SOURCE: "The Outsider Within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 378-93.

[In the following essay, Aarons explores the "paradox of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion" from tradition and heritage that women in Jewish-American literature face.]

For quite some time now the issue of ethnic identity in Jewish-American fiction has posed a central concern for critics and writers alike, a concern bred from the necessity to identify the place of Jewish fiction within the broader scope of American literary culture. Not unlike other literatures that we have come to call "ethnic," black or chicano fiction, for instance, or even those which comprise the "immigrant experience" in fiction (such as Maxine Hong Kingston's novels of Chinese-Americans), Jewish-American writing emerges as yet another example—if not the primary paradigm—of both an "ethnic" and an "immigrant" fiction. Certainly the Jewish-American literature that directly grew out of the early immigrant experience in America, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts (1920), for example, yielded to such literary concerns as dialect and a preoccupation with themes of assimilation and ethnic identity. Perhaps the best-known novel of the Jewish immigrant's journey from steerage to New York tenement life, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), self-consciously calls attention to the problematic mingling of languages and customs that characterized the "greenhorn's" struggle to integrate into American culture. This novel in many ways stands as a beacon to the immigrant's epic survival, much as Roth's metaphorical description in the prologue of the towering statue in New York's harbor ironically illuminates the immigrant's precarious passage into mainstream America: "the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty." By its very nature, then, early Jewish-American fiction was relegated to a certain outsider status. Both the writers and their fictions were situated on the outskirts of our perceived notions of the American literary heritage.

For post World War II Jewish writers, however, this outsider posture seemed no longer a requirement. Bellow, Malamud, and Philip Roth merge into the mainstream of American literature to stand alongside Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. More and more, Jewish writers speak about and within American culture, transcending an earlier "immigrant" identity imposed by an alien culture. In Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century, Leon Yudkin suggests such a shift in the place of American Jewish writers from the outskirts to the mainstream of literary culture when he argues that:

By the 1940's, a substantial native-born generation considered itself as much a part of the national fabric as any other element, religious or ethnic. To be an American Jew became increasingly one of the ways of being an American.… This did not mean that there was no longer a characteristically Jewish literature but its form of expression changed. The Jew could not easily see himself as an immigrant if he was of local provenance and an English-speaking American national. He was already, on the whole, commercially successful, socially established if not totally integrated, and did not have another mother country to look back to nostalgically or to summon as a measure.

Yudkin's point here seems particularly significant in light of our attention to defining literature in terms of its ethnic origins. He argues even further that in American literature since the 1940s,

the Jewish voice is not only heard but increasingly accepted as the norm. Jewish terminology, except in certain instances of specialist exposition, is no longer explained to the reader. Yiddish has entered the American language, and the Jewish type with the implication of his cultural, social and historical background is understood as part of the scene. Bellow does not have to translate to the extent that Cahan did. And the Jew is not seen on the fringes of society, trying to edge his way in. In many ways, he exemplifies that society. And Jewish literature is peculiarly American literature.

Yet Jewish women writers, at least in our formal recognition of them, remain beyond the pale of established critical acclaim. Less recognized than their male counterparts, yet nonetheless emerging in the American literary scene, contemporary Jewish women writers continue to be faced with issues of ethnic identity and self-definition, reinforcing the "immigrant" status that defined earlier Jewish fiction in America. For, if Jewish fiction in America has been marked by a certain outsider status, it may be all the more so for Jewish women writers, who are outsiders to the traditional, male-dominated literary culture, as well as to the more traditional Jewish laws, which limit women's roles in public worship and in institutional power.

What we find in the writing of many contemporary Jewish women, such as Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Cynthia Ozick, and Hortense Calisher, is a self-conscious recognition of an outsider position in both American culture and Judaism. When coupled as oft-perceived products of a literary subculture, Jewish ethnic identity and an emerging "women's fiction" become finally questions of voice, a voice that is at once a source of richness and tension in the fiction of contemporary Jewish-American women. In defining that voice, we come somewhat closer, I believe, to securing a coherent vision, a common world view, shared by many Jewish women writers in America.

