AN INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING BY JEWISH WOMEN 2004
By Irena Klepfisz and Helen Epstein
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in memoir as a genre on the parts of the international publishing industry as well as the academy, where memoir is now a frequent focus of non-fiction courses. Memoirs by Jewish women have been very much a part of this trend. Increasingly, scholars are examining the autobiographical writings of women rabbis, politicians, physicians. psychologists, community leaders and artists, and literary figures for a greater understanding of Jewish life.
As Jewish women writers, we have both been asked to lecture on Jewish women’s memoir and are confronted with the lack of a definitive anthology that is inter-national (including Europe, Israel, South America, North and South Africa and the U.S.) and inclusive of all parts of the community (observant and secular; lesbian and heterosexual; Ashkenazi. Mizrachi and Sephardi). We are particularly interested in texts that are out of print and texts which have not yet been translated into English but that we can translate ourselves. In 2002 we were funded by what was then the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women to begin work on a bibliography.
We have selected an international group of authors and texts and annotated them, thereby opening up a resource through which scholars might address such questions as: when did Jewish women begin writing memoirs and why? In what contexts did they locate their lives? Did they view themselves as exceptions or, as Mary Antin saw it, representatives of "unwritten lives?" We hope that this annotated bibliography, which we view as an evolving resource for general readers as well as for the many Jewish reading groups across the country, will also provide a valuable tool for students and teachers in Jewish Studies, History, Sociology and Literature courses.
We have chosen to include only book length autobiographies. In addition, because there is so much Holocaust material, we reviewed only the “classics” and a few other special memoirs. We have, however, included articles, personal essays, and anthologies of work by women from under-represented groups, most particularly Sephardi/Mizrachi women and Lesbians.
Memoirs included here describe Jewish women’s lives in 25 countries: Austria; Canada; Chile; Cuba; Czechoslovakia; England; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; India;
Israel; Lebanon; Lithuania; Netherlands; Palestine; Poland;
Russia; South Africa; Spain; Soviet Union; Switzerland
Syria; Turkey; U.S.) and are written in 10 languages:
Czech, Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew,
Russian, Spanish and Yiddish.
We tried to describe rather than review the literature although inevitably judgments were made. We were particularly interested in Jewish women who were in some way activists or involved in Jewish, women’s and general political movements; in women who were involved in the arts and in the sciences. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are strongly represented.
We have created 239 keywords which allow researchers to be
as detailed as possible.
The bulk of the material—despite our best efforts—is Ashkenazi, secular, heterosexual, middle class. We do not repeat these words—instead we identify Sephardi, observant (Hassidim, Orthodox, Traditional), lesbian, and working class (class—whenever this is an issue).
Helen Epstein and Irena Klepfisz
To facilitate research and to make continuation of the project on the internet easier, we have established the following Keywords (239)
1950s
1960s
Abortion
Academia
Activism
Adolescence
African American
Agunah
AIDS
Anglo Jewry
Anthropology
Anti-Racism
Anti-Semitism
Apartheid
Art
Ashkenazim
Assimilation
Austria
Baltimore
Berkeley
Berlin
Bialik, H. N.
Birobizan
Black Power Movement
Bobriusk
Bombay
Booksellers
Boston
Brecht, Bertolt
Bronx
Brooklyn
Budapest
Buddhism
California
Cambridge
Canada
Catholics
Chagall, Marc
Child Psychology
Childlessness
Chile
Civil Rights Movement
Class
Cleveland
Cochin
Communism
Conservative
Court Jews
Cracow
Cuba
Czechoslovakia
Death
Deganya
DP Camps
Drug Addiction
Dutch
Early Feminism
East Coast
Education
England
Etsel Groups
Family Violence
Farsi
Fashion
Father-Daughter Relationship
Feminism
Feminist Theory
Food
France
Frankfurt
Free Love
French
Freud, Sigmund
Friendship
German
German Jews
Germany
Greece
Gulag
Halakha
Hamburg
Haskalah
Hebrew
Hebrew Literature
Hidden Children
Holidays
Hollywood
Holocaust
Homophobia
Hungarian Jews
Hungary
Immigrants
India
Indian Military Service
Intermarriage
International
Interracial Marriage
Iran
Iranian Women
Isareli/Palestinian Conflict
Israel
Israeli Feminism
Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
Janina
Jazz
Jewish Food
Jewish Identity
Jewish Labor Bund
Jewish Renewal
Jewish Women of Color
Jewish Youth
Journalism
Kibbutz Life
Kindertransport
Konigsburg
Kozienice
Labor Movement
Language
Lebanon
Lechi Group
Leningrad
Lesbian Rabbis
Lesbianism
Literary
Literature
Lithuania
London
Los Angeles
Lower East Side
Manhattan
McCarthyism
Mental Illness
Metz
Miami
Mischling
Midwest
Mizrachi
Mother-Daughter Relationship
Motherhood
Mother-Son Relationship
Movies
Music
Nahalal
Native American
Netherlands
New Jersey
New Left
New Orleans
New School
New York City
Observance
Old Left
Opera
Orthodox
Orthodox Feminist Movement
Palestine
Palestine-Israel
Paris
Passing
Philosophy
Poetry
Poland
Polygamy
Pornography
Post-Holocaust
Prague
Premysl
Prostitution
Psychiatry
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Psychotherapy
Puerto Rico
Queer Theory
Racism
Recipes
Relationship with Jewish Gays
Revisionist Zionism
Ritual
Roth, Philip
Russia
Russian Revolutionary Movements
San Francisco
Scholarship
SDS
Second Aliya
Second Generation
Secret Jews
Secular
Secular Identity
Sephardim
Sex Therapy
Sexism
Sexuality
Single Women
Sisters
Slansky Trail
Socialism
Sociology
South Africa
Soviet Union
Spain
Spanish
Sports
Stern Gang
Stuttgart
Survivors
Switzerland
Syria
Television
Theater--American
Theater--French
Theater--Lesbian
Theater--London
Theater--Yiddish
Traditional Jews
Transgender
Transsexual
Turkey
U.S.
Victorian
Vienna
Vilna
Violence against Women
Washington Heights
Weathermen
WIZO
Women and Peace
Women Pioneers
Women Rabbis
Women’s Movement
Women’s Salons
World War II
Yiddish
Yiddish Culture
Yiddish Scholarship
YIVO
Youth Aliya
Zionism
INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH WOMEN'S
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING
By Helen Epstein and Irena Klepfisz with contributions by Tali Berner; Aviva Dautch, Rachel Shnider, Michelle Kay, Naomi Reinharz, Gail Merrifield Papp, Sylvia Schatz
ADLER, CELIA. Tsili Adler dertseylt [Celia Adler Recalls].
NY: Celia Adler Foundation and Book Committee, Vol. I & II. 1959. 688p.
Celia Adler was the "First Lady of the Yiddish Theater," the daughter of Jacob P. Adler and Dinah Shtettin. Half-sister of actors Luther Adler, Stella Adler.
LIFESPAN: 1889-1979
KW: Yiddish, New York City, Yiddish Theater
ADLER, SARA. My Life Story. NY: Jewish Daily Forward (Yiddish)
Yiddish stage star Sara Adler was born Sara Levitzky and was active in a prominent Yiddish theater troupe in Odessa, Russia in the late 1800s. When Yiddish plays were outlawed in September 1883, reflecting the increasing governmental controls on Russian Jews, her troupe made plans to emigrate to the United States and she went too, leaving her home to find a new life. Settling in New York, Sara quickly became a popular actress on the Yiddish stage. Through her work, she met and married Jacob Adler, an established American Yiddish actor, who wanted to reinvent and revitalize Yiddish theater. Together with the playwright Jacob Gordin, the Adlers were responsible for creating what is now called the "first golden epoch" of Yiddish theater, establishing the Independent Yiddish Art Company and promoting Yiddish theater in America during the early part of the 20th century. Most of their plays were produced at their own theater in New York, and Sara played 300 leading roles in all manner of productions, from serious drama to light escapist fare. After Jacob died in 1926, Sara rarely performed, but her two children, Stella and Luther, both became actors. Stella worked primarily on the stage and later taught acting, while Luther was a movie actor. Sara died on April 28, 1953.
LIFESPAN: ?-1953
KW: Yiddish, Russia, New York City, Yiddish Theater
AGOSIN, MARJORIE. The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (Trans. Nancy Abraham Hall) Rutgers U. Press 2000. 187p. and A Cross and A Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile. NY: Feminist Press. 1997. 224p.
The Alphabet in My Hands aims to evoke the Chile of Agosin's childhood and the America of her adolescent exile. The work is made up of over 150 very short, prose-poems which describe people, places, emotional moments and crises into two primary sections titled: "Childhood" and "Journey to the Other America." Women figure prominently throughout the book and the reader is aware of an underlying feminist approach to the material. The thrust of the book is the loss of the childhood Chile, the discovery of the more adult Chile of violence and political repression, the struggle to find oneself in an alien culture and become a writer. Sometimes Agosin's literary pointillism is effective, other times it is self-conscious and detracts from an extended discussion or examination of any particular subject. Agosin, known for her human rights work and historical research regarding Chile's disappeared under Pinochet, does not in this work root her writing in a historical context. In a chapter entitled “Being Jewish,” she reveals her consciousness of her Jewishness; as a child, she was sent to a Jewish school to protect her from pervasive anti-Semitism. There is also a brief description of a trip to Israel in 1973, but her primary identification is as a Latina from Chile. Her ongoing Jewish association seems to be with death, as when she visits the sites of mass murder and torture from Pinochet's era, sites which are reminiscent of the Holocaust.
LIFESPAN: 1955-
KW: Spanish, Chile, U.S., Immigration, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Literary, Activism
ALPERT, JANE. Growing Up Underground. NY: Morrow, 1981. 372p.
This memoir is part of the radical/activist tradition in Jewish women's memoirs, a window onto the life of a girl growing up in the 1960s and becoming part of the radical Left of that time, including her participation in the notorious short-lived American terrorist group called the Weathermen. Alpert grew up in the middle-class largely Jewish neighborhood of Forest Hills in the borough of Queens, New York. She describes her political and social education and the influence of Greenwich Village, wearing the Fred Braun sandals, hoop earrings, and blue jeans that became the uniform of women in "the movement.” Alpert describes her education through college in detail as well as the way she came into political activism. A reluctant revolutionary, she became involved through a lover with an anti-Vietnam war group in New York City's East Village that detonated bombs in the offices of major corporations. Alpert went underground as federal investigators threatened to arrest her and spent years "underground" under aliases before serving time in prison. Although the family background is recognizably Jewish and there is ample discussion of radical politics of the sixties, the real contribution of this book is its depiction of a Jewish girl's coming of age in a secular family, her sexual experimentation with both men and women, and the character of male-female relations between young radicals of the time. Well-written, sobering, and interesting.
LIFESPAN: 1947-
KW: New York City, Sixties, Activism, New Left, Weathermen
ALPERT, REBECCA T. and SUE LEVI ELWELL and SHIRLEY IDELSON (Eds.). Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 252p.
These essays range from personal narratives of religious awakening to narratives about problems in first being a lesbian rabbinical student and then later to finding a congregation or organizing a new one. To emphasize that despite all the progress not everything is still exactly as it should be, one contribution remains anonymous.
A variety of life paths are described which include lesbians of observant and assimilated backgrounds as well as of different training and denominations. In addition, we are given divergent perspectives on synagogues specifically organized for gays and lesbians and synagogues open to gays and lesbians and possibly led by lesbian rabbis. This may reflect a generational divide, the most recently ordained rabbis benefiting from a more integrated and open Jewish community than was evident in the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s. We also see a variety of personal choices that some of these rabbis make which include, among others, non-Jewish partners, motherhood through pregnancy and adoption.
The anthology is a testament to how far the Jewish community has come since Nice Jewish Girls (see Beck below) first appeared in 1982 and Beck declared Jewish lesbians invisible in the community. It also possibly marks the beginning of a new political block of rabbis working within the traditional rabbinical framework.
The introduction by Rabbis Sue Levi Elwell and Rebecca T. Apert provides an excellent framework from which to approach these essays.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: Lesbianism, Lesbian Rabbis, Motherhood, Intermarriage
BACALL, LAUREN (Betty Jane Perske). Lauren Bacall: By Myself. NY: Random House, 1979. 377p.
