The Making and Re-making of Literary History ♦ 69 The Making and Re-making of Jewish-American...

The Making and Re-making of Literary History ♦ 69

Vol. 27, No. 2 ♦ 2009

The Making and Re-making of Jewish-American Literary HistoryWendy Zierler Hebrew Union College

Until ten to fifteen years ago, Jewish American literary history was construed and described in overwhelmingly mid-twentieth-century masculine terms. As a corrective to this longstanding trend, this essay undertakes to “remake” Jewish American literary history in feminist terms. First, in an act of feminist “readerly resistance,” it surveys recent efforts to remake the canon to include women writ-ers and to reflect the experiences of women readers. Then it applies a variety of second-and third-wave feminist interpretive methodologies to readings of both classic and lesser-known works of Jewish American literature, including Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” Anzia Yezierska’s “The Lost Beautifulness,” Cynthia Ozick’s “Putter-messer and Xanthippe,” Jo Sinclair’s, The Changelings, and Dara Horn’s In The Image.

I. Resistant Readings: Tradition and Male Talent

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

1Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. xii. Fetterley’s critique of misogyny and male-centeredness in American literature owes a great deal to two pioneering works of criticism, Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969).

70 ♦ Wendy Zierler

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

the frequent appearance in the works of such mainstream American writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer of the “castrating bitch” stereotype, “the cultural reality” in American literature was “not the emasculation of men by women but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women have been taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values.”2

Until ten or fifteen years ago, the same might have been said about Jew-ish-American literature. American Jewish literary history begins well before the twentieth century and includes a number of important women poets and prose writers. And yet, until relatively recently, Jewish American literature was construed and described in overwhelmingly mid-twentieth century male terms, referring to a select group of post-World War II male writers who man-aged to “break through” (a term taken from the title of Irving Malin and Irwin Starks’ 1964 anthology3) into the larger American literary scene: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth.4 Others, with a broader historical perspective, looked further back to the Eastern European immigrant generation, to the work of journalist and novelist Abraham Cahan or to the stunning modernist achievement of Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep (1934), but often omitted any discussion of their Jewish female predecessors or contemporaries. This is not to say that critics specializing in American Jewish literature omitted all mention of women writ-ers. Like Judith Fetterley, however, who refers to certain exceptions to the gen-eralization of American literary maleness—“a Dickinson poem, a Wharton

2Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xx.3Irving Malin and Irwin Stark, eds., Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary Ameri-

can-Jewish Literature (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).4For example, in Ihab Hassan’s Contemporary American Literature 1945–1972: An

Introduction (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973) the only Jewish writers featured are Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, and Arthur Miller. For a more recent example, in Outline of American Literature, a pamphlet issued by the United States Information Agency in 1994, the Jewish authors represented (with the exception of a brief reference to Adrienne Rich) are all male, namely, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the poet Allen Ginsberg. In an effort to present a less traditional image of the American literary canon, the front cover of this small book fea-tures pictures of such mainstream canonical books as The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass, alongside more ethnic contribution—Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Jewish women writers, however, are included neither in this photographic sampling nor in the actual critical discussion.


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novel”5—female readers of Jewish American literature most often saw confir-mation of the rule rather than its exception.

Jewish American literary male-centeredness assumed several forms. In the most well-known cases—Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar—it found form in misogynist stereotypes of the Jewish Mother and the Jewish American Princess. In other cases, such as in Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man and Herzog, male-centeredness assumed the guise of a male protagonist whose intellectual explorations were carried out in op-position to and in isolation from a host of mindless female characters, there for little else but to satisfy the protagonist’s sexual appetite, or, as in the case of Moses Herzog’s intellectually accomplished adulterous ex-wife Madeleine, to serve as catalyst for Moses’ heroic journey of thought. In terms of critical practices, this male-centeredness figured in the tendency of male anthologists to under-represent women writers in collections of American Jewish litera-ture or criticism and, by extension, to generalize about the nature of Jewish American literature based on exclusively male paradigms found in works writ-ten by male writers like Bellow, Norman Mailer, or Philip Roth. According to this androcentric reading, Jewish American literature was primarily a lit-erature about the Jewish man of the city as an everyman of modernity, an intellectual urban schlemiel inhabiting a modern existence of alienation and marginality, set against a backdrop of ever-fading immigrant Jewish cultur-al scenery.6 Irving Howe’s 1977 anthology, Jewish American Stories,7 as well as his oft-cited critical introduction, exemplified this kind of male-centered critical bias; the anthology included twenty-five stories, only four of which were written by women. Later critical studies like Mark Schechner’s After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary Jewish Imagination (1987) and Sanford Pinsker’s Jewish American Fiction, 1917–1987 (1992) demonstrated a simi-larly abiding masculine focus: Schechner’s study included no female writers, while Pinsker included only one chapter on a women writer, namely Cynthia

5Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xii.6For versions of this reading of American Jewish literature see for example the essays

in Irving Malin, ed., Contemporary American-Jewish Literature: Critical Essays (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1973); Allen Guttman, “Mr. Bellow’s America,” in The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and the sections in Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) on American Jewish literature..

7Irving Howe, ed., Jewish American Stories (New York: New American Library, 1977).



Ozick. Sam Girgus’ The New Covenant (1984), a study of Jewish American literary engagements with the American Idea, is somewhat exceptional in its treatment (albeit in varying detail) of works by three women writers: Mary Antin, Johanna Kaplan, and Anzia Yezierska. Even so, Girgus’ willingness to describe the Jewish American novelist as a marginal man “who seeks to unite himself with America as metaphorically represented by the shikse”8—the gen-tile woman—is but one example of the way in which male experience (to the exclusion of Jewish female experience) became normative in the critical writ-ing on Jewish American experience as a whole. Even Andrew Furman’s Con-temporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (2000), a work of criticism that argued for the ongoing relevance of Jewish American literature to the enterprise of academic multiculturalism and ethnic studies and which demonstrated far greater receptiveness to women’s writing than any of the previously cited volumes, skews in a masculine direction, devoting seven chapters to male and only two to female writers.

According to Fetterley, faced with this kind of male-centered tradition, “the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader, and by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcis-ing the male mind that has been implanted in us.”9 Attempts at “exorcising” the Jewish American “male mind” have been undertaken in publications such as Lilith, in anthologies of Jewish American women’s writing such as Julia Wolf Mazow’s The Woman Who Lost Her Names, Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s The Tribe of Dina, Joyce Antler’s America and I, and in such criti-cal works as Diane Lichtenstein’s Writing Their Nations, Ann R. Shapiro’s Jew-ish-American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, Janet Handler Burstein’s Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters, S. Lilian Kre-mer’s Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination (1999), and more recently Lois E. Rubin’s Connections and Collisions: Identities in Contemporary Jewish-American Women’s Writing (2006). In all of these woman-centered publications, a strong case has been mounted for the presence and importance of Jewish women’s writing in America, and for the existence of other, non-masculine creative and critical points of view. Sylvia Barack Fishman’s Follow my Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction looked at images of women in modern Jewish writing by men and women as a means of

8Sam Girgus, The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) p. 19.

9Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xxii.


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discovering developments in the lives of Jewish women in America, as well as “changing values in American society as a whole.”10 Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport’s Writing Our Way Home: Contemporary Stories (1992) served as an important counter-statement to Irving Howe’s 1977 anthology insofar as women writers constitute a “small majority” in the collection of stories by Jew-ish men and women.11 The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature (2001),12 which included women’s voices in all its historical sections, even the Colonial Period, effectively re-visioned the very notion of the American Jewish canon. Paul Zakrzewski’s 2003 anthology, Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, half of the stories in which are by Jewish women authors, has also helped re-constitute American Jewish literature as something other than a male-only congregation. In writing this essay, which applies a variety of second- and third-wave feminist interpretive methodologies to the readings of both classic and lesser-known works of Jewish American literature, I join this process of

10Sylvia Barack Fishman, “The Faces of Women: An Introductory Essay,” in Sylvia Barack Fishman, ed., Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1992), p. 2.