I do not mean to suggest that literary concerns of ethnicity no longer remain central to the more established male Jewish writers. Indeed, the ethnicity of writers such as Malamud and their categorization as Jewish writers result in critical debate still. Robert Alter, in After the Tradition, suggests this tension:

It is by no means clear what sense is to be made of the Jewishness of a writer who neither uses a uniquely Jewish language, nor describes a distinctively Jewish milieu, nor draws upon literary traditions that are recognizably Jewish.

Here the complexity of the issues surrounding Jewish identity in the fiction of American writers crystallizes. Unlike other literary subgenres that call attention to questions of ethnicity and identity (such as black, hispanic, native American, or lesbian literatures), Jewish-American fiction seems to raise issues of a distinctively different nature. Because the Jews assimilated so quickly (unlike other minority groups still pursuing their rights and fashioning their American identities), Jewish identity has been complex enough to force itself upon the design of American fiction. While group affiliation would be the apparent linking concept of minority literatures, such public matters of identity give way to more private concerns with personal identity for the Jew in America. Jewish-American literature is still an "immigrant fiction" because of the complexities of the question of what it means to be a Jew in America. Can one remain a Jew in a secular "melting pot" and still feel at home there, still maintain a posture of economic and social success? This is the essential focus for contemporary Jewish-American writers. The question of whether one can remain a Jew in America, that is, can remain connected to the faith, underlies the thematic tensions in works as diverse as I. B. Singer's "The Son from America," Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice," and Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith." As one might expect, however, the issue of whether one can remain a Jew in America is not only a matter of faith, but involves an even deeper connection to the heritage, to the past, to the disappearing world of the "fathers."

Because of these complexities, a singular "Jewish" voice is untenable. Before one could identify a Jewish voice, one would have to answer some very vexing questions: How does one define the ethnicity of a writer: by his or her direct political statements? By his or her depiction in fiction of Jewish characters, environment, and issues? By his or her birth alone? Must a writer address particular Jewish issues or situations to be considered a Jewish writer? These questions are difficult because of the uncertainty in the definition of a uniquely Jewish character or context in America, where the character is as much American as Jewish and the context grounded in an American ethos. Questions of Jewish identity in writing are not unlike those currently faced by contemporary women writers, who have often felt compelled to address the issue of a "women's fiction," whether or not they consider themselves advocates of the genre. The current controversy among feminist critics and writers highlights this concern.

As Adrienne Rich and others have argued, how we define ourselves involves complex personal and political issues. This process of self-definition—especially for women who have been alienated historically from the Western literary heritage—presents itself in the literature by women as more than a search for identity, for a fixed personal identity. (I make the distinction here, knowing that it is a controversial one, between feminist writers, unified by a political ideology, and writers who are women.) Rather it seems to me that the attempts at self-definition through literature become a process of self-fashioning, of forging an identity. For contemporary Jewish-American women writers, faced with dual issues of sexual and ethnic identity, the process of self-definition is further complicated.

Can we make certain assumptions about Jewish women writers that will not simply reinforce well-worn stereotypes about both Jews and women? Does a self-perceived "ghettoization," the formative influence in the development of the Jew as "outsider," keep Jewish women writers on the margin of American literary culture? Such self-conscious distinctions go no little way in reinforcing an outsider status, despite, for example, Leon Yudkin's contention that the Jew in literature has secured a firm place by moving "from the periphery to the centre" of American literary tradition.

The motif of the outsider as fictional stereotype has been overly simplified in much of the writing about Jewish literature. To call the Jewish writer simply an outsider, distanced from both the American experience and from his or her Jewish heritage, ignores the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the problems of ethnic identification in fiction. As outsider, the Jew—as fictional character and as writer—becomes much more than a stereotype. The very tension in the fiction of Jewish-American writers is the insider-outsider paradox, the ability of the Jew to be at once insider and outsider, in terms of both America and Judaism.

Nonetheless, Jewish-American writers, I would maintain, remain in many ways on the periphery of the literary culture still, in no little part as a result of their own self-consciousness of their position in the literary community. Cynthia Ozick defines this troublesome position well when she depicts herself as "a third-generation American Jew (though the first to have been native-born) perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal." Ozick's description of the Jewish writer as defined by a precarious balance between acculturation and estrangement reflects a self-consciousness on the part of the Jewish writer, a self-conscious Judaism that extends to the characters' visions of themselves and to their perceived place in America.