The breezy theater autobiography of a self-described "nice, Jewish girl" abandoned by her Jewish father and brought up by a divorced Jewish mother on the West Side of Manhattan in the 1930s. Stage struck from an early age, Bacall describes her artistic training, marriage to actor Humphrey Bogart, highlights of her theater and film career and relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jason Robards. "Going back through my life now, the Jewish family feeling stands proud and strong, and at least I can say I am glad I sprung from that. I would not trade those roots - that identity."
LIFESPAN: 1924-
KW: Bronx, Manhattan, American Theater, Hollywood, Anti-Semitism, Mother-Daughter Relationship
BALKA, CHRISTIE and ANDY ROSE (Eds.) Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian, Gay and Jewish. Boston: Beacon, 1989. 304p.
This collection of writing by more than a dozen Jewish lesbians includes the life stories, memoirs, and narratives of coming out to, being out and doing activism in the Jewish community. It is an important collection for it documents the progress made during the 1980s (since the publication of Nice Jewish Girls ----see Beck below-—though not using that collection as a historical marker) and before the major breakthroughs in community acceptance, which still lay ahead in the 1990s. Far more than NJG, the identity of its contributors is connected to religious observance and ritual.
The essays vary from personal accounts to essays of activism and transformation. Some of the writers were already known from Nice Jewish Girls (e.g. Beck, Maggid, Wahba), others were known from their scholarly work (e.g. Plaskow, Akelsberg, Rogow, Elwell). There are both analytical and personal essays relating to homophobia, conflicts with religious upbringing and education, acceptance in the Jewish community, historical traces of lesbians, and the emergence of lesbian rabbis, an identity that was increasingly causing conflict in the late 1980s in rabbinical programs.
Also significant is the collection’s partnership with gay Jewish men. This reflects the growing connection—which rarely existed in the previous decade—within the broader gay and lesbian movement, accounted for and in part spurred on by the AIDS epidemic. This partnership, ultimately, contributed to the growth and strengthening of gay synagogues throughout the world.
This is an important anthology and should be used in any analysis of the emergence of Jewish lesbian identity within the Jewish community.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: Lesbianism, Orthodox, Secular, Homophobia, Activism, Relationship with Jewish Gays, Women Rabbis, AIDS
BECK, EVELYN TORTON (Ed.) Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology—Revised and Updated Edition. Boston: Beacon, 1989. 330p.
This groundbreaking anthology was first published in 1982 by Persephone Press, a lesbian/feminist press. After Persephone folded a year later, it was reissued by Crossing Press, and then in 1989 was published by Beacon Press. The Beacon edition excised and replaced much of the material on Israel and anti-Semitism, added a section on Jews by choice, expanded material on Jewish lesbian mothers and in general made the anthology more up-to-date. This 1989 collection is in many ways, when looked at as a whole, a very different work than the original. A comparison of the two editions is educational in that it reveals the issues and pressures Jewish women were experiencing and trying to respond to in the more radical/left strand of what was then known as the Lesbian/Feminist Movement.
The anthology, which addresses both anti-Semitism in the Lesbian/Feminist Movement and homophobia in the Jewish community, consists of not only personal narratives, but fiction, poetry and interviews. The personal narratives are by numerous contributors (and the editors) who were beginning to be recognized as Jewish lesbian spokeswomen and writers: Beck, Kaye/Kantrowitz, Klepfisz, Rich, Wahba, among others. In addition to telling personal accounts of coming out and its consequences, the anthology represented for the first time (albeit in small proportion) Jewish women of color and Sephardim (Segal, Wahba) and on secular identity. It includes essays on homophobia in the Lesbian/Feminist Movement, on anti-Semitism in the feminist Christian criticism (Plaskow), misogyny in I.B. Singer (Beck), lesbian mothers (Beck), lesbian daughters of intermarriage (Rich) and Jewish converts (Knefelkamp). Issues of racism are also discussed (Kaye/Kantrowitz) as well as Israel, Zionism and the first intifada (Klepfisz). All in all, the anthology reflects the Lesbian/Feminist Movement’s insistence on addressing the broad social issues facing U.S. society and the American Jewish community.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: Lesbianism, Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, Sephardim, Jewish Women of Color, Activism, Intermarriage, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Observance, Israel, Racism
BEHAR, RUTH. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. 1996. 196p. + index .
The Vulnerable Observer is not technically an autobiography, but a collection of six essays written and revised between 1987-1996. Behar argues for the necessary acknowledgment and importance of autobiography in one's work. In her own case, this means admitting the impossible stance of "neutral" anthropological observer and acknowledging her own life as a filter through which others' experiences are viewed. Behar argues not only for acknowledging the now generally accepted privileges of race, class and gender (the latter is something she emphasizes), which distort our vision, but also for the personal experiences of each individual observer. To prove her case, she recounts various moments in her own work and her life and how they have intertwined. For example, her work on death and memory in a small village in Spain was conducted at a time when her grandfather was dying in Miami. Behar tries to show that though she was reluctant to deal with her grandfather's approaching death, she could deal more easily with issues of death and dying among people to whom she was less attached. This particular essay is interesting, almost like a puzzle, watching Behar put the pieces together. Other essays are not as satisfying. The last "Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart" is somewhat self-righteous and pushes the reader away, even when s/he agrees with the author. In some ways, Behar says nothing new. Behar argues for exposing one's personal life in one's work so that the work can be read in context. She doesn't however provide distinct borders and the reader is left with many questions about when to be self-revealing: with students, patients, customers etc.? Behar identifies as a Jew, but there is little Jewish content in this collection. Her primary identification is as a Cuban exile and she seems more grounded when she explores that.
LIFESPAN: 1956-
KW: Cuba, Miami, Spain, Anthropology, Feminism, Death, Activism
BEN ZVI, RAHEL YANAIT. Anu Olim (Autobiography)) Tel Aviv, 1959 and Be-Shlichut Le-Le-Levanon Ve-Lesuria (On a Mission to Lebanon and Syria, 1943) Tel Aviv: Milo, 1979.
This book is a collection of memories and selected diary entries put together by Rachel Yanait Ben Zvi many years after her visit to the Jewish communities of Syria and Lebanon. Her mission was to to bring young women to Israel on Youth Aliya. She tells about her encounter with Middle East communities, her achievements there and her disappointment in the Jews of Syria and Lebanon. Her account is a good example of the attitude of European Jews to Middle Eastern Jews in the 20th century, and their misunderstanding of the different dynamics and lifestyle of those Jews. Although Yanait Ben Zvi is very sympathetic to the people she meets, she criticizes their way of life throughout the book, which is well written and interesting to read. Reflective and ideological, the author is convinced of her mission and typical of second aliya women writers in that she sees herself as a colorless, genderless person who is simply ambassador of a certain ideology.
LIFESPAN: 1886-1979
KW: Hebrew, Syria, Lebanon, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Zionism Youth Aliya, World War II
BERNHARDT, SARAH. My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt. [Ma Double Vie] Trans. by Victoria Tietze Larson, SUNY Series, Women Writers in Translation, 1998, New York. 453p.
This is one of the first memoirs by a Jewish performer. The French actress Sarah Bernhardt was one of the leading international performers of the 19th century. Her memoir leaves no doubt of the charisma for which she was famed in her "double life," both on- and off-stage. It also illuminates the worlds of 19th century women, politics, society, Europe and America.
LIFESPAN: 1844-1923
KW: French, France, French Theater
BIALIK, MANYA (AUERBACH). Pirke Zikhronot. Tel Aviv: Devir, 1963. 47p.
In this short book, Manya Bialik describes her life with the Israeli national poet Haim Nahman Bialik. The book begins with their first meeting and marriage, and ends with his early death in 1934. Manya's main goal is to tell unknown details about her husband, but she also describes their life together and gives a very personal and different perspective about his life. Overall, however, the book is overshadowed by the author's grief over the death of her husband. This grief is sometimes hard to understand since Manya always refers to Bialik by his last name, and there are few signs of mutual affection during their life together. The quality of writing is very poor but it affords a rare view into the life of the poet's wife.
LIFESPAN:
KW: Hebrew, Russia, Palestine, H. N Bialik, Hebrew Literature
BLOCH, ALICE. “Scenes from the Life of a Jewish Lesbian” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. Ed. Susannah Heschel. NY: Schocken, 1983. pp. 171-176.
This six-page essay represents a major breakthrough by its inclusion in an exclusively heterosexual anthology of Jewish feminist writing. Though a token essay, it nevertheless brought to many of its readers their first awareness of Jewish lesbian life. Bloch, who was publishing lesbian fiction with Persephone Press, identifies specific years of significance (from her birth in 1947 in Youngstown, OH to 1977), and describes the important events, which marked her life. After 1977, she turns to generalities about feminism, Jewish identity and lesbianism. Like other contributors to the anthology, she is concerned with observance and ritual and how her lesbianism impacts on religious practice. She also defends her embrace of Judaism, refusing to reject it, as some Jewish feminists did, as oppressive and anachronistic.
This is an important lesbian essay because of its placement in a historic anthology that introduced Jewish feminism to the mainstream Jewish community.
LIFESPAN: 1947-
KW: Lesbianism, Observance, Literary
BLOOM, CLAIRE. Leaving A Doll's House. Boston: Little Brown, 1996. 251p.
This memoir centers on actress Claire Bloom's much-publicized relationship with and separation from the celebrated Jewish-American author Philip Roth, who used her as a model in some of his novels. It also offers a portrait of a Jewish woman raised in the UK, her training as an actress, and her struggles to create a working marriage with not only Roth but also two other artistic men. Interesting for its social and artistic detail, the book lacks psychological insight and self-understanding but is certainly of interest to any reader who has followed Bloom's theater career or Roth's writing.
LIFESPAN: 1931 -
KW: UK, London Theater, Philip Roth,
BORNSTEIN, KATE. Gender Outlaw. NY: Routledge, 1994. 241p.
This proclamation of Kate Bornstein's theories on sex and gender was published when the author, a trained actor from an Ivy League university, was living in San Francisco as a male-to-female transsexual in her forties with her female-to-male transsexual partner. Born in New Jersey in the 1950s, Kate grew up as Albert Herman, the only child son of middle class, Conservative Jewish parents. Kate, however, shied away from Judaism in her great identity search. Convinced from childhood that she was a woman, she used theater as an escape and a venue for learning and practicing being a man. Although now she is a transgender lesbian, she also spent years trying to be a man through having sex with many women and a few men, being a religious Scientologist; and to more successfully carry on what she considered a facade. Most intriguing is how she deduces in the end that all displays of gender are a front, or what she calls "drag." The majority of the book is comprised of essays on queer theory and transgender politics and includes only minor snippets of information about her personal life. The latter part, on the other hand, is a play called Hidden: A Gender, which the author wrote and also performed. One of the characters is clearly a fairly realistic incarnation of herself before her genital conversion surgery. Bornstein structured the book in a fluid, yet unconventional style of dividing most of the pages into thirds (mirroring her third space/sex notion), to separate other people's theories from her own, as well as a space for her private confessions of sorts. Moreover, she freely incorporates dialogue, poetry, charts and photographs to supplement the text. Gender Outlaw's honesty about the process of being transgender and Bornstein's fresh and accessible take on queer theory are the most important elements of the book.
LIFESPAN: 1948-
KW: U.S., Conservative, Transgender, Transsexual, Feminist, and Queer Theory; Lesbian Theater
CASSUTO, SHERRI. “Sephardic Lesbian at the Bar Mitzvah Games.” in Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends. Winter 1997-98, VII, 1. 78-82.
A rower who had participated in two Olympic competitions, Cassuto unexpectedly joins a U.S. rowing team competing in Israel’s Bar Mitzvah Games. Having rejected her conservative religious upbringing and distanced herself to some degree from her Jewishness, Cassuto is moved by her visit to Israel as she visits major sites of interest. Her enthusiasm on the tour is dampened, however, by the tour guide’s racist comments about Sephardim. She ultimately wins and is proud (she wants to be written in up in her parents’ local Sephardic paper), but retains mixed feelings about her experience there. She does not describe in detail her Sephardic identity and the piece is written from a non-heterosexual perspective.
LIFESPAN:
KW: U.S. (New York City), Conservative, Israel, Lesbianism, Sephardim, Sports, Racism, Homophobia
CHAGALL, BELLA. First Encounter. Illus. by Marc Chagal. Trans. by Barbara Bray. NY: Schocken Books, 1983. 348p.