11In 1977, Irving Howe argued in the introduction to his anthology that American Jewish fiction had “probably moved past its high point,” insofar as the Jewish community had gone beyond the immigrant experience, having become fully acculturated and assimi-lated into American life. Today critics and editors such as Solotaroff and Rapoport reject that argument, contending that in recent years Jewish American literature has been revital-ized, building upon but also moving beyond the themes of immigration, assimilation, and alienation to re-engage traditional and sacred Jewish sources, themes, and issues, as well as to confront the issues surrounding the Holocaust and the State of Israel. (See also Alvin Rosenfeld, “The Progress of the American Jewish Novel,” Response, Vol. 7 [1973]: 115–130; S. Lillian Kremer, “Post-alienation: Recent Directions in Jewish-American Literature,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No 3 [Fall 1993]; and Andrew Furman, Israel Through the American Literary Imagination [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997].) At the forefront of this process of revitalization are a group of women writers, including Cynthia Ozick, formerly secular feminist activist writers such as Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Roiphe, who over the past decade have been re-examining their Jewish heritage, as well as others such as Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, and Nessa Rapoport, who, as Ted Solotaroff notes, “are anchored in the present-day observant Jew-ish community and who are drawn to the intense and growing dialogue between Jewish and modernity under the impact of feminism, the sexual revolution and the Holocaust.” See Ted Solotaroff, “Marginality Revisited,” in Richard Siegel and Tamar Sofer, eds., The Writer in the Jewish Community: An Israeli-North American Dialogue (Rutherford, NJ: Fair-leigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), p. 64.

12Jules Chametsky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, Kathryn Hellerstein, eds., Jew-ish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).



re-making Jewish American literary tradition, an ongoing mission of Jewish feminist “readerly resistance.”

A writer or a critic need not be a blatant misogynist to provoke female “readerly resistance.” Building on Fetterley’s argument, Patrocinio P. Schweick-art argues that that in many cases, the androcentricism of a text “is a sufficient condition for the process of immasculation. . . . For the male reader, the text serves as a meeting ground of the personal and the universal. Whether or not the texts approximate the particularities of his own experience, he is invited to validate the equation of maleness with humanity.”13 In contrast, the female reader is taught to identify against herself, inviting “female complicity in the elevation of male difference into universality, and accordingly, the denigration of female difference into otherness without reciprocity.”14

Allow me to provide two Jewish American illustrations of this phenom-enon. The first is perhaps an unlikely source, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a novel which did not achieve a “breakthrough” on the American literary scene until it was reprinted in paperback edition in 1964, but which Alfred Kazin has called “the most profound novel of Jewish life I have ever read by an American.”15 I speak of Call It Sleep as an unlikely example because in many ways, it stands in opposition to works like Portnoy’s Complaint or Marjorie Morningstar. Henry Roth’s novel does not present in the figure of Genya Schearl, the protagonist’s mother, a flatly misogynist stereotype of the castrating, overbearing, smother-ing Jewish Mother. In a critical survey of the Jewish mother type in American Jewish fiction, critic Melvin Friedman looks back almost nostalgically to Call It Sleep, describing Genya Schearl from Roth’s novel as “the most appealing of this type of Jewish mother. . . . She is a true figure of the Diaspora, with a built-in sense of suffering and survival. Her devotion to her son David is one of the most compelling relationships expressed anywhere in the history of the novel.”16 From Friedman’s reading, of course, Genya Schearl emerges not so much as an individual, but as a more positive version of an entrenched stereo-type. Even so, one cannot deny the power and beauty of David and Genya’s relationship—Sylvia Barack Fishman dubs Genya a “heroine to her needy

13Patrocinio P. Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Read-ing,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 26–7.

14Schweikart, “Reading Ourselves,” p. 27.15Alfred Kazin, “Introduction,” in Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Noonday

Press, 1991), p. ix.16Melvin J. Friedman, “Jewish Mothers and Sons: The Expense of Chutzpah,” in

Malin, ed., Contemporary American-Jewish Literature: Critical Essays, pp. 157–158.


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son”17—and the poetic mamaloshen of their conversations. The androcentrism of Call It Sleep inheres, then, not in the portrayal of Genya but in Roth’s por-trait of David Schearl: the young immigrant Jewish American artist, whose development requires him to disentangle himself from his profound Oedipal attachments to his mother and whose sense of power and inspiration is often elaborated through a scheme of blatantly phallic sexual images.

It has been a commonplace among readers of Call It Sleep to speak of Roth’s indebtedness to James Joyce,18 and in this discussion, the analogy to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is especially pertinent. As in Joyce’s novel, where readers are invited to experience and identify with the alleged universality of Stephen Daedalus’ male sexual and artistic awakenings, the reader of Roth’s novel is asked to identify with David’s distinctly masculine Oedipal fear and awe of his father muscular body and virility and to accept his fascination with and conflation of all forms of male power, whether they be physical, sexual, prophetic, or divine. Roth’s description of the Statue of Liberty at the begin-ning of the novel as a castrated female presence, “charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane,” brandishing what looks in the “flawless light” like “the blackened hilt of a broken sword,”19 sug-gests quite clearly that David’s story of initiation will involve an awakening of a more vital, masculine form of sexuality.

Accordingly, phallic images of swords and rods and images of male sexual release figured as light, power, even transcendence, abound in the novel. One important instance of this nexus of power, light, and phallic sexuality occurs when David is first brought by a band of street kinds to the rail tracks and forced to dip a zinc sword into the tracks:

The point of the sheet-zinc sword wavered before him, clicked on the stone as he fumbled, then finding the slot at last, rasped part way down the wide grin-ning lips like a tongue in an iron mouth. He stepped back. From open fingers, the blade plunged into darkness.

Power!Like a paw ripping through all the stable fibres of the earth, power, gigantic,

fetterless, thudded into day! And light, unleashed, terrific light bellowed out of iron lips. The street quaked and roared, and like a tortured thing, the sheet zinc sword, leapt writhing, fell back, consumed with radiance.20

17Barack Fishman, “The Faces of Women,” p. 26.18See for example, Kazin, “Introduction,” pp. xiii–xiv. 19Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York, Noonday Press, 1991), p. 14. 20Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 253.



Inasmuch as power, light, and transcendence are allied here with a rather vio-lent version of male sexuality and orgasm—with David’s sword wavering be-fore him, plunging into the dark lips of the rail tracks, “ripping through the stable fibers” of the (female/mother) earth, ending with the consummation of “radiance”—this passage is necessarily experienced differently by a female reader who does not have the male sexual equipment and, most likely, the phallic imagination of the author. If spiritual or artistic epiphany is figured universally here in terms of a male penetration of the femininely figured “slot” or “wide grinning lips” of the earth, the result is a reinforcement of the long-standing opposition between male activity or creativity and female passivity or procreativity.

At the climactic end of the novel, Roth adds a prophetic basis to this phallic imagery. When David’s father accuses him of being the son of a gentile organist with whom Genya once had an affair in the Old Country, David, who believes that the purifying coal—a prophetic image from Isaiah that he has learned about in heder—is located in the car tracks, rushes madly back to the railway track to experience its transcendent power again and completely. Dip-ping a milk ladle into the rail, like a “sword in a scabbard” (as Lynn Altebrand notes, the word scabbard is the Latin word for vagina21), David once again experiences a surge of shocking electric power that eventually knocks him temporarily unconscious. This climax and David’s eventual reawakening have been interpreted in various ways, as a Christ-like messianic redemption,22 as the culmination of a story of artistic awakening23 or the birth of a new Ameri-can consciousness.24 Common to all of these interpretations, however, is their pervasive male-centeredness. As David throws the ladle onto the tracks, Roth records, in true Joycean style, a stream of conversations which occur in the symbolic American background—a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, panoply of voices and references. Among these voices is yet another reference to the fe-male figure of the Statue of Liberty, this time not as a threatening, shadowed, hardened statue, but as a symbol of a pliant, quiescent feminized America, a “kindly faced American woman,” waiting to be entered and possessed: “And do you know you can go all the way up her for twenty five cents, mind you! Every

21Lynn Altebrand, “An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 1989): 678.

22Altebrand, “An American Messiah,” pp. 673–687.23Kazin, “Introduction,” p. xx.24Sam Girgus, The New Covenant, p. 96.


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man, woman and child ought to go up inside her, it’s a thrilling experience!”25 The Statue of Liberty may be open for entry to the general public, but this par-ticular passage about the statue, occurring alongside David’s sexualized expe-rience of electric shock, invites masculine entry or penetration, in particular.