Tillie Olsen's famous story, "Tell Me a Riddle," depicts a woman, an immigrant, who has spent her adult years struggling for equilibrium and comfort in America, who finally when her children are grown, when her death is imminent, renounces Judaism, renounces a connection to any specific faith. In the hospital, when told she is on the Jewish list for visiting rabbis, she proclaims: "Not for rabbis. At once go and make them change. Tell them to write: Race, human; Religion, none." For this old woman, Judaism—the religion and inherent traditions—represents backwardness, persecution, and restriction. Her daughter, American-born, tries to recreate tradition, ritual. She looks to her mother for a key to the past, for a link to Judaism, hoping to enrich the present. However, instead of being drawn to the tradition of her youth, the dying woman regards such rituals as the lighting of candles as "Superstition! From our ancestors, savages, afraid of the dark, or of themselves: mumbo words and magic lights to scare away ghosts." Her vision of Judaism militates against her principles of humanity, principles for which she fought in Olshana, in the old country, principles that flew in the face of a centuries-long stronghold of oppression. In a bitter recollection of what it meant to be Jewish, Olsen's protagonist decries the faith of her "fathers":

Candles bought instead of bread and stuck into a potato for a candlestick? Religion that stifled and said: in Paradise, woman, you will be the footstool of your husband, and in life—poor chosen Jew—ground under, despised, trembling in cellars. And cremated. And cremated.…

Heritage. How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savages—this to teach. To look back and learn what humanizes—this to teach. To smash all ghettos that divide us—not to go back, not to go back—this to teach.

Olsen's protagonist rebels against a determined adherence to a faith that persecutes and against long-ingrained gender expectations that reinforce her alienation from a religion that persecutes even more because of her status as a woman. To the amazement of her family, she cannot respond to her grandchildren. Her husband scolds her: "Unnatural grandmother, not able to make herself embrace a baby." The kind of isolation felt by the protagonist in "Tell Me a Riddle" is derived from the pressure to be what she is not, to live up to an externally defined posture of doting Jewish grandmother, solicitous wife, acquiescent old woman, content with the passage of age. She views these predetermined roles as denials of the progressive secular humanist she sees herself to be. She tells her granddaughter, "'it is more than oceans between Olshana and you,'" and yet her hopes for equality and freedom, values symbolized by America, plummet in the face of continued oppression. Those socialist ideologies of her youth in the old country—ideologies that gave her life-blood—failed to materialize in the "land of the free," and so she remains an immigrant still, ghettoized, as she was in the shtetl, by her refusal to "move to the rhythms of others," to accept the diminished circumstances willed to her. The old woman's husband finally comes to understand his wife's longing and loss, and remembering the ideals of the past, sees them now in the light of betrayal and failure of the twentieth century: "'"in the twentieth century ignorance will be dead, dogma will be dead, war will be dead, and for all humankind one country—of fulfillment?" Hah!'"

The immigrant's distance from his or her homeland, the "outsider" status, provides us with a vision of loss, disappointment, and disillusion. In Cynthia Ozick's brilliant short story, "Envy: Or, Yiddish in America," the main character, Edelshtein, must forever remain unnoticed because he writes his poetry in Yiddish and has no English translator. He derides America as "the empty bride," without dowry, without history, without identity. The wry humor with which he is portrayed by Ozick is constantly checked by our sympathies for him. Edelshtein's despair over the fate of Yiddish in America is momentarily arrested by his delight in finding a young woman, American-born, who reads Yiddish. Edelshtein's delusion that he has finally found a translator who will make him famous, will make his works known in America, founders when he discovers that Hannah, the would-be translator of his work, will not translate poems of the "ghetto." She is interested only in poetry that reflects universal concerns, poetry in the mainstream, "'In the world.… Not in your little puddles.'" Edelshtein's response to Hannah's attack demonstrates the enormous gap between the immigrant and the American-born Jew, the latter a Jew by descent only:

"Again the ghetto. Your uncle stinks from the ghetto? Graduated, 1924, the University of Berlin, Vorovsky stinks from the ghetto? Myself, four God-given books not one living human being knows, I stink from the ghetto? God, four thousand years since Abraham hanging out with Jews, God also stinks from the ghetto?"

"Rhetoric," Hannah said. "Yiddish literary rhetoric."