This memoir covers Bella’s childhood in Vitebsk, Russia and describes her life through anecdotal essays on different holidays and life cycle events. Born into a middle-class, orthodox family, her parents were shopkeepers, and she was the youngest of five. She mainly discusses actual events rather than feelings or ideas, but a rough sketch of her character as a lively young person is revealed nevertheless. The book functions quite well as an historic text, rather than any sort of intimate portrait of Marc Chagall's wife. She tells of her trips to the bath house/mikveh with her mother, gives detailed accounts of most of the major Jewish holidays, the preparations for Pesach, the goings on between her siblings, her parents, herself and the hired help, and many others. The book closes with an entry by Marc about Bella's death and her attachment to her writing.
LIFESPAN: 1895-1944
KW: Yiddish, Russia, Orthodox, Holidays, Ritual, Marc Chagall
CHERNIN, KIM. In My Mother's House, NY: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. 307p.
Set in the 1970s and 1980s, this memoir is written by the poet daughter of a Communist organizer in California of the 1940s and is in the tradition both of books about Jewish political-activists and literary women. Focusing largely on the mother's life, the book begins in Czarist Russia and moves via steerage to the Bronx and Waterbury, Connecticut, describing the lives and issues of its working-class, largely Russian Jews. Rose Chernin becomes one of the American Communists who goes to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to work for an ideal society. She returns to California to do political work there, loses her eldest daughter to illness, raises her second daughter, Kim, goes to prison for her Communist affiliation, and remains committed to political organizing all her life. In addition to documenting her mother's life, Chernin depicts her evolving relationship with her mother, while conveying a childhood in the Old Left and an adolescence in the 1950s. Many women writers consider this a classic of the mother-daughter literature.
LIFESPAN: 1940-
KW: U.S. (Bronx, California), Soviet Union, Socialism, Communism, Old Left, Activism, McCarthyism, Mother-Daughter Relationship
CIXOUS, HELENE. Photo de Racines. Editions des Femmes Paris, 1994. Translated and published in English as part of Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Mireille, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge 1997.
This slim album of extraordinary photos and intriguing but short literary text is worth a look for anyone interested in French or North African material. Cixous was born in 1937 in Oran, Algeria, then a colony of France, and raised in a German-Jewish household. Her father was Sephardi; her mother Ashkenazi. "Consequently," she writes, "although I am profoundly Mediterranean of body, of appearance, of jouissances, all my imaginary affinities are Nordic." She is a professor (in 1968 she co-founded the Universite de Paris VIII), a radical feminist, poet, philosopher, author of 30 works of fiction and a literary scholar. The writing is tantalizing: "In France, what fell from me first was the obligation of the Jewish identity. On one hand, the anti-Semitism was incomparably weaker in Paris than in Algiers. On the other hand, I abruptly learned that my unacceptable truth in this world was my being a woman." Unfortunately, this is an autobiographical snippet, a snapshot.
LIFESPAN: 1937-
KW: French, Algeria, France (Paris), Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Feminism, Literature
COHEN, GEULA. Woman of Violence : Memoirs of a Young Terrorist, 1943-1948. Trans. by Hillel Halkin. London, Hart-Davis, 1966.275p.
Together with Prof. Yuval Ne'eman and Elyakim Haetzni, writer and former MK Geulah Cohen led the Tehiya party, a right wing Israeli political party formed in the late 1970s. She is also the mother of current Likud party MK Tsachi Hanegbi. This book focuses on six years of her life, when she was an active member of the Lechi (Stern Group) underground Israeli fighter organization. The Lechi was a group formed by Abraham Stern and a few companions when they split from their parent organization, the Etsel, in 1940. Unlike their third party, the Haganah, the Etsel and Lechi were terrorist groups committed to fighting the British in order to force them to end the British mandate on Palestine. However, when the Etsel decided to halt their activities in Palestine and join the British in their fight against Hitler, the "Stern group" opted to continue their revolt against the British. It was after Abraham Stern's death in 1942 that Geulah Cohen joined the organization. Born in Tel Aviv in 1925 to Yemenite parents and one of ten children, Cohen emerges from the pages of this book as a young, ideologically driven woman of courage, commitment and strength. Her story begins as a seventeen-year- old student at a teacher's seminary in Tel-Aviv. As an ardent Zionist from a young age, she went from the Betar revisionist movement to become a member of the Etsel freedom fighters for two years, a path which led her to joining the Lechi in 1943. She describes her activities as a new member of the Lechi--her first visit to the shooting range, taking part in recruitment activities and initiations of new members. Cohen tells of the sacrifices she had to make as a member of Lechi. These include her dismissal from the teacher's seminary on account of affiliation with a terrorist group; having to leave home and go underground, severing ties with family and friends; risking her life for her cause. Cohen describes her work as a broadcaster for the Lechi's clandestine radio station, how she was arrested by the British during a radio broadcast and managed to break out of jail in 1947 with the help of friendly Arabs from the village of Abu-Gosh. Throughout the book she tells the stories of other members of "the faction" and of her relationship with the Lechi member who eventually became her husband, Adam Hanegbi.
LIFESPAN: 1925-
KW: Hebrew, Palestine-Israel, Revisionist Zionism, Lechi and Etsel Groups, Stern Gang, Activism
DALVEN, RAE. “The Golden Chain” in Sephardic American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy. Ed. Diane Matza. Hanover: Brandeis UP, 1997. 80-86.
Using a golden chain that she gave as a gift to her mother three years before the latter’s death, Dalven describes Sephardic culture in Greece, focusing much of her narrative on women’s roles in the community. She recreates her mother’s wedding and some of her subsequent life. The chain—something greatly yearned for by her mother—comes to represent the mother’s unfulfilled dreams. Delvin herself rebels against confinement and insists on her own education and self-fulfillment.
LIFESPAN: 1905-1992
KW: Greece (Janina), U.S. (New York City), Sephardim, Feminism, Mother- Daughter Relationship.
DANIEL, RUBY and Barbara C. Johnson. Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1995. 211p.
The personal story of Ruby Daniel, born and raised in the south Indian town of Cochin who later immigrated to Israel, is presented in Ruby's own unique rendering of the English language, which is affected by the local Malayalam language of Cochin. A joint venture between the eighty-plus Ruby and American anthropologist Barbara Johnson, the text documents Ruby's life in Cochin and the many folktales she absorbed mainly from her grandmother. Ruby tells the story of her family who was part of a small congregation of Kerala Jews who belonged to the Paradesi synagogue, the good relations between the Jews and their Hindu, Moslem and Christian neighbors and the tensions among the Jews themselves, who maintained separate congregations between the different sections of the "white" European descent Jews and the local Kerala "black" Jews. Ruby's own family were part of the white Jews of Cochin but denied equal rights because their ancestors were said to have been "freed slaves," a claim that Ruby furiously refutes. The rich folklore of her community is relayed through the ghost stories, intuitive dreams and other supernatural elements that are woven into the text together with such historical accounts as her family's experience of WWII. This leads the reader to understand how much the supernatural was a part of this Cochin's community's everyday life, an important part of their reality quickly "forgotten" once the community resettled in the "rational" land of Israel. Ruby emerges as an intelligent, fiercely independent and strong willed woman who has strong opinions about the role of women in her society and the importance of free choice. She herself chose not to marry and worked for much of her life in Indian government service. Despite the pressure to settle into the traditional mold of Jewish women's lives in her community, Ruby chose to pursue an education and even joined the Indian armed services. She comments upon her experiences not only as a woman in a male run society but as a Jew among non-Jews.
In the latter part of the book she details her experience and those of other Cochin Jews in the mass aliyah to Israel in the 1950's. She tells of her life in kibbutz Neot Mordechai in the Upper Galilee where she worked in the kitchen for ten years. She details the hardships of kibbutz life in the early years of the state and both the discrimination she encountered from the European descended members and her own critical opinion of these strongly secular Jews, so different from the richly traditional Jews of her own community.
LIFESPAN: 1912-
KW: India (Cochin), Israel, Indian Military Service, Traditional Jews, Feminism, Kibbutz Life
DAWIDOWICZ, LUCY S. From That Place and Time: A Memoir 1938-1947. NY: Norton, 1989. 333p.
This is a combination memoir and history of the Lithuanian capital of Vilna, together with an account of the destruction of Yiddish culture during the Holocaust. In 1938, Dawidowicz, just out of college, decides to study at the Vilna’s Jewish Scientific Institute (aka YIVO). After a year there she is forced to flee because of the German invasion. She spends the war years working at the YIVO Institute in New York and returns to Berlin after the war to work with Jewish survivors. There she also participates in the recovery of YIVO archives stolen by the Germans. Her parents were secular Yiddishists and there is a chapter on the author's early life and upbringing as the daughter of poor shopkeepers in New York City, then as a member of the Young Communist League. There is also interesting material scattered throughout the book on the difficulties -- personal and institutional -- that the author encountered pursuing Jewish Studies in the first half of the twentieth century, and her relationships with leading Jewish (male) scholars. The author provides an unusual account of how an informed Jew experienced the war and Holocaust from a committed position in the United States. In 1946, Dawidowicz once again heads for Europe "against the traffic," as she puts it, this time to work in the displaced persons camps. Her eyewitness description of the immediate situation is post-war Germany, of Holocaust survivors and personnel in the American zone is gripping. This is a highly literate and informative -- if slightly impersonal -- memoir.
LIFESPAN: 1915-1990
KW: U.S. (New York), Lithuania (Vilna), Yiddish, YIVO, Secular Yiddish Culture, Yiddish Scholarship, Holocaust, DP Camps
DAYAN, DEBORAH. Asaper [I will Tell]. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1952, 267p.
This book is a collection of essays, articles and memories written by Deborah Dayan from the mid 20's till the early 50's. Dayan describes, from a very personal point of view, her life as a pioneer at the first Kibbutz, Deganya, and later, about her experience in founding the first Moshav, Nahalal. The essays range in subject from thoughts about ideology, to the difficulties of raising children in the hard conditions of those days, the role of women and their special problems. Some chapters of the book are dedicated to members of her movement who died or were killed by Arabs along the years. The end of the book is dedicated to her son, Zorik, who was killed in the independence war. In that part of the book, the author deals with the high price life in Israel demanded, and the tragedy of mothers losing their children. The essays in the book vary in their interest and quality of writing. They are impersonal rather than intimate but they are all unique in their way of describing the collective lives of women in the pre-state Israel. Writing long before the Six Day War, the author hardly mentions her husband, or her famous son, Moshe Dayan.
LIFESPAN: 1890-1956
KW: Hebrew, Palestine-Israel, Zionism, Second Aliya, Deganya, Nahalal, Kibbutz Life, Early Feminism
DELMAN, CARMIT. Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures--A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl. Ballantine 2002. 261p.
Carmit Delman is the daughter of an Ashkenazi father from Russia and an Indian Jewish mother from the Bene Israel community of Bombay. Her memoir is focused on her Indian family, particularly her grandmother Nana-Bai. After her grandmother's death, Delman finds a diary that Nana-Bai kept which included not only personal reflections but also recipes, citations from her readings, and general information. Delman excerpts these to frame the chapters of her autobiography. Much of the book deals with Delman's slow discovery of her Indian family's secret: Nana-Bai was the second wife of Delman's grandfather Solly. The implications of this second class status for the grandmother, Delman's mother and herself are enormous and Delman shows the pain with which they play themselves out in family dynamics. They extend even after Nana-Bai's death, when the cousins of the first wife's family refuse to acknowledge her marital status on her tombstone in Israel and omit the word "wife" in her epitaph.
Nana-Bai's shame and resignation about her place in the family is mirrored in Delman's own confusion about her racial status inside and outside the Jewish community. She sensitively traces her feelings as a child and her growing awareness that she is different. She contrasts her feelings about where she belongs as her family moves to Israel and then back to the U.S. Delman's writing is especially evocative of her sense of otherness and she gives a vivid picture of her rebellion, her explorations during her adolescence, and her attempts to adapt to mainstream American culture. The book ends with her assertion that she will remain connected to her family, yet the form that this reconciliation will take remains vague. The context for the entire memoir also remains vague. One glaring omission: we are never told if Nana-Bai's situation was/is common among the Bene Israel and to what degree polygamy was practiced and accepted in that community. Delman, in fact, gives us little about the community, for to her the Bene Israel community seems to be primarily her family. She does not portray friendships with other Bene Israel girls, so we never know whether her experiences are typical. Judaism and its practices are also vague and again it is the family that seems to be their primary representative. There is a strong sense in this book of injustice: injustice in regard to how women were treated and injustice in regard to how non-Ashkenazi and non-whites are treated by the Jewish and larger communities. Yet it is peculiar that the words "feminism," "sexism," or "racism" are never used by Delman. It is unclear whether this is a deliberate avoiding of politicizing her experience or whether she simply does not believe in the terms.