My second example of Jewish American literary androcentrism, taken from Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979), the first novel of his Zuckerman trilogy, concerns the fictional representation of Jewish literary history, as a legacy passed down from father to son. In this short novel, the talented young writer, Nathan Zuckerman (modeled, perhaps, on the younger Philip Roth, in the days immediately following the publication of Goodbye, Columbus), who has become estranged form his own father as a result of his determination to write irreverent stories about Jews (including members of his own family), makes a literary pilgrimage to the Berkshires to meet his self-appointed Jew-ish literary father, E. I. Lonoff. During an evening spent sipping cognac with the married but inveterate loner Lonoff, Nathan offers his thumbnail sketch of modern Jewish literary history—a male literary family tree with Isaac Babel and Kafka at the base, and Lonoff (a fictional version of Bernard Malamud) and Abravanel (a version of Norman Mailer) serving as the various branches. “You haven’t finished,” Lonoff comments. “Aren’t you a New World cousin in the Babel clan too? What is Zuckerman in all of this?”26 The literary conversa-tion gives way to a sharing not just of literary history but also sexual fantasies, with Lonoff musing about his desire to run off to Italy with a woman other than his long-suffering wife, Hope, an idea which is reduced later in the con-versation to a more vulgar quest for a “piece of ass.”27 This interlude of shared male sexual fantasy is no mere digression from the central issue of the novel: at the heart of this taut, elegant, and serious novel about the responsibility of the Jewish writer after the Holocaust is the added question of the place of the woman and the woman writer in the world of male literary creativity. Allu-sions to James, Tolstoy, Kafka, and Joyce notwithstanding, the literary ghost that haunts this novel (as indicated by the title), both literally and figuratively, is that of a dead female writer, the Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. In an effort to convince Nathan to write and publish different kinds of stories about Jews, Judge Leopold Wapter, an esteemed acquaintance of the Zuckerman family, had urged Nathan to go see the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne

25Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 415.26Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 49.27Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 71.



Frank, a properly philosemitic work. Instead of prating “in platitudes to please adults,”28 however, Nathan uses the figure of Anne Frank to “ghost-write” his own magnificently inventive, Jewishly concerned drama, which plays out its story at the Lonoff house in the Berkshires.

Soon after arriving at the Lonoff residence, Nathan meets a “striking girl-woman” named Amy Bellette, whose capacious and beautiful head seems disproportionately larger than her body. Nathan has become used to viewing women primarily for their bodies; Amy’s cerebral endowments (coupled with her slight frame) seem to throw off Nathan’s sense of balance. Odd propor-tions notwithstanding, Nathan immediately begins fantasizing about bedding down and/or marrying this woman whom he assumes is Lonoff ’s daughter. When he learns she is not, he does not imagine for Amy a relationship of liter-ary parenthood or patronage, but rather one of a strictly sexual variety. “Who is she then, being served snacks by his wife on the floor of his study? His concubine?”29 Nathan later learns that Amy is a former student of Lonoff and an exceedingly talented writer. Amy Bellette’s belle-lettristic capabilities, how-ever, do not dislodge Nathan from his view of her as his potential consort and Muse. When in the middle of the night, sexual fantasy catches up with reality, and Nathan overhears Amy Bellette begging “Da-da” Lonoff to run off with her to Italy, Nathan begins to weave his own magnificent fantasy about Amy Bellette’s true identity as a twenty-six year old Anne Frank, one who actually survived the Holocaust but has remained incognito so as not to take away from the power of her published diary as the story of a Holocaust victim. The climax of Nathan’s fantasy is his resolution to bring Saint Amy/Anne home to his parents as his lawfully wedded wife, the perfect Jewish mate/martyr, who will allow him to write his irreverent stories and yet absolve him of the charge of Jewish self-hatred.

Critic Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky interprets Nathan’s imaginative transforma-tion of Amy Bellette as an adaptation of Stephen Daedalus’ similar transfigu-ration in Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist of the bird-girl on the strand “into the Virgin Mary, a virgin whore and then finally, into a personification of Artistic Inspiration.” According to Rubin-Dorsky, Nathan “transmogrifies Amy Bel-lette from an ordinary college student with a crush on her writing teacher, into, first, a ‘Femme Fatale,’ second, ‘the quintessential Jewish martyr heroine,

28Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 106.29Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 21.


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Anne Frank’ and third, an alter ego for himself as a young writer.”30 What Rubin-Dorsky fails to observe in his reading of The Ghost Writer and “literary heritage,” however, is that from the very beginning Amy Bellette is no ordinary college student; both she and Anne Frank are identified quite early on in the story as gifted writers, women who might very well be Nathan’s competitors for the a place in ( Jewish) literary pantheon. Lonoff ’s praise for Amy Bellette is no less generous than his praise for Nathan’s four published stories. “She has a remarkable prose style,” Lonoff says. “The best student writing I’ve ever read. Wonderful clarity. Wonderful comedy. Tremendous intelligence.”31 As for Anne Frank, Nathan himself (enviously) acknowledges that “she’s like some impassioned little sister of Kafka’s,”32 a comment both elevating, in its associa-tion with the genius of Kafka, and belittling in its relegation of Frank to the diminutive status of “little sister.” Clearly, Amy/Anne makes Nathan anxious. Writing from the comforts and achievements of North Jersey, Nathan knows he cannot begin to approach the monumental nature of Anne Frank’s subject, its simultaneously Jewish and universal import, its awesome, spare reality, its precocious insight. “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!”33 Nathan exclaims to himself as he overhears the love murmurs of Amy Bellette and Lonoff in the room upstairs, a comment which seems equally relevant in light of the contrast between Nathan’s Newark fictions and Anne Frank’s story of real life.

In their study of the place of women writers in literary modernism, San-dra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe a story by Max Beerbohm called “The Crime,” in which a man of letters, vacationing in a rented cottage, picks up a copy of a novel by a woman novelist of “immense vitality” about a “successful woman of letters,” and then impetuously flings the book into a fireplace only to find that the book cannot burn. Gilbert and Gubar read this story as a “masterfully comic satire on the futile rage with which men of letters greeted female literary achievement.”34 My “resistant” reading of Ghost Writer situates this novel within a similarly anxious, masculinist Jewish literary context. By

30Jeffrey Rubin Dorsky, “Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer: Literary Heritage and Jewish Irreverence,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1989): 179.

31Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 28.32Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 170.33Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 121.34Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: Volume I, The War of the

Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p.128.



imaginatively transforming writer Amy Bellette into Femme Fatale, and then into an Anne Frank who can no longer assume her literary identity because the power of her story is too invested in the idea of her having died in the Holocaust, Nathan essentially flings both Amy and Anne—as images of rival female artist—into the fire. When Nathan confronts Amy about the physical resemblance she bears to Anne Frank, and Amy declares, “I’m afraid I am not she,”35 Nathan finally accomplishes his goal of inventing “as presumptuously as real life.” How much greater an artist is he for thinking up Anne Frank’s “real” story, for subsuming her diary and making it all his own! By the end of the novel, the exceptional Amy Bellette is indeed rendered an ordinary col-lege student, Anne Frank is laid back in her grave, made an important writer only by virtue of the circumstances of her death, while Nathan lives on as the writer and hero of his own bildungsroman. And yet, as in the case of Max Beer-bohm’s man of letters who cannot get the woman’s book to burn, the ghost-writer Amy/Anne continues to hover over this novel even after its conclusion. Nathan’s copious citations from and effusive praise of Anne Frank in the novel virtually send his reader scrambling back to re-read the diary by a writer who might have been even more precociously accomplished than Roth himself.

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

According to Patrocinio Schweickart, the importance of counter-readings of male texts, like the readings of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep and Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer which I offer above, is not to eschew all readings of male or androcentric texts, but to remedy the problem of pervasive female literary “immasculation.” As a feminist critic, I hope that other feminist readers will recognize themselves in my reading of these novels, and “join in the struggle to transform” Jewish American literary culture.36 The other task of the Jewish feminist critic is to look to Jewish women’s writing for instances in which a woman’s point of view has indeed been expressed. Indeed, an essential project of feminist scholarship is to read back “through our mothers”—those early Jewish women writers who somehow managed to break into the male literary culture against all odds.

But what do we read for? As far back as 1975, in a pioneering dialogue/essay entitled “Theories of Feminist Criticism,” American feminist critics Car-

35Roth, The Ghost Writer, p. 169.36Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves,” p. 34.


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olyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, dubbed critic X and Y, debated the end goal of feminist criticism of literature, with critic X imagining a time, beyond the feminist denunciation of patriarchal writing and interpretation, when the critical imagination might cross the river into a “promised land for humanity, the Egypt of female servitude having been left behind.”37 In a later essay, Elaine Showalter later takes issue with “critic X,” arguing against the idea of a “feminist pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal like angels.” According to Showalter, an advocate for the “gynocritical” study of the specificity of women’s writing and culture, we may never and may never want to reach the Promised Land as understood by critic X as a realm of “serenely undifferentiated uni-versality.” Rather, Showalter argues, an examination of the distinctiveness of women’s writing indicates that it is “not a transient by-product of sexism, but as a fundamental and continually determining reality.” Instead of looking for-ward to an elimination of gender as a marker of difference in our culture, then, we may elect through a study of women’s culture to revel in the “tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself.”38

The poetic career of American-born Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) is par-ticularly relevant to all of these aspects of feminist criticism, before and after “the promised land,” if you will. Until recently, Lazarus’ literary contributions were largely forgotten, and thus a reading of her work entails an exposure of the fissures in and biases of masculinely constructed literary criticism and his-tory. As a woman writer, Lazarus also provides an occasion for the examination of the special history of Jewish women’s writing in America. A descendant of assimilated Sephardic Jews, Emma Lazarus had already published four books by the time she was 28 years old, works of both poetry and prose dealing mainly with Classical Greek and European subjects. It was not until the early 1880s, with the news of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia as well as first-hand exposure to the Russian Jewish refugees at Ward’s Island in New York, that Lazarus began to embrace her Jewish identity and turn her poetic atten-tions to Jewish subjects. In 1882, Lazarus published Songs of a Semite, what one scholar of American Jewish literature has called “the first important work

37Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Stimpson, “Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dia-logue,” in Josephine Donovan, ed., Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory (Lex-ington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1975, 1989), pp. 64–8.

38Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” in The New Feminist Criti-cism: Women, Literature Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 266–67.



of Jewish poetry in America.”39 By her untimely death in 1887, Lazarus had become an important literary and polemical voice for the Jewish people, plead-ing the cause of Russian Jewish refugees, calling in a series of essays entitled Epistle to the Hebrews for a rebirth of the Jewish nation and the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.40 In the words of one of Lazarus’ eulogists, the famous abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, “[s]ince Miriam sang of deliverance and triumph by the Red Sea, the Semitic race has had no braver singer.”41

Whittier’s invocation of the biblical Miriam is significant in that the typi-cal American reference to the biblical story of the Exodus is now gendered femininely, linking Lazarus to a biblical foremother, a bold, triumphant wom-an poet and prophet. As such, Whittier’s eulogy might serve as an emblem for the feminist re-vision of Lazarus as a founding Mother, if you will, of Ameri-can Jewish Literature. And yet, it is important to note the masculine bias in Whittier’s praise for Lazarus and her poetry. Even Whittier, who seems quite comfortable equating Lazarus’ poetic endeavors with the brave prophecy and poetry of Miriam, also makes sure to call attention to her “rhythmic sweet-ness”—a poetic quality which would conform more readily to stereotypical, Victorian notions of feminine compliance and piety. In the other eulogies written about Lazarus after her untimely death, the need to affirm Lazarus’ essential femininity in the face of her (aberrant) poetic achievements and rhe-torical “bravery” is even more pronounced. “I cannot hesitate,” writes Edmund Stedman,

to write a few words of tribute to the memory of a noble woman, enthusiast and poet. While thoroughly feminine, and a mistress of social art and charm, she was—though without the slightest trace of pedantry—the natural companion of scholars and thinkers. Her emotional nature kept pace with her intellect; as she grew in learning and mental power, she became still more earnest, devoted, impassioned.42

39Allen Guttman, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 21.

40Epistle to the Hebrews was first published in serialized form in The American Hebrew in fifteen sections between November 3, 1882 and February 23, 1883. These fifteen sec-tions were reprinted in 1987 with notes and an introduction by Morris U. Schappes (New York: Jewish Historical Society).

41John G. Whittier, “A Brave Singer,” The American Hebrew (December 9, 1887): 3.42Edmund Stedman, “A Contagious Inspiration in her Ardor,” The American Hebrew

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


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In this paean to Lazarus, Stedman foregrounds Lazarus’ femininity and her related qualities of emotionalism before all else. Lazarus’ ability to play the role of “companion” to scholars and thinkers notwithstanding—it is interest-ing that she is elected a companion, rather than a scholar and thinker in her own right—she is first and foremost a “noble woman,” “thoroughly feminine,” a “mistress of social art and charm.” Stedman’s parenthetical dismissal of any trace of “pedantry” in Lazarus’ intellectualism suggests that in most cases, a literary or scholarly woman was typically regarded as a “bluestocking” and a pedant.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously argued in their classic study The Madwoman in the Attic that the traditional association of author-ship with masculinity afflicted the nineteenth-century woman writer with an “anxiety of authorship”—a “radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor,’ the act of writing will destroy her.”43 Con-sequently, these women writers developed various literary “swerves” in order to clear an imaginative place for themselves in the masculine realm of literature, actively seeking out a female precursors and employing poetics of “duplicity” so that their literature could be read and appreciated even when its vital concern with female dispossession and disease was ignored.44

Gilbert and Gubar’s theory of female literary creativity helps shed con-siderable interpretive light on the gynocritical “specificity” of Lazarus’ best known poem, “The New Colossus,” which Lazarus was commissioned to write for a campaign to raise money for the erection of the State of Liberty. To be sure, Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” offers a different portrait of the feminized Statue, and by extension, America, than what we saw earlier in Roth’s Call It Sleep:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,with conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

43Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University PRess, 1977), p. 49.

44Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman, p. 72.



With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”45

In this sonnet, Emma Lazarus deliberately opposes the national character of America, as represented by the Statue of Liberty, to that of the great Euro-pean nations as represented by the Colossus. In contrast to the classical, mas-culine, conquering, “storied pomp” of Europe—a cultural matrix which has been the chief source of Lazarus’ poetic inspiration in the earlier part of her poetic career—the America of Lazarus’ sonnet is a place where the humble, marginal, unstoried, alien is prized, where the outsider, schooled in homeless-ness, is welcomed as a source of new energy and industry. Unlike the Colossus of Rhodes, which stands, fixed in its position, “with conquering limbs astride from land to land,” this statue stands by an “air-bridged harbor,” a geographical space characterized by airiness or an openness of spirit, not yet concretized or limited by hoary, European forms of patriotism. Similarly noteworthy is the repetition of hyphenated word forms in the description of the State of Liberty and her new-world constituency—sea-washed, air-bridged, world-wide wel-come, tempest-tost—a set of word patterns that gesture toward the idea of the America as a place that allows for hyphenated forms of identity, that embraces ethnic diversity and affiliation even as it hopes to unite all of its newcomers into one new nation.

Especially significant here is the attention given to the feminine gender of the statue, as well as Lazarus’ decision to situate this feminine figure with-in a distinctly biblical/Jewish context. As Esther Schor argues in her recent biography of Lazarus, “‘[d]efying the storied pomp’ of antiquity, precedent, and ceremony, the statue speaks not in the new language of reason, but in the divine language of lovingkindness.”46 In place of the old Greek Colossus, a symbol of masculine, pagan, authority, Lazarus revisits and re-imagines her cultural past and offers a Jewish feminine counter-myth. Michael Kramer has astutely observed that Lazarus’ Liberty is both “the mighty woman with torch,” reminiscent of the biblical prophetess/poetess Deborah who is referred

45Emma Lazarus, The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1889): pp. 202–3.

46Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Nextbook Schocken, 2006), p. 189. For more on Lazarus see also Ranen Omer-Sherman, Diasporism and Zionism in Jewish Ameri-can Literature (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2002), pp. 15–67.


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to in the book of Judges as “eshet Lapidot,” literally, “a woman of torches”47 and a “Mother of Exiles,” evocative of the matriarch Rachel, who is depicted in the book of Jeremiah as a mother weeping for the exiled Children of Isra-el.48 Lazarus’ dual invocation of Deborah, the warrior poetess, and Rachel, the weeping mother—opposing images of femininity—represents a poetics of duplicity, resulting in a feminine image which is simultaneously acceptable and subversive. Lazarus’ use of conventional feminine imagery in this poem, her description of the female statue’s “mild eyes” and “silent lips,” as well as her maternal, nurturing qualities, conforms to a Victorian domestic definition of femininity, not unlike that evinced by the critics I cited earlier. At the same time, as Diane Lichtenstein observes, Lazarus’ Deborah-like Liberty “stands as a symbol of womanhood which defies traditional stereotypes of passivity and demureness.”49 This mother is both mild and mighty, nurturing and authorita-tive. More than that: in the sestet of Lazarus’ sonnet, this silent-lipped mother of Exiles breaks her silence, as it were, and becomes a woman poet, uttering verse about the meaning of America. According to this interpretation, the oc-tet image of “imprisoned lightning” might be understood as a figure for the capturing or encapsulation of electric motion and feeling in the fixed, crafted form of the written sentence; the sestet image of the lamp held by the Golden Door becomes a similar figure for the literary illumination of American ex-perience. Read this way, “The New Colossus” not only articulates a vision of the America dream, but also offers a model for the American ( Jewish) female poet or writer who derives her inspirations and authority not from classical, patriarchal traditions, but also from the “unstoried” lives of Jewish women and other oppressed or marginalized people of the world.50

47See Judges 4: 4.48See Jeremiah 31:14–16. Michael Kramer made this point about the biblical sources

of Lazarus’ Liberty in a paper presented at the 1998 AJS conference entitled, “How Emma Lazarus Built the Statue of Liberty.”

49Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 36–7.

50Dan Vogel gestures toward a similar reading of “The New Colossus” in his brief and lukewarm appraisal of the well-known poem. “It is not too much to say,” Vogel writes, “that the sonnet can stand as a kind of allegory of a literary spirit that itself yearned to break free but did not know how, and finally learned what freedom really is” (Dan Vogel, Emma Lazarus [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980], p. 159). For a more feminist appraisal of Laza-rus’ work see Carole S. Kessner, “Matrilineal Dissent: Emma Lazarus, Marie Syrkin and Cynthia Ozick,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 197–215.



The idea of a Jewish American female poetic based on the “unstoried” lives of Jewish women or oppressed minorities becomes equally important if one reads the work of such immigrant Jewish women writers as Anzia Yezierska (1880?–1970). Like Lazarus, Yezierska was a relatively forgotten figure until the 1970s, when she was rediscovered by feminist historians and literary crit-ics. In contrast to the wealthy, American-born, and highly educated Emma Lazarus, however, whose social connections, education, and style of writing would more readily associate her with aristocratic Old New York than with the “wretched refuse” of New York’s “teeming shore,” Yezierska was literally and figuratively “unstoried”—a complete newcomer to American culture and liter-ary tradition. Throughout her career as a fiction writer, in which she published two collections of short stories and four novels and was awarded a prestigious national literary prize and two lucrative film contracts, Yezierska continually doubted her ability and ruminated over the implications of her immigrant female identity. Perhaps more than any of her female contemporaries, Anzia Yezierska made the search for a female immigrant idiom a primary subject of her fiction.

Yezierska’s obsession with the idea of a female immigrant language or idiom lends itself to a reading that incorporates the feminist theoretical ap-proaches not only of Anglo-American critics, but also of such French feminist theorists, influenced by Jacques Lacan,51 such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Iri-garay, who imagine a kind of women’s writing (“écriture feminine”) that dis-places the symbolic order of the “phallus” and retrieves the repressed Female Imaginary. Often discussions of “écriture feminine” draw on a complex set of metaphors based on the female body: images of fluidity and flux based on menstruation, lactation, and amniotic fluid, as well as images of “wandering excess” and multiplicity that build on the experience of female orgasm. In her

51There are several reasons why Lacan’s re-reading of Freud has become influential in French feminist theory. First is Lacan’s staunch anti-essentialism and anti-biologism, a critical stance that allows for radical rejection of patriarchal definitions of the female self. According to Lacan, there is no such thing as an essential, predetermined identity or subjec-tivity, male, female, or otherwise. Unlike Freud, who describes human development in fixed biological terms, for Lacan, the Oedipus complex is a symbolic rather than a biological con-struct. Unlike Freud, then, Lacan makes a strong distinction between the penis, the male anatomical organ, and the phallus, its representational symbol. As Diana Fuss explains, according to Lacan, the phallus is a “signifier, a privileged signifier of the Symbolic order which may point to the penis as the most visible mark of sexual difference but neverthe-less cannot be reduced to it.” See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 7.


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famous essay “Castration or Decapitation,” Hélène Cixous describes a “femi-nine text” which is pervaded by a sense of touch, movement, and outpouring, a “primitive, elementary,” a “fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow,” a “throwing up, disgorging.”52 Similarly, in This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray opposes the phallic notion of literary unity and coherence to the idea of a pluralis-tic and multiplicitous women’s writing based on a female sexual/anatomical metaphor. “Perhaps,” she writes,

it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural . . . [Woman] is indefinitely other in herself. This is why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious . . . not to mention her language, in which she sets off in all directions leaving him unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand.53

On the one hand, these theorists reject essential definitions of “woman” as part of the binary thinking of patriarchal Western culture that would define woman as a “subjugated difference within a binary opposition: man/woman, culture/nature, positive/negative, analytical/intuitive.”54 On the other hand, they embrace these essential oppositions in metaphorical terms for the sake of celebrating the repressed “feminine Imaginary.” Similarly, Yezierska seizes upon the conventional dualistic categories of male/female, head/heart, cul-ture/nature, for the sake of advancing a female immigrant poetic. Repeatedly in her essays and fiction, she dramatizes this opposition, composing fictions in which immigrant women artists experiment with American-born forms of beauty and language, only to find themselves turning back uneasily to the mamaloshen (Mother Tongue) of the ghetto, the rude and raw, passionately unrestrained Yiddish idiom of the immigrant.

Yezierska clearly dramatizes this aesthetic conflict in an early story called “The Lost Beautifulness.” In this story, the protagonist Hanneh Hayyeh Saf-ransky is presented as a kind of domestic artist—“an artist laundress” as her

52Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation,” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1981): 54.

53Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cor-nell University Press, 1985), pp. 28–9.

54Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1988): 417.



American employer Mrs. Preston somewhat condescendingly calls her because of the passion and care with which she launders Mrs. Preston’s linens and laces. Hanneh Hayyeh is so filled with quixotic love and yearning for Ameri-can beauty, as represented by the cleanliness and refinement of Mrs. Preston’s Stuyvesant Square mansion and the elegant fineness of her linens and frocks, that she longs to reproduce it in her own Lower East Side tenement flat.

The story begins as Hanneh Hayyeh stands marveling at her newly-painted white kitchen, an almost chimerical vision of beauty and light in the dark, ill-smelling tenement. For weeks she has been scrimping and saving to buy the paint. Now, as her beloved son Aby, a soldier in the American army, is returning on leave from his tour of duty in World War I Europe, Hanneh Hayyeh has finally painted the kitchen as a gift to the son she adores. “If only you could give a look how I painted up my kitchen!” Hanneh Hayyeh tells her employer, Mrs. Preston. “It lights up the whole tenement house for blocks around. The grocer and the butcher and all the neighbors were jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they seen how I shined up my house.”55 From the outset, the naively hopeful Americanizing ambitions of Hanneh Hayyeh are contrasted with the skepticism and practicality of her immigrant husband Jake, who considers her painting escapade foolhardy and wasteful, evidence of her longing to be something she can never be.

Despite her husband’s misogynist excoriations, Hanneh Hayyeh contin-ues to revel in her artistic accomplishment, inviting all of her friends in to see her newly painted kitchen. The dream soon turns to nightmare, however, when Hanneh Hayyeh makes the mistake of showing off her paintwork to her tough-nosed landlord. Before long the Safranskys receive notice that their rent has been raised, for now that the flat has been painted new, the landlord has decided he can get more money for it. When only a few weeks later, the merciless landlord raises the rent on their flat a second time, the Safranskys face eviction, and the happy vision turns dark. “Black is my luck! Dark is for my eyes!”56 Hanneh Hayyeh cries out to her neighbors when she receives her first and then second rent increase. The scene turns completely black at night, when in a fit of rage against both of her male adversaries, the landlord as well as her husband Jake who blames her for their misfortune, Hanneh Hayyeh sets out to destroy the beautifulness she had worked so hard to create:

55Anzia Yezierska, “The Lost Beautifulness,” in How I Found America (New York: Per-sea Books, 1991), p. 35.

56Yezierska, “The Lost Beautifulness,” p. 37.


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With savage fury, she seized the chopping axe and began to scratch down the paint, breaking the plaster on the walls. She tore up the floor-boards. She un-screwed the gas jets, turned on the gas full force so as to blacken the white-painted ceiling. The night through she raged with the frenzy of destruction.57

This story, which starts with Hanneh Hayyeh’s creation of one refined form art dedicated to the more conventional maternal/oedipal purpose of regaling her beloved American-soldier son, culminates, then, with her creation of a completely opposite form, a kind of female anti-art created from rude sharp edges of wood, dark scorched panels of paint, a furious and frenzied display of uncontrolled rage. This plot development is embodied in the three names assigned to Yezierska’s protagonist. The first name Hanneh allies her with the maternal, artistic, and national aspirations of the biblical Hannah, who prayed for a son, composed poetry upon his birth, and then sent him to Shiloh to undertake holy national service as a servant to Eli the priest. Her second name Hayyeh, meaning both “she lives” and “animal,” seems to underscore the more primitive, physical, vital aspects of her personality, while her last name, Saf-ransky, literally meaning “of the book,” identifies her with literature or poetics. Hanneh Hayyeh’s white kitchen, a symbol of her yearning for conventional maternal as well as economic/national kinds of gratification, thus becomes a kind of blank slate against which she writes a new, living book. Yezierska’s jux-taposition of notions of the maternal, the animal, and the aesthetic, her bring-ing images of white-America, as represented both by Mrs. Preston’s linens and Hanneh Hayyeh’s painted kitchen, with counter-images of raging, destructive blackness, is especially interesting in light of Hélène Cixous’ metaphorical de-scription of feminine writing in her famous essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” as a “dark continent,”58 dangerous and destructive. “When the repressed of their culture and their society returns,” Cixous writes, “it’s an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions.”59 Hannah Safransky’s destructive ram-page at the end of “The Lost Beautifulness” might be read as precisely this

57Yezierska, “The Lost Beautifulness,” p. 41.58Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in

Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schock-en Books, 1980), pp. 247–48. Cixous argues in this essay that it is impossible to define or limit the feminine practice of writing. She does, however, offer various metaphorical descriptions of this writing through images of darkness, the mother, the body, bisexuality and heterogeneity.

59Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” p. 256.



kind of “staggering return”—an unleashing of a new artistic energy released from repression.

Significantly, the passage describing the creation of this second work in-cludes no dialogue, concentrating instead on melodramatic physical gestures, evocative of the pre-Symbolic, pre-lingual stage of development, of the body and the physical medium of dance. Over the course of the night, Hanneh Hayyeh enacts a veritable dance of destruction, in which she seizes, scratches, breaks, tears, unscrews, turns, blackens, rages, flings herself on the lounge, her nerves quivering and her body aching. Hanneh Hayyeh does not revel in this second piece of art work formed out of the remnants of the first. Like Yezier-ska herself, this ghetto artist never feels entirely comfortable falling back on images of woman as uncontrollable, irrational, creatures of passion, and never entirely relinquishes her desire to emulate (masculine) American-born style. And yet, even as she mourns the lost beautifulness that she herself created and destroyed, she cannot help noticing the vitality of her newly ruined kitchen. As in her essay “Mostly About Myself,” where Yezierska describes herself writ-ing feverishly day and night in order to create stories which are a “living picture of living people,”60 Hanneh Hayyeh’s feverish nocturnal rampage results in a remarkably vibrant expression of her immigrant anger and disappointment. “These walls that stared at her in their ruin, were not just walls. They were animate—they throbbed with the pulse of her own flesh.”61 Here artistic cre-ation becomes synonymous with ethnic and gender identity: the “wall”—and by extension, the word—made flesh.

This effort to create an idiom and form which reflects a female Jewish (immigrant) identity, to imbue one’s writing with a vibrancy of female flesh and blood can also be discerned in the work of Canadian writer Adele Wise-man, particularly in her immigrant novel, Crackpot (1974), a work which bears distinct similarities with Henry Roth’s earlier-discussed Call It Sleep. Like Roth’s Call It Sleep, Crackpot is a coming-of age novel, as well as a narrative of the immigrant experience set against a background of poverty, squalor, social Darwinism and insecurity. Again like Roth’s novel, which alludes to biblical and mythological sources (particularly to the Book of Isaiah as well as certain Christological images), Crackpot is shot through with references to biblical as well as kabbalistic lore, all with a female/feminist twist. The novel opens with a quasi-biblical, quasi-comical litany of “begats”—“Out of Shem Berl and Golda

60Anzia Yezierska, “Mostly About Myself,” in How I Found America, p. 136.61Yezierska, “The Lost Beautifulness,”p. 42.


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came Rachel. Out of Danille and Rachel came Hoda. Out of Hoda, Pipick came, Pipick born in secrecy and mystery and terror, for what did Hoda know?”62 But unlike the typical biblical genealogy which may or may not include the mother and typically drives toward the male son who will be the focus of the story, Wiseman centers her story on the development of Hoda rather than her son, David, whose nickname Pipick, the Yiddish word for belly button or navel, ties him back umbilically to his mother Hoda. Hoda’s story of initiation, like that of David Schearl in Call it Sleep, takes on a mythic or mystical quality, which is greater than itself. Unlike Roth’s novel, however, which consistently casts David’s development in phallic terms, the story of Hoda’s coming of age takes on a frank, female sexual form, not just in its audacious explorations of Hoda’s sexual experiences as a neighborhood prostitute in Winnipeg, but also in the repeated female sexual/reproductive imagery of vessels and contain-ers. Strewn throughout the novel, as suggested by the title, are images of pots that crack or overflow, that bring forth their flawed, radiant offspring or break into various fragments, shards which Hoda endeavors throughout her life to rejoin and repair. In its recurrent use of images of cracked, fragmented vessels Wiseman’s Crackpot seems to answer the call of such French feminist critics as Luce Irigaray for a representation of female sexuality which is not “conceptual-ized on the basis of masculine parameters,” which is not fixed and unified, but rather plural, expanding and limitless.63

What Wiseman adds to this French feminist paradigm, of course, is the richness of Jewish mystical tradition.64 The epigraph to the novel, taken from Lurianic story of Creation, provides the mystical context for this recurrent vessel imagery. According to Lurianic Kabbalah, in the beginning God “stored the Divine Light in a Vessel, but the Vessel, unable to contain the Holy Ra-diance, burst, and its shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered

62Adele Wiseman, Crackpot (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 7. Orig-inally published in Canada in 1974 by McClelland Stewart Ltd., Toronto. All citations will be from the University of Nebraska edition.

63Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 23–31.64For interesting readings of Wiseman’s Crackpot, see Michael Greenstein, “The Fis-

sure-Queen: Issues of Gender and Post-Colonialism in Crackpot,” Room of One’s Own: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sept. 1993): 20–31; Francis Zichy, “The Lurianic Background: Myths of Fragmentation and Wholeness in Adele Wise-man’s Crackpot,” Essays on Canadian Writing, Vol. 50 (Fall 1993): 264–79; and Marco Lo-Verso, “Language Private and Public: A Study of Wiseman’s Crackpot,” Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1984): 78–94.



through the Universe.”65 Reminiscent of this kabbalistic legend of Creation, both Rachel and her daughter Hoda become vessels for something to grow inside and burst out from them. Rachel first engenders the obese, unstoppable Hoda. She then becomes a vessel for a lethal growth or cancer that ultimately overwhelms and kills her. When Hoda becomes a practicing prostitute as a way of supporting herself and her blind father after her mother’s death, Hoda herself becomes the unknowing vessel for the gestation of a baby that bursts out of her one night and almost rips her to pieces emotionally and physically. Terrified by the mystery, secrecy, and violence of the baby’s birth, Hoda clum-sily severs and knots the cord, wraps up the baby in rags and abandons him on the doorstep on the local orphanage of which her rich uncle is a major patron. That she feels she must give up the baby is evidence of yet another form of tragic fragmentation, just like the kabbalistic vessel that breaks up into so many shards which need to be gathered back in order for the world to be repaired and perfected.

Vessel imagery also figures earlier in the story of Hoda’s development when Hoda attempts as part of a public speaking assignment at school to tell the fabulous story of her parents’ marriage in the old country—an Eastern European hieros gamos in the graveyard, reminiscent of the marriage of Gim-pel and Elka in I. B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool.” Hunchback Rachel and blind Danille are brought together in marriage in an effort to bring an end to a plague that was ravaging the village. Hoda, as vessel for the transmission of this story, is a kind of overflowing “superabundant” physical and storytelling presence in the class. Her sexually repressed teacher Miss Boltholmsup becomes “posi-tively sick to the stomach with the vividness”66 of her story, however, and thus silences Hoda before she is able to bring the story to its proper conclusion. “Your whole display this afternoon,” Hoda’s teacher tells her, “was inappropri-ate,” the result being that Hoda makes a career out of being inappropriate. The teacher’s name, which Hoda mockingly re-writes as “Bottom’s Up,” evokes the twin images of a bare bottom and of a glass being turned over and emptied, as in a drinking contest where the shot glass is turned over when it is empty and placed on the bar. Hoda’s teacher has to empty herself of Hoda’s story of sa-cred copulation in the graveyard. But Hoda refuses to empty and repress her-self in the same fashion. When not given recognition in school for the amaz-ing story of her family and for her oral/literary powers of self-creation, she

65Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 1. 66Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 97.


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embarks on the various sexual adventures that result in her setting up shop in her broken-down house in the corner of town, where she copulates regularly and religiously with anyone who wanders by. “Bundle for Britain,” she cheers her clients on during World War II. “Fornicate for Freedom.”67 David Schearl’s sexual initiation is figured in Roth’s Call It Sleep with images of fragmentation, the whole world breaking “into a thousand little pieces, all buzzing, all whin-ing, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them except himself.”68 Like David Schearl, Hoda undergoes a similar mixture of revulsion and exaltation as a result of her early sexual exploits. Ultimately, however, Hoda’s sexual ini-tiation does not serve, as in David Shearl’s case, as a catalyst for her isolation from the various menacing social forces around her, but rather as an outlet in which she is able in her own highly unorthodox way to bring the various frag-ments of her existence together.

