish literature still exhibit squeamishness about their female nature.

Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem wittily captures many facets of the discomfort American Jewish women can still feel about themselves. That discomfort ranges from a lack of self-esteem, in which a woman is made to feel deficient because she is both attractive and intelligent, to a real revulsion against female physiology. In Goldstein's book, one woman comes to see her mind as the enemy that threatens her chances for a happy marriage. Another woman articulates the pathological attitudes toward the female body that both Bellow and Ozick put into the mouths of men; here, women have absorbed destructive male attitudes so thoroughly that they see their bodies as the enemy.

Goldstein surveys the many prejudices that confront the brilliant, multifaceted woman. Her female protagonist, Renee Feuer, is a beautiful young woman who goes to Princeton to get a Ph.D. in philosophy and studies philosophical approaches to the dichotomy between the intellect (the mind) and the senses (the body). Her professors do not take her seriously—she is too beautiful—until she gains legitimacy by marrying a world-famous mathematical genius. The genius wants Renee to abandon her career and make herself his organizer and enabler. Renee's best friend, Ava, an attractive classmate from Barnard who has now become an intentionally ugly academic, reinforces the idea that femininity and intellectualism are mutually exclusive, that "feminine is dumb," and that a woman who hopes to be taken seriously as a scientist must "stamp out all traces of girlishness."

Ava's insistence that she cannot see herself both as a woman and as an intellectual is true not only of women in the sciences but often of women in the arts as well. Hortense Calisher argues that many female writers and painters have absorbed the judgments of their male colleagues. They are terrified that if they are perceived as female artists their art will be somehow trivialized or diminished: "She knows her own capacity for the universal, and will not have it contaminated with the particular—if the particularity is feminine. Looking abroad, it can be seen what happens to women who do ride their femininity in the literary races: Doris Lessing, tied to psychiatry, suffragettism, and the vaginal reflex." It is their flight away from overt femaleness, however, that actually does reduce the power of some female writers, Calisher suggests. Only by speaking out with their own voices can the full power of their artistic vision be realized.

For many years, some female writers suppressed aspects of their experience in order to assimilate into the dominantly patriarchal literary environment. Similarly, Jewish writers for many years catered to the predominantly non-Jewish literary establishment either by ignoring Jewish subject matter or by treating Jewish characters as a species of precocious "others," existential heroes or court jesters, whose value consisted in their standing both inside and outside Christian or secular societies and commenting on them. Few American Jewish writers prior to 1965 explored what being Jewish meant for the Jews themselves. Just as female writers today are reclaiming their own womanly voices, Jewish writers are regaining their Jewish voices. Jewish female writers, doubly marginal, for many years disguising two primary aspects of their identity, are at last writing out of their full vision. Writers such as Cynthia Ozick, Rebecca Goldstein, and others draw on the full, complex, often contradictory and conflicting particularisms of their female Jewish American experience and vision.

Contemporary American Jewish writers often focus specifically on women's struggles to be treated as multifaceted individuals. Their works illustrate the fact that the battle is far from over. As surely as is I. B. Singer's Yentl the yeshiva boy, Rebecca Goldstein's Ava is convinced that she must dress, act, and think like a man in order to be considered, by others and by herself, a bona fide intellectual. She must reject her female nature, mind and body, to participate in the discipline she loves, albeit it is physics rather than the Talmud that she studies, and it is drab, androgynous clothing rather than a taalith that she dons. As keenly as did Jewish heroines of past decades, Renee Feuer rejects the rigid pieties of her mother's life, but she longs for the melodies and flavors, the spiritual and communal richness of traditional Jewish culture. Depictions of Jewish women have become broader, deeper, and more believable than they had been in recent decades, but the problems Jewish female protagonists face bear more than a passing resemblance to the problems of Jewish women in the past.

A new and yet curiously traditional protagonist has emerged in contemporary American Jewish fiction: the strong, intelligent woman who struggles with conflicts arising from within and from without. The scope of female protagonists in American Jewish fiction is more diverse than it has been for decades, reflecting changing economic and societal conditions for American women. Despite radical changes in the social realities and in the literary depictions of women in recent American Jewish literature, however, the ancestry of the contemporary soldier woman remains a venerable one, enriched immeasurably by historical and literary precedents.