LIFESPAN:
KW: India (Bombay), U.S. (Cleveland), Israel, Immigration, Assimilation, Racism, Sexism, Polygamy
DEUTSCH, HELENE. Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue. NY: Norton, 1973. 217p.
This autobiography was written in Cambridge, Massachusetts when the author was in her mid-nineties. Born in Premysl, Poland, Helene Deutsch was an assimilated daughter of a middle class Polish Jewish family who became one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Vienna, where she became an assistant to Freud. Although her narrative manages to be distant even when it is discussing intimate things, it is valuable for the window it offers on the author's turn-of the-twentieth century life in her Polish Jewish family headed by a prominent lawyer. There are three daughters; Helene is the youngest and most intellectually ambitious. Using her family as a jumping off point, Deutsch portrays a small sector of Polish Jewish society and its attitudes. She recounts her attraction to socialist politics and the events of 1905 as well as a long affair with L., a married man and socialist leader with whom she had a love affair for several years before she married her husband, physician Felix Deutsch. Perhaps most interesting is her description of her education: school until age 14, privately tutored to pass university exams, then university trained at medical school in Vienna. She discusses her fellow students, how she became interested in psychiatry, and rather superficially what it was like to be part of Freud's inner circle. In medical school, she meets and marries her husband, but tells us less about her marriage than she does about her long affair. Despite a certain coldness in tone and overall narrative discretion, this was an interesting memoir to read -- probably because as a professional woman, Deutsch's life, interests and independence in the world provide an early example of what contemporary women’s lives are like.
LIFESPAN: 1884-1982
KW: Poland (Premysl), Austria (Vienna), Assimilation,
Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Activism, Socialism, Sexuality,
Boston/Cambridge
DWORKIN, ANDREA. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York 2002. 213p.
In this beautifully written and angry political autobiography, Dworkin, a prolific writer and ardent anti-pornography activist, traces her education and coming of age from a working-class childhood in Camden, New Jersey through college at Bennington and travels abroad. Dworkin is a prolific writer and activist. Here, in her most personal book, she is concerned with tracking sexual violence to women as she experienced and observed it and sketches her evolution from a music student to a social activist. Dworkin ends her book with this paragraph: "I hope this work can serve as a kind of bridge over which some girls and women can pass into their own feminist work, perhaps more ambitious than mine but never less ambitious, because that is too easy. I want women to stop crimes against women. There I stand or fall."
LIFESPAN: 1942? -
KW: U.S. (New Jersey), Class, Activism, Feminism, Pornography, Violence against Women
EHRLICH, Elizabeth. Miriam's Kitchen. NY: Penguin 1998. 370p.
Ehrlich's memoir recounts an American-Jewish life that began in a family that lit Sabbath candles but went boating on Yom Kippur. As an adult Ehrlich chooses an Orthodox life marked by ambivalence about the rigors of being kosher and pride in what she is passing on to her children. Recipes for Honey Cake, Noodle Pudding, and many others are buried treasures hidden among Ehrlich's intense words. Her grandmother uses the tempting noodle pudding to good-naturedly test and taunt, and ultimately as the means to accept her daughter Selina's non-Jewish fiance into the family. Miriam's Kitchen is a gripping and gratifying memoir of food, life, tragedy, and family survival.
LIFESPAN:
KW: U.S., Orthodox, Jewish Food, Jewish Identity, Intermarriage
EPSTEIN, HELEN. Children of the Holocaust. NY: Putnam, 1979. 345p.
Trying to understand her own responses to her Czech survivor parents and to her own Jewishness, Epstein embarks on an international search of other children of survivors to examine (and compare) their views of themselves, their parents' history, their place in the world and their views on Jewish identity. The result is a ground-breaking book that is part autobiography, part interviews, a book that helped establish the personal Holocaust memoir in the American Jewish literature of the last two decades. Epstein does not sentimentalize, soften, or patronize her subjects. Some are proud Jews, others pass. Some break the most sensitive of taboos (incest), others conform. Some are productive members of their societies, others struggle. All live with the Holocaust experiences of their parents as either presence or absence. Epstein frequently parallels her own sense of Jewishness, of family dynamics by measuring her parents' behavior against those of the other young people she interviews, and by sorting out her complicated feelings about Israel--particularly after the '67 War. The mosaic she creates is a complex one from which no clear "lessons" can immediately be drawn. (An aside--the work lacks any of the feminist analysis so prominent in her later work.) Children of the Holocaust set a standard that unfortunately has not been met by much of the Holocaust literature that followed it. It is totally unromantic in its view of the war, its victims, and survivors. Its primary concern is for the speakers, rather than for the reader, and the narrative allows them and Epstein to tell their lives and their views without softening their experiences and perceptions. For that alone, it should be continued to be read and studied.
LIFESPAN: 1947-
KW: Czechoslovakia, Canada, Israel, U.S., Holocaust and Post-Holocaust, Survivors, Second Generation, Jewish Identity
EPSTEIN, HELEN. Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History. NY: Little, Brown 1997. 322p.
This work belongs to a special subgenre of contemporary feminist autobiographical writings in which daughters seek to understand their lives through their mothers' and/or other female family members' biographies and histories (see, for example, Pogrebin, Chernin, Gornick). Though Epstein is present throughout the book, her focus remains on Therese, her great-grandmother, Pepi, her grandmother, and Frances, her mother, rather than on herself; ultimately, whatever we know of her comes through her responses to what she is able (and unable) to discover. Searching for even the smallest hints of her family history in the 19th century, Epstein travels to Czechoslovakia where, despite the normal erosion by time and the deliberate obliteration by the fascists and communists, she is able to recover and reconstruct the lives of her female ancestors.
Her success stems from Epstein's uncommon openness to people--Jews and non-Jews. Inevitably her encounters lead to friendship and friendship leads to assistance in her quest. Her own and her unexpected allies' persistence is rewarded with remarkable discoveries, including a news item about Therese's death in 1890 and later the discovery her tombstone. That's just the beginning. This chronicle of searching for one's female roots is marked by an atypical lack of bitterness and cynicism. It is also marked by an insistent respect for history and its complexities. As a result, the reader benefits from a detailed historical context of Jewish life as well as a view of that life through eyes of Jewish women. Another strength of the work is that the Holocaust does not take over the chronicle. We see Epstein's female ancestors in full detail before the war and come to understand the complexities of Frances' personality--as survivor, mother, seamstress, designer--after the war. This work is a great antidote to those books that try to reconstruct history through private feelings and vague memories. Epstein proves that rummaging through municipal records, meandering through deserted cemeteries, and, above all, being willing to talk to people, all people, can yield remarkable results. [For more background on Epstein, see above Children of the Holocaust]
LIFESPAN: 1947-
KW: Czechoslovakia, U.S., Holocaust, Assimilation, Mother-Daughter Relationship
FELMAN, JIL LYNN. Cravings: A Sensual Memoir. Boston: Beacon 1997. 195p.
Centered largely around Felman's late mother, this family of three daughters offers keenly observed and often hilarious portraits of American Jewish family life.
LIFESPAN: 1954-
KW: U.S. (Midwest), Lesbianism, Mother-Daughter Relationship
FERBER, EDNA. A Peculiar Treasure. NY: Doubleday, 1939. 398p.
This autobiography reads as if it were written yesterday by the twentieth century best-selling novelist. Edna Ferber began her writing career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago and Milwaukee. In 1924 her book Ice Palace was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
LIFESPAN: 1867-1968
KW: U.S. (Midwest), Literary
FIRESTONE, TIRZAH. With Roots in Heaven: One Woman's Passionate Journey into the Heart of her Faith. NY: Dutton. 1998. 343p.
Born in St. Louis, Mo. in 1974, psychotherapist and Rabbi Firestone was raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family, a younger sister of the feminist ideologue Shulamith Firestone. After a rebellious, secular youth in which she sought spirituality in Christian mysticism, Hinduism and various New Age practices, Firestone married a Christian minister and was disowned by her family before returning to Judaism and becoming ordained in 1992. This is a spiritual memoir as well as a coming of age in the United States narrative, compellingly written and full of detail on the Jewish Renewal movement. At the time she completed her book, Rabbi Firestone headed a congregation in Boulder, Colorado.
LIFESPAN: 1974-
KW: U.S. (Midwest), Orthodox, Intermarriage, Jewish Renewal, Women Rabbis
FIRST, RUTH. 117 Days. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1989. 170p.
Originally published about a year after her release from prison, 117 Days is Ruth First's account of her imprisonment in 1963 in Johannesburg and Pretoria. Ruth was placed in solitary confinement under the 90 Day Detention Law which allowed the government to put all resisters into prison for 90 days without charges. The 90 days could be repeated at whim. This remarkable account recreates how First tried to cope with her isolation and her misguided strategy with the interrogators. The details of her thought processes alternate with her recounting of political events which she only had full knowledge of after her release. The writing is sharp and vivid but also impersonal in that Ruth only mentions her husband Joe Slovo and her children and friends as they touch upon her own incarceration. This was undoubtedly because she was afraid of exposing them to danger. There is nothing about Jewish identity or feminism. This unique document has been published in numerous editions with various people (including Slovo) providing introductions and postscripts. For a different perspective on First, see the memoir by her daughter Gillian Slovo below.
LIFESPAN: 1925-1982
KW: South Africa, Apartheid, Communism, Activism
FORRESTER, Viviane. Ce Soir, Apres la Guerre [Tonight after the war]. Fayard, 1997.
Although this book was envisioned as a memoir of the men who passed through the author's life as she worked as a music critic and in the publishing and radio world in Berlin and London, her voice is so strong and her observations so acute, it reads like an autobiography. Fischer was born far before her time. Intelligent, original, provocative ---"I was hardly 13 when I invented the expression 'charity hyenas' for my aunt and her ladies." Almost anything she chooses to write about in the publishing industry, Prague social mores, the writing of history -- is interesting. This volume deserves an English translation and scholarly attention.
LIFESPAN: 1893-1977
KW: French, France, Germany (Berlin), England (London), Czechoslovakia (Prague), Literary, Brecht
FOSTER, EDITH. Reunion in Vienna. (Maturatreffen: 50 Jahre Danach) Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1990. 178p.
In 1983 Edith Foster, psychotherapist and long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area, embarked on a trip to Vienna to attend the fiftieth reunion of her class at gymnasium. In recounting the behavior of Jews and non-Jews during that week in Vienna, Foster offers flashbacks of coming of age as a girl in pre-war Vienna. Honest, psychologically insightful and full of details, this book is an intriguing view into a misogynist culture.
LIFESPAN: 1914-
KW: German, Austria (Vienna), Education, Psychotherapy, Socialism
FRANK, ANNE. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Critical Edition. [Achterhuis]. Eds. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Introduction by Harry Paape, Gerrold van der Stroom and David Barnouw. Trans. Arnold J. Pmerans and B. M. Mooyaart. NY: Doubleday, 1989. 719p. and The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. [Achterhuis]. Eds. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Trans. Susan Massotty. NY: Doubleday, 1995. 340p.
This internationally known text by Anne Frank has been read by millions of adults and school children. Since its first publication in Dutch in 1947 (1500 copies), it has assumed the status of a classic and is often considered the primary Holocaust text. First translated into French and German and then into English in 1952, the diary is now available in 67 languages. For many readers it is the only literature they will ever read about the Holocaust.
Born in 1929 in Germany, Anne and her family relocated to Holland in 1932 to escape the Nazis. Written in Dutch, the diary records the life of Anne (thirteen when the diary begins), her family and four other Jews hidden by friends in an attic in Amsterdam. It covers their 25 months together and ends three days before their betrayal on August 4, 1944. No one except Anne’s father, Otto, survived. Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just a few days before the camp’s liberation.