While it may be treading on shaky ground to adduce a novel in which the female protagonist is a prostitute who eventually has sex with her own son as a feminist representation of female sexuality, Wiseman’s Crackpot somehow convinces us that Hoda is not an exploited figure but rather a proletarian revo-lutionary, an expert in the art of “making” fleeting bits of love in a world that sorely needs it. The conclusion of the novel, in which Hoda assents to marry a physically and emotionally broken Galician Holocaust survivor, recapitulates the theme of sacred marriage in the graveyard, suggesting another one of the ways in which “crackpot” Hoda has helped bring about tikkun olam (repairing the world).

III. Postfeminist Readings

Cynthia Ozick’s 1983 novella “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” is another work of contemporary fiction that builds a female plot on the foundation of kabbal-istic lore and the mystical imperative of tikkun olam. When the novella begins, Ruth Puttermesser, a middle-aged, unmarried lawyer/bureaucrat, autodidact and Soviet-Jewry activist, has just lost her lover and is about to lose her job. Having always fantasized about having a daughter, she suddenly discovers in her bed the form of a naked teenage girl—a female golem—that apparently, she herself has unwittingly fashioned out of the soil taken from the potted plants in her apartment. In writing this half-comic, half-tragic story about a female intellectual/functionary who creates and breathes life into a female

67Wiseman, Crackpot, p. 270.68Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 55.



golem, Ozick makes feminist literary history, supplying a female version of several religious as well as secular male plots—the Pygmalion story, where a male sculptor carves the statue of girl who then comes to life, the Frankenstein story where a male scientist creates and animates a monstrous human using the tools of modern science, the biblical Creation Story, where a male-gen-dered God first creates a male human out of the dust of the earth and breathes the breath of life into his nose, and the golem tradition which begins with the sixteenth century Rabbi Lowe of Prague who creates a male golem of great physical strength to help protect the Jews from their adversaries. “This is a holy place,” the mute golem writes to the confused Puttermesser, who initially thinks that this female creature in her bed is a wayward girl who has broken into her apartment. “I did not enter. I was formed. Here you spoke the name of the Giver of Life. You enveloped me with your spirit. You pronounced the Name and brought me to myself. Therefore I call you mother.”69

Puttermesser’s female golem, who calls herself the Greek name Xan-thippe after Socrates’ shrewish wife, who tended to Socrates’ earthly needs as Socrates pursued the lofty matters of philosophy, first serves as Puttermesser’s domestic helper and moves on to the loftier task of getting the unemployed Puttermesser elected as mayor of the City of New York, so she can enact a broad-ranging “PLAN FOR THE RESUSCITATION, REFORMATION, REINVIGORATION, & REDEMPTION OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.”70 Puttermesser’s golem, however, does not bring about genuine tikkun olam. As Sarah Blacher Cohen observes, Xanthippe encourages Puttermess-er to become sinfully obsessed with perfection. Both Puttermesser and her golem become puffed up with their achievements and aspirations; Xanthippe literally swells in physical stature as the story progresses, becoming a kind of monstrous embodiment of insatiable desire.71 Ultimately, like Rabbi Lowe of Prague, Puttermesser needs to destroy her Golem, to return her creation to the earth to prevent the destruction of the city. According to some critics, then, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” is a story about the unlawful usurpation of the creative, ameliorative powers of God and how this usurpation should be punished and undone. Read in light of third-wave or “postfeminist” theory, however, Ozick’s “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” takes on special relevance,

69Cynthia Ozick, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” in Levitation (New York; E.P. Dut-ton, 1983), p. 97.

70Ozick, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,”p. 123.71Sarah Blacher Cohen, Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy (Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 95–6.


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insofar as it offers a statement on the shifting, unstable nature of gender and identity categories, and serves as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of supplanting a patriarchal “master narrative” with an equally oppressive “mis-tress narrative.”

As Judith Butler writes in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, “[f ]or the most part, feminist theory has as-sumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the categories of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is assumed. . . . [T]his prevailing conception has come under challenge. The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms.”72 At the same time, post-feminist critics are aware that the complete disavowal of identity is im-possible, for that would lead to the opposing problem of “undifferentiation.” According to Jane Gallop, then, “[id]entity must be continually assumed and immediately called into question.”73

In Ozick’s “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” this kind of construction and deconstruction of identity occurs and recurs beginning with the story (or lack thereof ) of the golem’s creation. In contrast to the biblical story in Genesis 2, where God’s role in creating Adam from the dust of earth is made very explicit, Ozick provides no direct description of Ruth Puttermesser’s fashioning of her golem, leaving the real origins of this creature ultimately uncertain. One mo-ment, Puttermesser is fantasizing about a daughter who recites Goethe, and the next, the golem is lying there in Puttermesser’s bed. Puttermesser does not recall making her. Where then has she come from? What is her essence? Her nature? The golem has a female form, but is she a woman? “It was true she [Puttermesser] had circled the bed. Was it seven times around? It was true she had had blown some foreign matter out of the nose. Had she blown some un-canny energy into the entrance of the dormant body? It was true she had said aloud one of the names of the Creator.”74 This passage suggests an adaptation of various traditions. Puttermesser’s circling of the bed recalls the traditional wedding ritual in which the bride circles the groom, signifying his future cen-trality to her self-definition, while the number seven recalls the seven days of biblical Creation and the primeval marriage of Adam and Eve in Eden; here,

72Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.1.

73From Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. xii. Quoted in Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 104.

74Ozick, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” p. 97.



however, instead of a bride circling a groom, a female creator figure encircles a female golem, suggesting a female-centered revision of the divine creation plot in which all male figures are excluded. Here the golem becomes Adam and Eve to God Puttermesser; and yet, as Puttermesser’s circling of this golem/groom suggests, an intertwining of identity is about to occur, whereby it will be diffi-cult to identify the creator from the created. On one level, this passage offers a meta-fictive commentary on the unintentionality of (literary) creativity. It has indeed become a commonplace for writers to speak of the characters they cre-ate taking on lives and careers of their own; in these terms, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” is Ozick’s own unwitting offspring. On another level, Xanthippe’s uncertain origins introduces a theme of unstable identities and relationships which continues in the narrative, even as Puttermesser becomes Mayor and witnesses through the inexhaustible efforts of the golem, the utopian trans-formation of New York City. “The coming of the golem animated the salva-tion of the City, yes—but who Puttermesser sometimes wonders, is the true golem? Is it Xanthippe or is it Puttermesser? Puttermesser made Xanthippe; Xanthippe did not exist before Puttermesser made her: that is clear enough. But Xanthippe made Puttermesser Mayor, and Mayor Puttermesser too did not exist before. And that is also clear. Puttermesser sees that she is the golem’s golem.”75

In contrast to the conventionally masculine mode of linear cause and ef-fect, Puttermesser’s ability to be molded by a creature of her own creation suggests a reciprocal or circular relationship of malleability and continual ref-ormation, even destruction. Nothing is given or fixed about the assumed roles and identity markers of these two characters. They are both fragile fictions, a fact that becomes palpably clear when Puttermesser destroys the overgrown, love-crazed golem and, by implication, her mayoral identity and urban para-dise. Puttermesser elegizes: “O Lost New York! O lost Xanthippe!” But were these lost objects ever truly found in the first place?

As a cautionary tale, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe” suggests that replacing a male-centered creation story with a female-centered one does not necessarily bring about tikkun olam. In Ozick’s novella, the same Promethean, patriarchal acts of seizing power and assuming god-like perfectibility are performed by female rather than male actors. Clearly, Ozick’s insertion of this female golem story into a long masculine literary history is a feminist achievement. All the same, in serving as a feminine version of maculine myth, Puttermesser’s Xan-

75Ozick, “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” pp. 136–37.


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thippe also runs the risk of becoming an end in herself, a counter-myth or idol that must be destroyed before it becomes an ossified form of feminist identity.