Hannah, unlike the American-born daughters in Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle," perceives her "heritage" not as a source of richness and continuity, but rather as a preoccupation with suffering, as a curse: "'Suffer suffer,' she said. 'I like devils best. They don't think only about themselves and they don't suffer.'" Hannah seeks a universal—not a peculiarly Jewish—history, much in fact like Olsen's protagonist, a history without the emotional vestiges of the "old country," free from suffering, from defeat, from self-delusion. Edelshtein's outrage at Hannah's neglect of the past emphasizes the chasm between generations, between cultures. He, in turn, denies her a past, curses her: "'Forget Yiddish!' he screamed at her. 'Wipe it out of your brain! Extirpate it! Go get a memory operation! You have no right to it, you have no right to an uncle, a grandfather! No one ever came before you, you were never born! A vacuum!'"

As Edelshtein cries out, it ultimately may be a matter of "rights," that the birthright, the right of identity, a connection to the past, to Judaism, carries with it the emotional baggage of the outsider. However, being a Jew in twentieth-century America takes on a decidedly different meaning from what it meant to be a Jew in the Eastern European shtetls. This difference in definition finally prevents Hannah and Edelshtein, Tillie Olsen's dying mother and her American-born children, and the host of Jewish characters separated by generations, from residing comfortably under the same "roof."

Problems with generational differences and with "place" are deeply connected to issues of identity and ethnicity. Grace Paley's protagonists, especially the women, struggle with identity, with their physical place in the world, and in relationships with other people—parents, husbands, children, peers. For Paley, Judaism often appears in her short stories as a nagging reminder of the past, a loss, a constant source of disquiet for many of her characters. The main character, Faith, in Paley's short story, "Faith in the Afternoon," for example, is caught between differing visions of the world. On the one hand, she remains connected to the world of the "fathers," as characterized by her parents, and on the other, she lives in a more modern America, a world seemingly free from the bonds of historical and religious dictates. Having left Judaism in a formal sense, reinforced by her marriage to a gentile, a union that finally—acrimoniously—leaves her to raise her children on her own (" 'I love their little goyish faces,'" her father says of his grandchildren), Faith attempts to bridge the two worlds. Although she has abandoned the old neighborhood of her childhood, she nostalgically turns to her mother in search of information of people from her past, and feels connected to them; their tsouris, their suffering, is akin to her own. Yet she remains inevitably outside of both worlds, her predicament ironically similar to the very immigrant parentage against which she shields herself:

Her grandmother pretended she was German in just the same way that Faith pretends she is an American. Faith's mother flew in the fat face of all that and, once safely among her own kind in Coney Island, learned real Yiddish, helped Faith's father, who was not so good at foreign languages, and as soon as all the verbs and necessary nouns had been collected under the roof of her mouth, she took an oath to expostulate in Yiddish and grieve only in Yiddish, and she has kept that oath to this day.

Faith has only visited her parents once since she began to understand that because of Ricardo she would have to be unhappy for a while. Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.

Yet in her failure to achieve the American image of happiness—the immigrant's dream—Faith can neither reconcile herself to her family, which is her past, nor adjust to the present. So her relationship with both parents, but especially with her father, is wrought with emotional turbulence; her "Judaism" becomes self-conscious, very much on the surface of her actions and responses.

While the father figure in Jewish literature is a powerful force with whom to be reckoned, the figure of the mother provides a deep connection to the past. Unlike Olsen's protagonist in "Tell Me a Riddle," it is often the mother who, because of her garrulity and penchant for participating actively in the lives of her neighbors and friends (frequently depicted humorously), is a rich source of information and continuity. It is not surprisingly the mothers who strongly adhere to the "world of the fathers," the mothers to whom the American-born children return time and time again. The tradition of the mother in Jewish literature—a tradition that unfortunately often lends itself to the worst kind of stereotyping—has a long history for both male and female Jewish writers. Shenandoah Fish, for instance, in Delmore Schwartz's short story, "America! America!," suffers from a loss of identity while traveling abroad and returns home to his mother's kitchen where, almost despite himself, he listens and is drawn to his mother's stories of old family ties. In them he recognizes his connection to the people in his past, not without a good deal of self-recognition and guilt, born from his conscious attempt to distance himself from his mother's immigrant history and to intellectualize his family's past. He comes to recognize his condescension toward his family and their friends with no little self-disgust:

Shenandoah was exhausted by his mother's story. He was sick of the mood in which he had listened, the irony and the contempt which had taken hold of each new event. He had listened from such a distance that what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. How different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from the inside, looking out.