The diary is remarkable for Anne’s artistry, her ability to articulate complex feelings, her keen observations of and the dynamics among the people with whom she was confined, and her reflections on the world into which she was born. Over the years, however, it has become surrounded by controversy. Otto Frank, the playwrights and scriptwriters of the play and film of the 1950s and 1960s have all been critcized for numerous reasons. Otto purged passages about Anne’s sexual awakening, her developing relationship with Peter and her negative observations about her parents’ marriage. The writers involved in dramatizing the work consciously tried to “universalize” it by downplaying or excising Jewish references. It has taken many decades for the diary to re-emerge in its entirety and it is still not clear today if what we have in print is the complete, unedited text. The 1995 “definitive” edition claimed that it included “30 percent more material” than the original published diary, but since that publication, more new passages have been “found” and restored. For a passionate and unapologetically personal response to some of the controversies surrounding the diary (which involved such notables as Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and Garson Kanon), see Cynthia Ozik’s essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” in The New Yorker, October 6, 1997, 76-87.
LIFESPAN: 1929-1945
KW: Dutch, Netherlands, Holocaust, Hidden Children, Jewish Youth
FREEDMAN, MARCIA. Exile in the Promised Land: A Memoir. Firebrand 1990. 234p.
This is an important feminist text from one of the founders of the Israeli feminist movement. Freedman briefly recounts her early life in the U.S. including her marriage and then quickly focuses on her and her husband's aliya to Israel in 1967, just after the '67 war. She traces her early awakening to feminism--through books she picks up in the Village on one of her U.S. visits--and her slow recognition that Israel's claim to sexual equality was a myth. Freedman lived in Haifa and there with other women began to organize--starting shelters for battered girls, bookstores and political parties. In 1973 she is elected to the Israeli Knesset. It is a remarkable story. What Freedman does best in this memoir is describe the struggles inside and outside the Israeli women's movement. The details about these struggles are educational for those who are interested in activism; so are the personal repercussions. Freedman begins to recognize her own lesbianism, ends her marriage, struggles with the demands of a young daughter. Nothing is easy. Ultimately, Freedman returns to the States. Freedman was way ahead of her time by trying to link in the 1970s feminism to the "Palestinian question." At the time, most feminists rejected the connection and it would be only in the late '80s that the issue of women and peace and the link between them would be accepted by Israeli feminists.
LIFESPAN: 1938-
KW: U.S., Israel, Zionism, Israeli Feminism, Lesbianism, Activism Violence against Women, Women and Peace, Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
FREEMAN, LUCY. Fight Against Fears. NY: Crown, 1951. 332p.
This book is billed as the first memoir of a psychoanalysis by an American woman analysand. She is a Jewish woman from a "German" family, raised in Larchmont, New York, a graduate of Bennington College, and a "girl reporter" for the New York Times during the 1940s. There is not much explicit Jewish content and Freeman amazingly never once in her discussion of the 1930s and the 1940s mentions the persecution of Jews in Europe, but in this respect, Freeman is very much an assimilated American/New York Jew of her time. The memoir is noteworthy as a document of what psychoanalysis was like for a woman in the 1940s (patriarchal to the point of caricature)and as a document of what was once a well-known stereotype of the "career woman" who gave up marriage and family for work and the "life of a man." The writing is journalistically reductionist but this book gives a very clear picture of an ambitious and bright girlhood and womanhood at a time when most middle class Jewish women were staying home in the U.S.
LIFESPAN:
KW: New York City, German Jews, Assimilation, Journalism, Psychoanalysis, Freud
FREMONT, HELEN. After Long Silence: A Memoir. NY: Delacorte: 1999. 349 p.
Raised in the Midwest as a Catholic of Polish descent, Helen Fremont details the process by which she found out she was in fact the daughter of Polish Jews whose families had been exterminated in the Holocaust. Her memoir chronicles the process of information from Jewish organizations and individuals and her concern about its impact on her angry, overpowering father and reticent, nightmare-plagued mother. Fremont has the courage to paint a nearly unsympathetic portrait of her parents' secretiveness and initial reluctance to have their children dredge up the past; as the narrative unfolds, readers comprehend the tormented roots of their behavior without forgetting the psychological problems it created for their daughters. Fremont's re-creation of her parents' ghastly ordeals--her mother narrowly escaping the murder of nearly every Jew in her hometown; her father surviving six years in the Soviet gulag--is a triumph of dogged research and sympathetic imagination. Fremont’s account includes her partnership with her sister on this venture, their coming out to her parents as lesbians, and the way the European past retains grip on her family.
LIFESPAN: 1950-
KW: U.S., Catholics, Secret Jews, Poland, Holocaust, Lesbianism, Sisters, Mother-Daughter Relationship
FRIEDAN, BETTY. Life So Far. NY: Simon & Shuster, 2000. 380p.
In the tradition of Jewish political activist books, this memoir gives a personal account of the second wave of American feminism. One-time labor relations reporter and feminist Friedan begins her book in Peoria, Illinois where she was born into a secular Jewish family and to a mother whom she characterizes as a Jewish anti-Semite. After a lonely childhood in which she feels like an intellectual and social misfit, Friedan finds acceptance at Smith College, where she discovers psychology and political activism. She details her unconventional marriage (she supports her artistically-oriented husband by working first as a labor reporter, then a freelance magazine journalist); describes her participation in the 1950s flight from city to suburb and her mothering of three children before writing The Feminine Mystique and co-founding the National Organization of Women. There are mini-portraits of prominent politicians and activists, other feminist and anti-feminists leaders, marches, controversies, and the death of the Equal Rights Amendment. She is candid in describing her divorce and subsequent sexual affairs, as well as strategies for living alone after sixty. The book is an easy read, candid, ideological, but not particularly literary, with attention to Jewish tradition and culture throughout. Friedan is a memoirist in the tradition of Gluckl, businesslike in setting ordinary facets of her life down for posterity.
LIFESPAN: 1921-
KW: U.S. (Midwest, East Coast), 1950s, Motherhood, Second Wave Feminism, Activism
GAY, RUTH. Unfinished People. NY: Norton 1996. 310p.
Although this book is ostensibly about the nearly three million turn-of-the-twentieth century immigrants from Eastern Europe whose descendants are the bulk of today's' American Jewish community, it is also a memoir of Ruth Gay's family and a memoir with an agenda. She resents the caricaturing of this generation of Jews by such (male) comedians and writers such as Jackie Mason, Woody Allen and Philip Roth and aims to describe and document the group in a more sympathetic way. Her book is situated largely in the Bronx and focuses on social history as well as her own family stories. A very readable book full of interesting detail.
LIFESPAN: 1922-
KW: U.S. (Bronx), Immigrants, Yiddish Culture, Assimilation
Ginor, Fanny. Stutgart, Tel Aviv: Chayim BeTzel HaHitrachshuyot [Stuttgart, Tel Aviv: Life in a changing world]. Tel Aviv: Gevanim, 2002.
This autobiography tells the unusual story of a woman who played a central role in establishing the economic ground of the state of Israel and of a career woman in the early days of the state. Ginor, who was born to a middle-class Orthodox, Zionist family in Stuttgart in 1913, tells in this book her memories from her early childhood till the 1990’s, when she first wrote her memories in
German. Showing a great desire for studies from a very young age, she finished first in her class and persuaded her traditional father to let her go to the University. She started her studies at the University of Frankfurt, and after the Nazis came to power continued her studies in Bern, where she received her PhD In 1934. She immigrated to Israel that year, and after many difficulties
got a job at the Jewish agency, using her skills as an economist and specialist in agriculture. This position brought her later to play key roles in the formation of the new states financial and fiscal institutions. She worked in the bank of Israel and ministry of treasury. Later she was part of the Israeli delegation to the UN. She was married to Yehoshua Ginor (Shika), and after his sudden death in 1986 she wrote his biography that was published under the
title “Shika; Pirkei Hayyim” (Shika: Life Episodes). She also published a few books concerning the economy of the state of Israel and other developing countries.
LIFESPAN: 1913-
KW: Hebrew, Germany (Stuttgart), Israel (Tel Aviv), The Jewish Agency, UN
GLUCKL of Hameln (Glikel Hamel, Zikhroneas Maras Glikel Hamel, Fersburg: Druk fun Adolf) Alkakai, 1896.
Glikel's autobiography is the first autobiography written by a Jewish woman, and one of the first autobiographies written by Jews at all. It is also one of the first known works written by a Jewish woman. Glikel wrote the first part of the book (books 1-5) after the death of her first husband, Haim, in the last decade of the 17th century, and the second part of the book (books 6-7), after the death of her second husband, Hirsch, around 1710. She describes her life since early childhood in the city of Hamburg in Germany, till her last years, when she is living with her daughter in Metz. The autobiography addresses her life as a woman, a mother, and a successful merchant. Together with her first husband Haim, she established an international trade of gold and precious stones, and was deeply involved in the business, enabling her to run the business alone after Haim's death. Glikel also tells about her family and her children--she had 12 children who survived childhood. Since one of her purposes in writing the autobiography was to tell about her family, a considerable part of the book tells the story of her and Haim's forefathers. Glikel's autobiography is a fascinating document that gives us details about the lives of the Jews in the 17th century, but also about Glikel's own personal thoughts and experiences, and the spiritual and social lives of Jewish women in the past.
LIFESPAN: 1645-1724
KW: Yiddish, Germany (Hamburg, Metz), Motherhood, Business, Court Jews
GOLDIN, FARIDEH. Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman. Hanover: UPress of New England, 2003. 188p.
In what is possibly the first memoir by and Iranian Jewish woman and one of the few Mizrachi memoirs available in English, Goldin describes her girlhood in the ghetto of the Shiraz; family, religion and culture; and how she broke tradition by first studying math at Pahlavi University, then visiting the U.S. and marrying an American. Goldin pays special attention to the particularities of women’s lives. There are frank descriptions of first menstruation and first visit to the mikveh and the custom of adolescent marriage which persisted into her mother’s generation (Goldin’s mother was 15 when she gave birth to the author). By turns fiercely honest, subtle and lyrical, Wedding Song is an important addition to Jewish women’s autobiographical literature.
LIFESPAN: 1953-
KW: Iran, Mizrachi, Orthodox, Education, Iranian Women
GOLDMAN EMMA. Living My Life. Vols. 1 & 2. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931. 993p.
This autobiography was written by Emma Goldman in Saint-Tropez in the south of France when she was in her early sixties after much urging from her friends and comrades to record her life. Born in what is now Lithuania, Emma Goldman was the daughter of relatively orthodox Jewish parents suffering from an unhappy arranged marriage. Abused frequently by her father, Emma was closest to her sister Helene, and moved with her to America. The narrative is detailed and focuses primarily on her involvement in the anarchist movement, but does reference her parents' practice of Judaism and also occasionally Emma's own identification as a Jew. Emma Goldman references her childhood, but focuses mainly on her post-emigration-to-America life. She recalls with frequency the close relationship between herself and her older sister Helene that continues to develop throughout the memoir. Throughout her extensive travels, lectures, confrontations, and arrests, Emma's narrative often turns back to her loyal relationship to her family, visits with her family members, and occasionally, to her Jewish heritage.
The most alluring part of her memoir is the unfolding of Goldman's involvement in, and fearless leadership of, the anarchist movement. It seems as though she is constantly faced with the threat of arrest, assassination and government persecution, however, Emma continues throughout her life to speak out against the injustices of the capitalist system and the exploitation of the proletariat. She provides descriptions of the numerous famous revolutionaries with whom she comes in contact, including her array of lovers and romances. In addition, the autobiography offers her revolutionary ideas not only on government, but on women's rights as well. The overall tone was one of excitement and the possibility of change. The focus of the memoir was generally not on the role of Judaism in her life.
LIFESPAN: 1869-1940
KW: Lithuania, U.S., International, Anarchism, Socialism, Free-Love, Feminism, Activism
GORDON, BARBARA. I'm Dancing as Fast As I Can. NY: Harper & Row, 1989. 313p.
This page-turning memoir by an award-winning television documentary maker is notable for its view into involuntary drug addiction, the life of a single working woman, and the way the medical establishment dealt with middle-class Jewish women and their neuroses in mid-twentieth century America. Born in Miami, Florida, Gordon graduated from Barnard College and chose a professional life in the high-stress world of New York TV. She describes her professional life in colorful detail as well as her sexual involvement with an apparently healthy and helpful male lover. Her increasing dependence on Valium to manage anxiety and the abusive nature of her intimate relationship result in a mental health crisis that involves some dozen psychotherapists and two psychiatric hospitals. Gordon chronicles these events and writes of a secular Jewish childhood in Florida.