The critical enterprise of de-centering our various notions of identity has become an especially important strategy for post-feminist/queer theorists such as Butler, as well as for contemporary post-colonial and lesbian femi-nist theorists. Post-colonial critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty, for example, has been instrumental in voicing objection to the monolithic representation of Third-World women in Western feminist literature, as well as to the notion of a universal notion of “Woman”—of gender or sexual difference—which would unite feminists throughout the world across all national and class bor-ders.76 Together with lesbian critic Biddy Martin, Mohanty has also mounted a critique against the idea of “feminism as an all-encompassing home”—that is, the “assumption that there are discrete, coherent, and absolutely separate identities—homes within feminism, so to speak—based on absolute divisions between various sexual, racial, or ethnic identities.”77 Using as their example an autobiographical essay by Minnie Bruce Pratt entitled “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,”78 Martin and Mohanty advocate a critical perspective which is “mul-tiple and shifting,” in which the critic “re-anchors herself repeatedly in each of the positions from which she speaks, even as she works to expose the illusory coherence of these positions.”79

These various critical perspectives are particularly relevant to a reading of the writing of lesbian writer Ruth Seid/Jo Sinclair (1913– ), especially her 1955 novel, The Changelings, which opens as a Jewish community in Cleve-

76Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Co-lonial Discourses,” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 196–220.

77Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An An-thology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 294.

78Minnie Bruce Pratt’s “Identity: Skin, Blood Heart” is part of a book co-authored by Pratt, Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith entitled Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 1984), pp. 11–63.

79Martin and Mohanty, p. 295. For another Jewish application of these ideas see Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Janet Handler Burstein, Telling Little Secrets:American Jewish Writing Since the 1980s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 76–115.



land begins to “defend” itself against the arrival of blacks in their neighbor-hood, provoking them to reconsider their notion of “at-homeness” in America. On the margins of the neighborhood is The Gully, a liminal space, neither street nor park, where the neighborhood kids congregate. In “the summer the Gully really belonged to Vincent and her gang”80—Vincent, an androgynous, last-name designation for Judy Vincent, a young street-wise adolescent girl who dresses up as a boy and presides over the gang, which meets regularly on Friday nights. As a tomboy who is not quite a boy (“She had never actually called herself a boy, but neither had she ever thought of herself as one of the girls she despised for their soft, plaintive weakness”81), leading a gang of Jew-ish and Italian kids that meets on Friday nights in a club house that “was big enough to hold ten people” (a minyan that is not quite a minyan), where they light candles melted into two wine bottles (a Sabbath ritual that is not quite a Sabbath ritual), Judy Vincent is a walking representation of the plural, shifting nature of identity and home.

For a long time Vincent had lived in a three separate worlds: one that was the gang-gully, one was the street, one was Manny-Shirley [her nephew and inter-married sister]. There were three levels of thinking and feeling in her, to match these separate worlds in which she had moved so methodically. Rather suddenly, lately, her worlds had been jumping out of their boundaries, fragments from one mixing confusingly with bits from the other two.82

At least this is the sort of identity that she has always naturally embraced, until her street and her gang members, facing the specter of the “Schwartze” in their midst, retrench and reassert more essentialist notions of religious and gender affiliation. In one particularly chilling scene early in the novel, Vincent’s gang members turn on her and forceably strip her naked to demonstrate that she is indeed a girl. At that very moment in the novel, however, Judy meets and befriends Clara, a similarly tomboyish black girl from the other side of the gully, an encounter that demonstrates Judy’s determination not to reside within set racial, religious, or gender categories. Dubbed a “changeling” by her tubercular poet friend, Jules, because she is so different from her family and the people on her street, Judy Vincent is a “borderland” character—to borrow

80Jo Sinclair, The Changelings (New York: Feminist Press, 1983), p. 3. 81Sinclair, The Changelings, p. 17.82Sinclair, The Changelings, p. 12.


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Chicana lesbian critic Gloria Anzaldúa’s term83—whose mix of traits and al-legiances provoke her continually to change and challenge the boundaries of her life.

Which brings us to the present moment in American Jewish literary his-tory—the “New Wave,” as it has been called by several writers and critics.84 Despite Irving Howe’s oft-quoted dire predictions for the post-immigrant pe-riod in Jewish American literature,85 Jewish American literature is alive, well, and thriving in large measure because of the extraordinary contributions of an ever-expanding group of young women writers—Rebecca Goldstein, Al-legra Goodman, Tova Mirvis, Nicole Krauss, Joan Leegant, and Dara Horn, to name a few—who continue to negotiate the ideas of Jewish (feminine) Ameri-can identity and home.

In her recent study of contemporary Jewish American literature, critic Janet Handler Burstein observes that “[i]n much recent work by American Jewish women writers of the new wave, this postmodern awareness of the complexity of ‘selving’ is coupled with a persistent interest in the constructive power of search for origins.”86 This trend finds particularly significant expres-sion in Dara Horn’s remarkable debut novel, In the Image, a novel which inter-weaves related stories of American Jewish life with allusions to the biblical and Jewish literary past,87 and where a female protagonist’s quest for origins culmi-nates in the fantastic dream-discovery of a lost city of origins in the New York harbor beneath the Statue of Liberty. This arresting chapter explicitly recalls Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” as well as the climactic conclusion of Roth’s Call

83Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco, 1987), pp. 78–80.

84See Morris Dickstein, “Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing,” Tikkun, Vol. 12, No. 6 (1997): 33–36; Andrew Furman, Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Janet Burstein, Telling Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing Since the 1980s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). See also Wendy Zierler, “A New Addition to the ‘New Wave’ of Jewish-American Literature” (a review of a book by Janet Burstein), Midstream ( Janu-ary/Febuary 2007): 33–36.

85See note 11; also Irving Howe, introduction to Jewish American Stories, p. 16-17.86Janet Handler Burstein, Telling Little Secrets, p. 77.87Dara Horn, In The Image (W. W. Norton & Co., 2002). The array of biblical allu-

sions in the novel is extensive, including references to Noah and the flood (p. 24), Lamenta-tions (p. 36), the creation accounts of Genesis 1 (p. 38), Job (p. 95 and later), Ezekiel and the dry bones prophecy (p. 132), Rachel and Leah (p. 138).



It Sleep, thereby providing a fitting coda for this feminist re-reading of Jewish American literary history and criticism.

As mentioned earlier, the concluding sequence of Call It Sleep has David Schearl’s escaping from his home with a milk ladle to the rail tracks, past the “old wagon-yard, the lifted thicket of tongues; the empty stables, splintered runways, chalked doors, the broken windows holding their glass like fangs in the sash, exhaling manure-damp, rank. The last street lamp droning in a cyst of light. The gloomy massive warehouse, and beyond it, the strewn chaos of the dump stretching to the river.”88 Horn’s final chapter re-enacts this same se-quence with Leora running against a backdrop of New York City urban blight, past

burned out factories and chemical swamps, past rail yards and landfills, past garbage dumps and abandoned buildings, past rotting two-family houses and downed power lines, past unused smokestacks and giant water towers, past emp-ty streets, empty buildings, empty houses, where not a single glowing window illuminated the dark night. . . . In front of her, beckoning with a giant torch like a flare in a crime scene, stood the Statue of Liberty.89

David Schearl’s journey reaches its climax when he plunges the dipper into tracks and electrocutes himself, knocking himself unconscious. Recalling Da-vid’s moment of death and rebirth, Horn’s Leora plunges into the river; her visit to the lost city, however, serves to heighten rather than to erase her con-sciousness of past choices and experiences. The lost city she plumbs

contains only things that we have truly abandoned, created exclusively out of what we believe to be lost forever . . . teeming and screaming and churning with all that was have now forgotten, that it spills out over its walls, the wretched refuse of its teeming shores pushing out in every direction until the walls sur-rounding its inner core become little more than a technicality. In this underwater sanctuary, however, the huddled masses all breathe free.”90

After touring the city, Leora departs not through its gates, but by springing herself off the ocean floor and “projecting herself upward,”—like the Statue of Liberty herself. Leora’s visit to and departure from the lost city thus point to a desire to supply new definitions of American liberty, as underscored by the explicit allusions to Lazarus’ sonnet in the passage quoted above. If in Laza-rus’ sonnet, America offers immigrants the assimilationist opportunity to shed

88Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 408.89Dara Horn, In The Image, p. 271.90Horn, In The Image, p. 273, emphasis added.


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their wretched past by the golden door, Leora’s deep-sea dive suggests that the our ability to breathe free en masse in America inheres in our ability to choose exactly how much of our Jewish textual/religious/cultural past we wish to embrace and how we wish to make or remake our Jewish American (femi-nine/masculine91) selves. By analogy, we as contemporary feminist readers of Jewish-American texts are challenged to invent and reinvent our own critical selves, continually re-making the multi-fold project of feminist interpretation, and re-shaping the contours of Jewish American literary history to reflect our contemporary reality.

91For a fascinating discussion of the ways in which Dara Horn’s novel enacts “Gen-der Trouble,” querying both masculine and feminine Jewish identities, see Helene Meyers, “Jewish Gender Trouble: Women Writing Men of Valor,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Litera-ture, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006): 323–334.

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