And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity.

Despite Shenandoah's recognition of his unbreakable connection to his heritage, an insight he has not come upon without considerable turmoil, he remains an outsider still: "'I do not see myself. I do not know myself. I cannot look at myself truly.'" Shenandoah, like many of the fictive American-born children of immigrant parentage, suffers from a self-imposed but equally uncomfortable "immigrant" condition. He is and is not a part of his parents' world. Thus in characters like Shenandoah and Faith, we see, not a transcendence of traditional values, but a fragmentation of identity resulting from, on the one hand, a guilt-ridden attraction to the old ways and, on the other, the realization that the attraction, both curiosity and instinct, is felt inevitably from the "outside."

The outsider's sense of difference often results in a perceived failure to live up to the expectations of one's parents—a theme itself consistently found in the literature. We find it, for example, in such works as Chaim Potok's The Chosen, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's Falling, and Herbert Gold's "The Heart of the Artichoke," in which the conflict of values and choices between children and their parents—mothers who know intimate details of the lives of their neighbors, fathers who ascribe to postwar American notions of success, parents who believe in fixed absolutes, such as family loyalty, hard work, and the like—creates considerable ambivalence for the protagonists. This tension manifests itself, I believe, most strikingly in the depiction of the "modern" Jewish woman, who is, in many ways, expected to carry on the tradition. In Hortense Calisher's short stories this ambivalence manifests itself in a quiet recognition, but by no means an unqualified acceptance, of change. In "The Rabbi's Daughter," for example, Calisher's protagonist leaves the refined "world of the fathers," for her the relatively genteel world of the Jewish middle class, surrenders her career as a pianist for marriage to a man who works with his hands, yields finally to a style of dress and decorum unlike those to which she is accustomed, and takes up a life of transience. The difference in the rabbi's daughter's two hands, one more roughened than the other, reflects with understated power the dual nature of her existence. Gazing at her hand, she proclaims: "This one is still 'the rabbi's daughter,'" the hand unmarred by work, unblemished by worries about finances and domestic concerns.

Characteristic of many of the protagonists uncovered in the fiction of Jewish-American women, the rabbi's daughter breaks from the tradition, the life, but can never entirely leave the world of her "father," that world so ingrained, so very much at the heart of her identity and her struggle. This kind of ambivalence prevents the female protagonists from living comfortably in either world. For the rabbi's daughter, it breeds resentment, dissatisfaction, a sense of self as "visitor." The rabbi's daughter, upon leaving her family and moving into new temporary lodgings found by her husband, "heard her own voice, sugared viciously with wistfulness. 'Once I change [my attire] I'll be settled. As long as I keep it on … I'm still a visitor.'" Shedding her "travel" clothes—an adornment of past luxury—becomes a metaphor for relinquishing a past life for a much less certain future, a future without the fixed values and traditions of the "fathers."

Similarly, Paley's character Faith is equally infused with an ambivalence that causes both shame and anxiety, manifested by an uneasy love for her father, whom she can no longer look in the eye:

He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.…

Mr. Darwin reached for her fingers through the rail. He held them tightly and touched them to her wet cheeks. Then he said, "Aaah …" an explosion of nausea, absolute digestive disgust. And before she could turn away from the old age of his insulted face and run home down the subway stairs, he had dropped her sweating hand out of his own and turned away from her.

The image presented here is strikingly visual; Faith's father virtually pulls on her, drawing his daughter to him, begging her to return to the fold. A tug of war ensues, from which neither emerges as victor.

Paley's characteristically ironic—often tentatively humorous—voice balances the pathos of her characters and situations. This voice might best be characterized as a kind of self-irony, born perhaps from the inherent problems of self-definition and from the recognition of the precarious posture of the American Jew. Jewish writers thus are ironically detached from, yet identify with, their characters.