LIFESPAN: 1935-
KW: U.S., Filmmaker, Television, Drug Addiction, Psychiatry
GORNICK, VIVIAN. Fierce Attachments. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987. 204p.
This is a fierce no-holds-barred memoir of a mother and daughter by one of the best essayists of her generation. Gornick, as well as her mother are products of the mid-twentieth century Communist Jewish Bronx, feisty, political women who are tough with each other and with the world at large. Gornick is the author of several books of personal essays and an interesting memoir of a stay in Egypt. All her work is of interest in the context of Jewish American women but this acerbic memoir is a classic of mother-daughter literature, a coming-of-age narrative of a Jewish girl growing up and as far away as she can get -- Berkeley, California. Gornick looks uncompromisingly at her mother, neighbors, friends, lovers, herself through acidic-yellow glasses. A new world opens up at the City College of New York and then UC Berkeley. There, she struggles to determine who she is, what she wants, and through it all continues wrestling with her mother whom she loves, admires and disdains.
LIFESPAN: 1935-
KW: U.S. (New York City, Berkeley), Communism, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Activism
GOULD, LOIS. Mommy Dressing. Doubleday, 1998. 255p.
This memoir by novelist Lois Gould focuses on her dress designer mother, Jo Copeland, whose fashion career spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s. One of a number of Jewish dress designers of her time, Copeland’s life was lived largely among the assimilated New York Jews of the Upper East Side and the less assimilated Jews of New York’s garment district. The writing is excellent, the depiction of mother and daughter relations painful and moving.
LIFESPAN: 1932-2002
KW: New York, Assimilation, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Fashion
Greenberg, Joanne. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. NY: Holt, 1964. 256p.
This book, published as a novel under the pseudonym of Hannah Green, is actually a memoir and was to be published as non-fiction in 1964, but the author persuaded her editor to put it on the fiction list. It is based on the real-life psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish German family) and her treatment of her young patient, an American Jewish adolescent. A classic that has sold millions of copies since the 1960s, this is a memoir of a severely disturbed young woman -- then diagnosed as schizophrenic -- and how she is healed through intensive psychotherapy with a caring physician. Although there are no overt references to Jewish identity in the text, the Jewish identities of both doctor and patient are apparent to the savvy reader. For an analysis of the real-life protagonists, see Gail Hornstein's biography of Fromm-Reichmann: To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World.
LIFESPAN: 1932-
KW: U.S., Psychiatry, Schizophrenia, Art
GRUBER, RUTH. Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. Tarrytown, NY: Wynwood, 1991. 319p.
From Kirkus Reviews memoir of the 1920's and 30's. The daughter of Jewish immigrants, Gruber was born and raised in Brooklyn, where her precocious academic abilities were soon recognized. Encouraged by mentors, she excelled, first in high school, then in college, majoring in English and German. Awarded scholarships, she went on to graduate school in Wisconsin and at the Univ. of Cologne. There, in 1932, where she became at 20 the youngest Ph.D. in Germany, she also witnessed the growing power of Hitler and the spread of anti-Semitism. Intent on being a writer, Gruber returned to New York, but because of the Depression, jobs were scarce, and she began writing free-lance pieces for the New York Herald Tribune. A travel fellowship enabled her to return to Europe in 1935 as a correspondent for the Tribune to study women under democracy, Fascism, and Communism, which she did by traveling in Germany, where old friends had either fled or joined the Nazis; in England, where she had a disappointing interview with Virginia Woolf; and in the Soviet Union, where she traveled in what we now know as the Gulag, first by train, then by plane, and finally by ship across the Arctic Ocean. A woman to admire, with a remarkable story that's undercut by lackluster prose and a tendency to deal superficially with the darker side of times past.
LIFESPAN: 1911--
WS: U.S. (New York City), International, Journalism, Holocaust, Soviet Union
HELLMAN, LILLIAN. An Unfinished Woman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. 280p.; Pentimento, Boston: Little Brown, 1973. 297p. Scoundrel Time, Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. 155p.
There is barely a mention of Jewish identity or background in these three books by the feisty and celebrated playwright -- author of The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, and Toys in the Attic -- but this trilogy is impressive for its portrait of a certain kind of Jewish intellectual and artistic woman who lived a passionate public and private life in the twentieth century. A "free woman" who married, divorced, had many affairs and finally became the long-time partner of Dashiell Hammett, Hellman is alternately frank and evasive, clear and convoluted. In a paragraph characteristic of her style she wrote: "We met when I was twenty-four years old and he was thirty-six in a restaurant in Hollywood. The five-day drunk had left the wonderful face looking rumpled, and the very tall thin figure was tired and sagged. We talked of T.S. Eliot, although I no longer remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at each other and over each other until it was daylight. We were to meet again a few days later, and, after that, on and sometimes off again for the rest of his life and thirty years of mine."
You have to read between the lines and pay attention to the names of the relatives in this archetypal German-Jewish family that arrived in the United States in the emigration of the mid-19th century. Hellman exaggerated or may have even falsified some of her memories, but the writing and the subject matter are a fascinating and rewarding draw. An Unfinished Woman includes a portrait of a childhood spent in New Orleans and New York and Hellman's visit to the Spanish Civil War as well as to the Soviet Union in 1944. Included in Pentimento is the memoir of Julia, Hellman's childhood friend who became part of the anti-Nazi resistance during the second world war. (This was made into a film starring Jane Fonda as Hellman) There are incisive portraits of New Orleans, New York theater, literary Martha's Vineyard and Paris. Scoundrel Time deals with McCarthyism and caused the most controversy of all her work. Her voice, style and attention to literary, racial, political and personal matters makes all three memoirs mandatory reading for anyone interested in twentieth century Jewish women.
LIFESPAN: 1905-1984
KW: U.S., International, German Jews, Theater and Film, Communism, McCarthyism
HANEL, HERMINE, Die Geschichte meiner Jugend [The history of my youth], Leipsig, 1930. (Excerpted in Iggers, Wilma A. Women of Prague: Ethnic Diversity and Social Change from the
Eighteenth Century to the Present, Providence: Berghahn 1995. 381p)
This is the autobiography of "one of the first ladies who bicycled in Prague," the daughter of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, allegedly the first couple to have an interdenominational marriage in Prague (in 1870). The text documents the world of the child of intermarriage (the Catholic and Jewish sides of the family), her reading as a child and adult, Jewish religious, cultural, pre-marital heterosexual relationships, marital, child-rearing and social practices of the time and details of life in Prague, Vienna and Munich in the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The author, who makes no secret of her preference for the company of men over women ("the great sorrow of my life was not being a boy"), was divorced soon after she married. She lived an interesting single life "outside the bourgeois world" and became a professional writer in such varied genres as travelogue, criticism and fairy tale and an illustrator. Through her work and social life she came into contact with and writes about prominent men of her time, including Artur Schnitzler, who critiqued her writing.
LIFESPAN: 1872-1944
KW: German, Czechoslovakia (Prague), International, Intermarriage, Literary
HOFFMAN, EVA. Lost in Translation Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. NY: E.P.Dutton, 1989. 280p.
This a portrait of the Wandering Jew as a sensitive young girl. It begins with Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland just after the second world war; moves to Vancouver, British Columbia when she is thirteen; continues on to Texas and Massachusetts for her university years; and ends in New York, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. It encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the cost of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the consequences, for many Jews, of the Nazi and Communist regimes. Hoffman was born in the summer of 1945. Like many Jews in post-war, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, the Hoffmans observed Passover and had home-baked challah, on shabbat but Eva was culturally Polish, reading Sienkiewicz's nationalistic novels, playing Chopin etudes, attending church with her friends, receiving gifts on St. Nicholas's Day. After emigration, she adapts to North American culture, first Canadian, then Texan, then New York. This is a memoir squarely in the Jewish immigrant tradition but one in which the immigrant is a graduate student at Harvard, and relates her situation not only to Mary Antin but to contexts laid out by Sartre and Nabokov, Jung and Freud. Lost in Translation contains stories and essays, phrases to ruminate on, ideas to consider. It is a demanding read that challenges its reader to consider her own autobiography, her own childhood, her own assumptions. There is little in it that could be construed as explicitly Jewish. Yet, in its choice of subjects and its contexts, it could only have been written by a Jewish woman.
LIFESPAN: 1946-
KW: Poland (Cracow), U.S., Canada (Vancouver), Post-Holocaust, Communism, Anti-Semitism, Immigration, Language
HURST, FANNIE. Anatomy of Me: A Wanderer in Search of Herself. NY: Doubleday: 1958. 367p.
This deft memoir, written by one of the most popular American woman novelists of the 1920s-1940s, is surprisingly full of detail about what it was like to be an assimilated Jewish woman of that time. Born and raised in a German-Jewish family in St. Louis, Missouri, Hurst was one of the many women who fled the provinces to live in New York just before the first world war. Her account of breaking away from a conventional Jewish family, her portrait of her parents and upper-middle class Jews from St. Louis and New York are all valuable social history as well as enjoyable reading. Hurst writes specifically about social and cultural issues for Jews of her time and also narrates her development as a successful writer.
LIFESPAN: 1889-1968.
KW: U.S. (Midwest), New York City, Literary
JACOBY, SUSAN. Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. NY: Scribner, 2001. 304p.
Like American author Mary Gordon, Susan Jacoby is the daughter of a Jewish father who took pains to hide his roots. Her journalistic memoir traces her search for her father's hidden background. The question of Jewish identity, for Jacoby. is about culture and ethnicity rather than religion. She examines some historical issues such as being a Jew in 19th-century America, and the ramifications of being a Mischling (of partial Jewish descent) in Europe under the Nazi regime. There are few philosophical or theological elements present to give the story much in the way of depth, however, or to position it much higher than the average ``should-I-celebrate-Christmas'' stocking stuffer. Jacoby's major attraction to her father's buried past, outside of the usual adolescent obsession with questions of identity, appears to be a sincere identification with outsiders and victims. Many African-American friends attend her second marriage, for instance, a non-Catholic church wedding to a man with two atheist Jewish parents. As a talented young journalist, this small-town Midwestern girl meets many Jews and discovers for the first time that Jacoby is a Jewish surname. Jacoby (and her father to some extent) can, by the late 1960s, see their Jewish ancestry as an asset as well as a liability. Her father eventually admits the truth and turns the tables on his daughter by declaring that “identifying oneself as a Jew simply because Jewishness had acquired a certain social and professional cachet was just as opportunistic as denying one's Jewishness to escape social or professional stigmatization.” The gambling addiction of her Jewish ancestors adds some pathos to Jacoby’s memoir, but her identity problems lack the drama of others she mentions: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Catholic novelist Mary Gordon.
LIFESPAN: 1945-
KW: U.S. (Midwest), Mischling, Intermarriage, Assimilation, Journalism
JEDWAB, LENA. Girl with Two Landscapes: The Wartime Diary of Lena Jedwab 1941-1945 [Fun heym tsu navenad: melkhome –togbukh 1941-1945].Trans. from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld; foreword by Irena Klepfisz and introduction by Jan Gross; NY: Holmes & Meier, 2002. 190p.
In 1941 sixteen-year-old Lena Jedwab found herself stranded in the Ukraine in a summer camp for young communists. She would spend the rest of the war years in a home for orphans and in Moscow studying at the university. During this time she kept a Yiddish journal in which she described the daily routines of the orphanage, its petty power struggles, her leadership roles, her preparations for university, her work among the local peasants and later her student life in Moscow. The diary is wonderful for its excellent writing, its details, its passion, its strong moral sense and socialist commitment, and its commitment to Yiddish. Earnest, always politically conscious, in love with learning, Lena also yearns for parents and siblings left behind in Bialoystok and whom she will never see again. Throughout the journal, we see her seeking adults with whom she can become dependent. She never finds them--though there are numerous good people along the way--and she is forced to remain totally self-reliant trying to make something of her life. Despite her loneliness, she insists on using all her talents and intelligence. She loves theater and performs, she reads voraciously, and she holds on to her political socialist beliefs even when confronted with the anti-Semitism of the peasants. She continues perfecting her Russian, reads German and Polish, sets herself academic goals, meets them, and still writes in Yiddish to keep the culture alive. This diary should be read by everyone, but especially young people, for Lena is an extraordinary role model.
LIFESPAN: 1924-
KW: Yiddish, Soviet Union, Socialism, Yiddish Culture, Holocaust, Jewish Youth
JONES, HETTIE. How I Became Hettie Jones. NY: Grove Press, 1990. 239p.
This memoir covers the eight years Jones was married to the Black poet/playwright/activist LeRoi Jones, now known as Amiri Baraka. Jones met “Roi” in the late '50s and along with many of the writers, musicians, critics, and painters who would explode into the Beat Generation. Jack Karouac, Allen Ginsberg, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus enter and leave the narrative casually. Jones and Roi are part of the circle that encouraged and greeted Howl, On the Road, Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and Brecht’s plays. While married to Roi, Jones also saw him go from an virtual unknown to a well established music critic, poet and the playwright of The Slave and The Dutchman. Jones' Jewish parents remain vague as does her Jewish upbringing, covered only in a few pages. The parents rarely appear after her alliance with Roi. Her father never speaks to her again (at least while she's married to him) and her mother only visits occasionally, often crying when looking at her interracial daughters. Jones always asserts her Jewishness, but there is no content to it. Her identity is expressed in racial terms: she is the white partner of a Black man.
The memoir is rich in details of the couple’s life in the East and West Village and Jones catalogs the encounters, discussions, and sexual exploits of this energetic group of artists as they frequented The Five Spot and The Cedar Bar. She also traces her own and Roi's evolution in ways which ultimately doomed the marriage. Roi came from a middle-class Black background, had been in the Strategic Air Command, from which he was discharged for reading The Partisan Review (for which Hettie later worked and he wrote). She describes his energy in his jazz criticism and creative writing. She also documents her own self-erasure in the marriage, her dissatisfaction with herself for being categorized as "Roi's white wife." At the same time, she details the influence of the civil rights movement, the assassinations of the early '60s, the emergence of the Black Power movement, the expression of "Black Rage" (as it came to be known) and Roi's growing involvement with these historical phenomena. Throughout, we get the glimmerings of a potential feminist consciousness that has not yet identified itself as such. Hettie gropes for self-definition--through children's writing. But she struggles to make and take time for her poetry. This is a fine memoir that captures a critical moment in America's racial and cultural history. It is generous almost to a fault. Hettie rarely complains, shows no bitterness over the breakup of her marriage, and continues working in the struggle for equal rights.
LIFESPAN: 1934-
KW: New York, Beat Culture, Civil Rights, Black Power, Activism, Racism, Interracial Marriage, Poetry, Jazz
KAPLAN, ALICE. French Lessons: A Memoir. Chicago: UChicago Press: 1993. 221p.
This is an interesting memoir by an academic who specializes in French fascism. Kaplan's father, one of the American lawyers at the Nuremberg Trials, died when she was seven. The memoir gives Kaplan an opportunity to trace her involvement with the French language and how it ultimately leads her to the same position her father had: interrogating war criminals and collaborators. Though well written in sections, the books feels too distanced, too impersonal in many ways. The trajectory is almost too neat. On the other hand, you don't often have a chance to read about a girl’s intellectual development. In this case, it is interesting to follow Kaplan’s experiences with learning French and mastering the French "r," her observations of DeMan at Yale, her love of Celine's work, her responses to Hindus' correspondence with Celine, and then her own interaction and meeting with the French fascist Bardeche. Still--the book is somehow frustrating. It's hard to know what to think of the author when after all that probing and background, she writes, almost at the end of the book, in response to her encounter with Bardeche: "1945. 1945: why does it feel so close, why am I still fighting the battle of another time and place, as though they were mine?" The answer is obvious, but is one that Kaplan never considers: her Jewishness.
LIFESPAN: 1954-
KW: U.S. (Midwest), France, French Language, Holocaust, Fascism
KARPF, ANNE. The War After. United Kingdom: Minerva, 1997. 351pp.
Anne Karpf interweaves personal narrative with historical analysis to create a thought-provoking account of the experiences of the “Second Generation” - the children of Holocaust survivors. A journalist and sociologist living in London, England, whose mother was interred in Plaszow and Auschwitz, and whose father survived several Russian labor camps, Karpf uses her academic and literary skill to write a moving memoir which is also a profound exploration of the impact parents’ suffering can have on their children’s lives.
The book is split into three distinct sections. The first describes her childhood in Langland House, a home that is sturdily and solidly protective but suffocatingly intense. Whilst growing-up she constantly tries to comfort and please her parents through her achievements and this continues into adulthood. Her separation anxiety is echoed by the form of the book: interviews with her parents, her parents’ experiences before and during the war, interrupt the linear narrative trajectory of her own story. This section includes a searing description of how Karpf’s psychological distress, which she is initially unable to vocalize, manifests physically, erupting in sores on her skin. The second section, a well-researched examination of the history of British attitudes to Jews, highlights the weakness of the Anglo-Jewish Establishment who often failed Holocaust victims through fear of engendering prejudice. She is unforgiving of general British society: “Let's not forget that anti-Semitism actually increased in Britain during the second world war, with many sharing the Joyce Grenfell belief that ‘there's something a bit un-cozy about a non-Aryan refugee in one's kitchen’.” Lastly, Karpf returns to the personal and narrates how, through psychoanalysis, she is able to slowly transform her relationships, to others and to herself, and heal, supporting her father through his illness and coping with his subsequent death. Although essentially a secular Jew, the memoir ends as she takes on the ritual of making the Passover Seder for her family, something she can only do once she has come through her own personal exodus. The synthesis of the parents’ story and her own pain is accomplished smoothly with an integrity and candor that feels neither narcissistic nor egregious, but lends the book an immediacy and intimacy that creates a powerful impact. Anne Karpf is a strong woman and talented writer. Her book is well-worth reading for those interested in the Holocaust, British Jewry or what it means to be human.
LIFESPAN: 1950-
KW: England (London), Holocaust, Second Generation, Poland, Germany (Berlin), Journalism, Sociology, Psychology
KHAZZOOM, LOOLWA. “United Jewish Feminist Front.” in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Ed. Danya Ruttenberg. Intro. by Susannah Heschel. Seattle: Seal, 2001. 168-80.
Khazzoom summarizes some of the biographical material from an earlier essay including her Iraqi background. She then moves forward to describe more recent activism on behalf of Sephardic identity and her work as editor of an anthology, Behind the Veil of Silence (still unpublished) of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish feminists. She also describes in great detail some of the pitfalls of feminist conferences (specifically Israeli) that claim to have multiethnic and multiracial representation. In this case, she notes the exclusion of Ethiopian Jewish women and the general reluctance of Ashkenazi women to be labeled as such.
LIFESPAN:
KW: U.S. (Los Angeles), Iraq, Sephardim, Feminism, Activism, Racism, Ashkenazi-Sephardi Relations
KLEPFISZ, IRENA. Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes. Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990, 219 p.
This collection of assorted autobiographical writing by poet and activist Irena Klepfisz is an unconventional grab-bag of work – some of it in diary form – that is invaluable in its close focus on issues confronting the American-Jewish woman: themes of American-Jewish identity, deciding whether to have children, coming out as a lesbian in the Jewish community and as a Jew in the lesbian community, and supporting oneself through office work. Klepfisz is a committed Jewish secularist who also addresses the general issues of Yiddish culture and secular Jewish identity, personal memory versus American Holocaust memorialization, and the American Jewish response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Consciously written "from the margins" rather than from the mainstream of, the book is notable for the clear and distinctive voice of its author as well as for being a document of American Jewish life the 1970s and 1980s in the United States.
LIFESPAN: 1941-
KW: U.S. Poland, Holocaust, Feminism, Lesbianism, Childlessness, Activism, Class, Yiddish Culture and Secular Identity, Israeli/Palestinian Conflict, Women and Peace
KOFMAN, SARAH. Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. Galilee. Paris. 1994 Trans. by Ann Smock. Lincoln, Neb: UNebraska Press, 1996. 85 p.
Sarah Kofman, who died a suicide, was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and author of more than 20 books, an important writer and thinker. This memoir is a lyrical and very account of her girlhood which takes in her life between the ages of 8 and 18. It begins on the last day she ever saw her father, an orthodox rabbi on the day in 1942 that some 13,000 French Jews were rounded up and taken to Auschwitz. The narrative centers around her difficult relationship with her mother and her surrogate mother, a Christian woman who hid them both until the liberation of Paris. The memoir ends when Kofman enrolls at the Sorbonne in the mid-1950s. This slim volume reads like a poem.
LIFESPAN: 1934-1994
KW: French, France, Holocaust, Literary, Philosophy
KOVALY HEDA. Under a Cruel Star, A Life in Prague 1941-1968. Trans. Francis Epstein and Helen Epstein with the author.
NY: Holmes and Meier, 1986. 192p.
The memoir of 27 years in the life of Heda Margolius Kovaly, born and raised in Prague, this book tells her life story from the time of her deportation to the Lodz Ghetto until she leaves Czechoslovakia in 1968. It also contains many flashbacks to earlier times. Not primarily a Holocaust memoir, it is one of the few memoirs of Czech Jewish life by a woman and particularly of what it was like to be a Jew in Prague during the Stalinist period. Kovaly’s first husband, Rudolph Margolius was one of the Jews hanged in the infamous and anti-Semitic Slansky Trial. Kovaly tells the story of being scapegoated as a Jew under Communism and how the conviction of her husband affected her and her son. The book is beautifully written and affords major insights into the behavior of human beings in extreme situations. Kovaly writes eloquently of her love for her husband Rudolph Margolius and their son Ivan, her struggle to keep her son in school, clothed and fed while she was prevented from legally working, how she managed to rebuild her family and reconstruct personal life after her husband’s death.
LIFESPAN: 1923? –
KW: Czech, Czechoslovakia (Prague), Holocaust, Communism, Anti-Semitism, the Slansky trials
LABER, JERI. The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement. NY: Harper Collins, 2002. 405p.
Jeri Laber, one of the founders of Helsinki Watch, was a major figure in the international movement for human rights and against torture. Her readable, straightforward memoir of how Laber turned her back on ordinary housewifely routines and became a human rights activist is interesting. She devotes some attention to an analysis of the tensions between the professional and personal ambitions of a twentieth-century wife and mother but does not speculate on why the majority of people she describes in the human rights movement are Jews, nor how her own Eastern European Jewish roots or childhood in an anti-Semitic neighborhood might have influenced her future work. This is a book by a committed political activist and American, who was radicalized by her reading about torture and devoted much of her life to people suffering human rights abuses all over the world.
LIFESPAN:
KW: U.S. (New York City), Soviet Union, Activism, Human Rights, Motherhood
LERNER GERDA. Fireweed: A Political Autobiography. Philadelphia: Temple Upress, 2002. 373 pp.
Born in Vienna, Gerda Lerner left Europe during the rise of Nazism and eventually became a pioneer in the field of women’s history. Her life story includes a Viennese childhood, emigration to Depression-era New York, a life in its left-wing community, then her professional training as an historian. Along the way she discusses her difficult relationship with her mother and her happier relationship to her husband Carl Lerner. The book pays great
attention to cultural and social contexts and reveals the making of a
feminist historian in a thorough if somewhat stiff way.
LIFESPAN: 1920-
KW: Austria (Vienna), U.S. (New York City), Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Scholarship, Mother-Daughter Relationship
LEVY, AMY. The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy. Ed. Melvyn New. Gainsville: UPress of Florida, 1993. 566p. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ed. Linda Hunt Beckman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. 331p.
Amy Levy was a 19th-century novelist, essayist, satirist and poet and the first Anglo-Jewish writer to write critically about her community. Renowned during her lifetime, she was one of the first Jews to be admitted to Cambridge University, becoming a protege of Oscar Wilde and publishing 3 novels, several poetry collections, and many essays and articles. However, her conflicted identity as a Victorian and a “Jewess” both fuelled her work and destroyed her life. Her inability to synthesize her literary affiliation to the Christian world, her religious and cultural Jewish inheritance, and her struggles with her lesbian sexuality, caused her to commit suicide a few months before her twenty-eighth birthday. Despite her reputation, Levy was written out of the Canon until the 1990s when Victorian, Jewish, feminist and lesbian scholars sought to reclaim her. Her essays explore the subtleties and pain of difference, while regretting that distinctiveness should always be under threat from the pressure to assimilate. In a powerful first-person voice she condemns the lot accorded to unmarried women and the “spoiling” of Jewish children.