As distanced from traditional Jewish values and culture as many of the characters are—Hannah, the rabbi's daughter, the dying old woman who denounces a faith that denies humanity, the young mother in Paley's story who recognizes the disparate needs of her father and herself—they have nonetheless a bond, a haunting connection to Judaism, an obsession with the past, an often unspoken alliance with "the fathers." Susan Fromberg Schaeffer metaphorically suggests this link to a collective sense of identity:

they remembered with wonder, how their lives, and their characters, and their morals and their fates had always hung there like long clothes in the closet, waiting for them to grow into them.

This compelling link to the past, a past experienced often elusively as a sort of collective memory for the American-born children, is nowhere more apparent than in the fiction that draws heavily upon the tension between the immigrant parent and his or her American-born child. This reliance on collective memory is what allows Grace Paley's narrator in "Mom" to relate the images of her childhood memory of her mother, like all mothers, who calls to the child from the window to come in off the street: "I am not the child. She isn't my mother. Still, in my head where remembering is organized for significance (not usefulness), she leans far out." For the American-born children of Jewish immigrants, life in America is both a blessing and a curse, ironically for the same reason: because one is not in Europe. Paley, in "The Immigrant Story," establishes this paradox, when a young couple attempt to grapple with their parents' lives, and with their own childhoods (a common theme in Paley's works):

Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?

I suppose so, I answered. As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief.…

What if this sorrow is all due to history? I asked.

The cruel history of Europe, he said. In this way he showed ironic respect to one of my known themes.

The narrator of the story remembers her childhood perception of America, reflected by an incantation: "I made an announcement to the sixth-grade assembly thirty years ago. I said: I thank God every day that I'm not in Europe. I thank God I'm American-born and live on East 172nd Street where there is a grocery store, a candy store, and a drugstore on one corner and on the same block a shul and two doctors' offices." Yet as the narrator itemizes the gains, her luck in being an American, Jack recounts the losses of the immigrant experience, of his parents' past. For him, America symbolizes the ultimate sacrifice, that of parents for children who constantly deny the promise. The misery, the guilt, and the confusion Jack feels stem primarily from his own sense of failure. Jack remembers the comparative ease of his life in juxtaposition with his pieced-together fictional picture of his parents' struggle, a picture that comes together in his "memory" of likely events:

My mother and father came from a small town in Poland. They had three sons. My father decided to go to America, to 1. stay out of the army, 2. stay out of jail, 3. save his children from everyday wars and ordinary pogroms. He was helped by the savings of parents, uncles, grandmothers and set off like hundreds of thousands of others in that year.… Mostly he put his money away for the day he could bring his wife and sons to this place. Meanwhile, in Poland famine struck. Not hunger which all Americans suffer six, seven times a day but Famine, which tells the body to consume itself.… My father met my mother at the boat. He looked at her face, her hands. There was no baby in her arms, no children dragging at her skirt.… She had shaved her head, like a backward Orthodox bride, though they had been serious advanced socialists like most of the youth of their town. He took her by the hand and brought her home. They never went anywhere alone, except to work or the grocer's. They held each other's hand when they sat down at the table, even at breakfast. Sometimes he patted her hand, sometimes she patted his. He read the paper to her every night.

Their story is the immigrant's story, and their sorrow, their loss, becomes that of their children, American-born, both finally outsiders. Jack's efforts to explain his parents' lives in America, like the obsessive queries made of Olsen's resistant protagonist—"Day after day, the spilling memories. Worse now, questions, too. Even the grand-children: Grandma, in the olden days, when you were little"—speak to, I think, an attempt at alleviating the fragmentation that has become the by-product of contemporary Jewish-American life. Such attempts often fail, however, because of the tensions inherent in the outsider's relation to his or her culture, expressed again by Shenandoah Fish:

Shenandoah tried to imagine their arrival in the new world and their first impression of the city of New York. But he knew that his imagination failed him, for nothing in his own experience was comparable to the great displacement of body and mind which their coming to America must have been.

It is not so simple to argue that what we finally uncover in Jewish-American writing is a conflict of generations, a struggle between the immigrants and their American-born children. A struggle, certainly. However, it is a struggle that connects as well as divides. For such children in fiction, even those long since grown, the oral history embedded in their memories remains paradoxically a source of both connection and estrangement. Despite the host of characters caught in an ambivalent, often warring posture with their heritage, the guiding voice of the writer, almost without exception, tempers the conflict, makes sense of the tension through empathy. It is no wonder, then, that this conflict has as its center the family, for, as Robert Alter has recently argued, "the family, after all, is the matrix of our psychological lives, of our political, moral, and theological imaginings."

While this ambivalence is articulated most pronouncedly in the language of the vanishing immigrant in Jewish-American literature, the insidiousness of separateness, of identity by ethnicity, appears also in that literature remote from the immigrant experience. Hortense Calisher's short story, "Old Stock," for example, suggests a different vision of the outsider. The assimilated and refined Mrs. Elkin, who considers herself and her daughter removed from those "Jews whose grosser features, voices, manners offended her sense of gentility all the more out of her resentful fear that she might be identified with them," finds herself the very burnt of anti-Semitism, all the more disturbing because of her own anti-Semitic inclinations. While vacationing in the Catskills, where she considers herself beyond reproach, Mrs. Elkin tries her best to shun the other Jews staying at her lodgings; she considers any such association intrusive and presumptuous. Much to her embarrassment, however, Mrs. Elkin's "disguise" is exposed by an elderly local woman, and her unease, finally out in the open, reflects the denial of her own and her daughter's Jewish lineage and ironically causes her daughter to seek such a connection:

"I told Elizabeth Smith," Miss Onderdonk said. "I told her she'd rue the day she ever started taking in Jews." …

Mrs. Elkin, raising her brows, made a helpless face at Hester [her daughter], as if to say, "After all, the vagaries of the deaf…" She permitted herself a minimal shrug, even a slight spreading of palms. Under Hester's stare, she lowered her eyes and turned toward Miss Onderdonk again.

"I thought you knew, Miss Onderdonk," said her mother. "I thought you knew that we were—Hebrews." The word, the ultimate refinement, slid out of her mother's soft voice as if it were on runners.

"Eh?" said Miss Onderdonk.

Say it, Hester prayed. She had never before felt the sensation of prayer. Please say it, Mother. Say "Jew."

Her mother's obvious distress paradoxically causes Hester to define herself once and for all as Jewish, and so to put an end to her mother's attempts to be what she is not.

We finally return to the question: can one remain a Jew in America? This question, born of the Jewish immigrant experience, depends for its answer on the definition of Judaism, which in many ways "looks different" in America, and on the acceptance of change, the tolerance of an evolving Jewish character in the literature of Jewish-American writers, the denial of old stereotypes and archetypal patterns.

How does one reconcile the Jewish-American experience with its past, with its immigrant origins? The steerage across the waters left behind more than miles. And the sense of loss is increasingly perceptible as the generations turn for American Jews, creating a need for a new identity, a new sense of what it means to be Jewish, a need intensified for women by the inevitably transformed feminine postures available in the "new" culture of America. In the fiction I've examined, a new vision of what it means to be Jewish in America emerges. No longer do we find, as we did with the earlier immigrant fiction and even with that which came after World War II, characters who feel excluded from and at odds with American socioeconomic ideals. Malamud, Bellow, and Philip Roth, it might be argued, worked through the evolution of the Jewish male character who, always a step out of line with the rest of America, struggled unsuccessfully to merge with the American mainstream, to shed the weighty baggage of his heritage. Contemporary Jewish-American women writers present a different sense of the "outsider." No longer on the outskirts of American culture, nor even of the literary tradition, the characters find themselves paradoxically alienated from and drawn to a heritage from which they are excluded, and yet in which they play an important function—the silent foil of a male-dominated tradition. This paradox of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion results in the fragmentation of identity we've seen in these stories, a fragmentation that causes the characters to seek to resolve their ambivalent feelings toward their pasts by trying to recreate them. Often, such characters are torn between a longing for the past, for a sense of absolutes (rituals, traditions, beliefs), and a determination to forge ahead, to fashion an identity that "fits" for this time and this place. Though their defiance of the "world of the fathers" results in new possibilities for the Jewish-American woman, it remains a vision fraught with ambivalence, with mistrust of one's "place," yet with an "insider's" instinct for continuity and the potential reaffirmation of identity. It is in this way that the Jewish-American woman, and perhaps, even more so, the Jewish-American woman writer, is the "outsider within."