Linda Beckman Hunt’s biography, published in 2000, includes 90 pages of Levy’s private letters, which expose her deep depression and sense of alienation, with some startlingly savage caricatures of the Anglo-Jewish community. The ironic, self-deprecating tone, often evident in her novels and dramatic monologues, is the primary characteristic of Levy’s personal writing. Her liminal position makes her a superb anthropologist and sheds light on the plight of her own life as an educated Jewish woman at the fin-de-siecle, enabling her to vocalize larger questions about the tension between belonging and otherness in the Victorian Jewish community. For further reading that seeks to contextualize Amy Levy’s identity as a Jewish woman writer challenging the dominant cultural ethos see Cynthia Scheinberg’s two essays "Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy's Challenge to Victorian Poetic Identity," Victorian Studies 39 (1996): 173-200 and "Recasting 'sympathy and judgment': Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue," Victorian Poetry 35 (1997): 173-92.
LIFESPAN: 1861-1889
KW: England, Anglo Jewry, Victorian, Education, Lesbianism, Journalism, Literature, Poetry
LEWALD, FANNY. The Education of Fanny Lewald: An Autobiography. [German Title] Trans. and edited by Hanna Ballin Lewis. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992. 341p.
This autobiography, set in the first half of the 19th-century describes the first 34 years of Fanny Lewald, born in 1811 in Koenigsburg. In this possibly second memoir after Gluckl, we see that the expectations of wealthy European Jewish women have changed dramatically, especially among those Jews who had acculturated to German Christian life. Conducting business is now considered a man’s job and if a daughter or wife is engaged in business it reflects poorly on the family. Although Fanny Lewald became possibly the first Jewish woman journalist and later a famous and successful author in Germany, her education was limited and she was forced by her father into a virtually useless life of practicing piano and embroidering handkerchiefs, which she documents with her daily schedules and bitter words. Her family was highly assimilated and she grew up away from the Jewish community, unfamiliar with many Jewish customs and beliefs. Although she converted to Christianity at her teens, she never became a believing Christian. Her writing career began when one of her male cousins asked her to write for his magazine Europa. Encouraged by her success, she began writing novels and novellas, which became very popular. Lewald also describes the intellectual life of Konigsberg and Berlin in the middle of the 19th century, and her acquaintance with the intellectual salons of her time and their hostesses --precursors of the many Jewish women supporting the arts -- serving as muses, patronesses, critics and reviewers -- in later times. This well-written autobiography offers a glimpse of the life of middle-class Jewish women in the first half of the 19th century.
LIFESPAN: 1811-1889
KW: German, Germany (Konigsburg), Assimilation, Literature, Education, Women’s Salons,
MAHLER, MARGARET S. The Memoirs of Margaret S. Mahler. Compiled and edited by Paul E. Stepansky. NY: Free Press, 1988. 179p.
This is a fascinating and all too brief memoir by a woman who became one of the most influential child psychiatrists in the U.S. Born into a secular Jewish family in Hungary, Mahler recounts her struggle to break free of a traditional Jewish middle-class upbringing and to create for herself an intellectual and professional life. The backdrop soon changes from Hungary to Vienna to Berlin during which time she becomes first a physician, then a pediatrician, then a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where she is an analysand of Helene Deutsch and an acquaintance of Anna Freud. Mahler marries very late, at 38, and discusses her premarital sexual life, including her affair with one of her analysts. Although vague on sexual detail, she does provide a view of a secular Jewish woman’s intimate life in the early part of the 20th century. Similarly, there is not much detail of Jewish life or observance although an awareness of anti-Semitism throughout her life and pained surprise at finding evidence of it in the U.S. This is not a well-written memoir, nor is it full of sociological detail. It’s value is as a plain record of a successful, early twentieth century woman psychiatrist.
LIFESPAN: 1897-1985
KW: Hungary, U.S. Psychiatry, Child Psychology, Sexuality, Anti-Semitism
MEIR, GOLDA. Hayai [My Life]. Tel Aviv: Maariv, 1975. 333p.
The autobiography of Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only woman Prime Minister, is a fascinating document written by one of the most important figures in Israeli politics in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. Meir tells her life story beginning with her childhood in Kiev, her immigration to America, her youth years in Milwaukee, and her immigration to Israel in 1922, and her becoming a leading figure in the Labor Movement. She details the years she served as the Israeli Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and her years as a cabinet member and Prime Minister. The most interesting part is her account of the Yom Kippur war, which broke when she was Prime Minister. This document gives an opportunity to learn about the dynamics between the leaders of the state of Israel in its early years and the process of decision-making. It’s also an opportunity to learn about Meir personals life and straggles. The book is usually well written, and usually doesn’t go into unnecessary details. The writing becomes polemical sometimes, especially when she talks about Ben Gurion, about her responsibility to the Yom Kippur war, and when she discusses Feminism and position as a woman.
LIFESPAN: 1898-1978
KW: Hebrew, Kiev, U.S. (Milwaukee), Palestine/Israel, Zionism, Activism, the Labor Movement, Feminism, Socialism
MELANSON, YVETTE D. Looking for Lost Bird : A Jewish Woman's Discovery of her Navajo Roots. NY: Bar, 1999. 322p.
In this memoir, Yvette Melanson tells of being raised to believe that she was white and Jewish. At age forty-three, via the internet, she learned that she was a "Lost Bird," a Navajo child taken against her family's wishes, and that her grieving birth mother had never stopped looking for her until the day she died. Melanson served in the Israeli Army as well as the U.S. Navy before beginning a new life on a Navajo Reservation in Arizona.
LIFESPAN: 19?
KW: U.S., Israel, Jewish Identity, Native American
MOORE, TRACY (Ed.). Lesbiot: Israeli Lesbians Talk about Sexuality, Feminism, Judaism and their Lives. London: Cassell, 1995. 326p.
This is a collection of transcribed interviews conducted between 1988-89 and published almost six years later. Many of the women became known in the Israeli feminist and peace movements (Moed, Shalom, Svirsky), and many others are not recognized because they used pseudonyms and could not be out publicly.
Their stories contribute a significant component in understanding the conflicts and struggles of individual lesbians in Insrael, whose society is strongly traditional and family focused. A spectrum of backgrounds is evident: women from the city, from kibbutzim, Ashkenazi, Sephardi are represented. We see growing awareness of feminism, U.S. Jewish influence and Israeli resentment, and the forging of close ties to U.S. Jewish lesbians. But these interviews also reveal how the various strands of the women’s movement worked together and against each other at various moments between the late 1960s and late 1980s. We witness the tense intersections of feminists and lesbians and peace activists, the arguments about defining “lesbian and feminist issues” (do they include, for example, the occupation?) and the confrontation of racism and homophobia in the Israeli women’s movement. In addition, there is frank discussion of Jewish family violence and incest.
Moore admits to the limitations of the collection. She relied only on her own personal network and, as a result, no women from Haifa, a center of feminist activities, are included, nor are Israeli Palestinian lesbians for whom such exposure, even under a pseudonym, would have been extremely dangerous. Also limiting was Moore lack of Hebrew, so the interviews were confined only to English-speaking lesbians.
The interviews took place during a “lull” in lesbian and feminist activism—when many lesbians and feminists were experiencing burn-out and the institutions established in Israel in the 1970s had shut down in the early 1980s. The publication of the collection six years after the initial interviews, therefore, created a gap. Certainly the merging of many feminists’ ideology with anti-occupation/pro-peace positions would have, as Moore states, been more evident if the interviews had taken place closer to the time of publication in 1995. With the first intifada (December 1988), many of the lesbians interviewed would come to take prominent positions of leadership in Women in Black as well as in the multi-organizational Israeli women’s peace movement (though not always openly as lesbians).
Of course, any collection of interviews necessarily becomes dated in relation to current events. But this collection will remain important for its documentation of Israeli lesbians’ hidden lives and open activism during three critical decades. Till now it remains our sole source on this subject in English.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: Israel, Lesbianism, Sephardim, Kibbutz Life, Homophobia, Feminism, Activism, Family Violence, Women and Peace
MORALES, AURORA LEVIN AND ROSARIO MORALES. Getting Home Alive. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1986. 213p.
This is a very creative book written by a Jewish, Puerto Rican daughter and mother. They portray very strongly their feelings of angst, pain, conflict and joy surrounding their multi-faceted identities. Through poetry and narrative, they tell the history of their family, tracing it back their through Jerusalem, Puerto Rico, and the United States. They discuss being Jewish in a Christian and prejudiced society. They include Hebrew/Yiddish and Spanish words and dialogue which makes their personalities and self-images really shine through. They discuss their pride as women and as writers. Although their confusion is evident in the jumbled thoughts and diverse styles of writing, they state that they are literally women of the diaspora, caught between multiple worlds. And they embrace that position fully and set goals for greater self-understanding. They see themselves as working identity projects and multicultural successes.
LIFESPAN: Aurora Levin Morales: 1954- Rosario Morales: 1930-
KW: U.S., Puerto Rico, Israel, Jewish Identity, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Feminism,
NER-DAVID, HAVIVA. Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination. Needham: JFL Books, 2000. 255p.
This manifesto of sorts was written in Jerusalem when the author was around the age of 30, married, mother of three, and well along the complex path she alludes to in the book’s title. Born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Haviva Ner-David grew up mainly in Westchester, New York, where her family moved when she was three. She is the second-eldest of four children of a well-to-do, modern orthodox household. Ner-David is studying in pursuit of becoming the first woman to receive an orthodox s’micha, rabbinic ordination. The book is constructed around different aspects of Judaism, and thus heavy in parts with halakhic (Jewish law-oriented) content. She, however, delves into each matter frankly with personal stories as support for her religious feminist plight.
Since the book does not follow her life in chronological order, she draws examples from different periods in her life to explain her viewpoints. She is currently committed to Jewish law, and identifies herself as a halakhic and pluralistic Jew, with most of the trappings of orthodoxy. She openly discusses her issues with the choices of religious denominations that have led her to being a member at four different synagogues at one time. Also, in a heartening tone, she examines her former doubts about Judaism and God throughout adolescence and into her college years, and candidly shares her trials dealing with an eating disorder and muscular dystrophy. Her frankness about her marriage and parenting provides an intimate window into the family life of a halakhicly concerned, yet critical woman of today. Above all, the book documents the monuments and roadblocks in her years as a prominent leader in the Jewish religious feminist movement, and provides answers to common halachic questions that satisfy Orthodox and feminist attitudes in symbiosis rather than conflict.
LIFESPAN: 1969-
KW: U.S., Israel, Orthodox Feminist Movement, Halakha, Women Rabbis
PIERCY, MARGE. Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir. NY: William Morrow & Co., 2001 345 p.
This autobiography was written in Cape Cod, Massachusetts while the author was in her sixties after having written many books of poetry and fiction. poems and works of fiction. Born in Detroit to a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother, Marge Piercy lived originally in a Jewish neighborhood. She later moved to a working- class neighborhood where she was surrounded by a largely Irish, Polish Catholic, and Afro-American population. Marge Piercy grew up in a religiously fragmented family in which her father urged her mother to abandon her Judaism. As a result, Piercy struggled to build and maintain a strong Jewish identity. Her narrative is exceptionally emotional and honest in discussing her personal, familial, and religious life. Raised in an environment that did not nurture creativity and individuality, Marge Piercy defied her upbringing by attending college writing, and becoming involved in many organizations fighting against social injustice. As a college student and young woman, she became especially active in SDS and began to establish her legacy in the women's movement. Piercy's narrative follows her through the various cities in which she lived and illuminates her devotion to writing, women's rights, social justice, and Judaism. She pays special attention to the romantic aspects of her life and is honest and detailed in recounting her numerous lovers and affairs, experiments with sex and love, and intimacies with both sexes. Piercy recounts her relationships with her three husbands, her trial of an open marriage, numerous love affairs, and her deep love for her current husband, Ira Wood. Finally, a large part of Marge Piercy's memoir is devoted to writing about the numerous cats that she has had throughout her life.
LIFESPAN: 1936-
KW: U.S. (Cape Cod, Boston, New York City), Jewish Identity, Activism, SDS, Women's Movement, Sexuality, Literary
PINZER, MAIMIE. The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute. Ed. by Ruth Rosen, Sue Davidson, Florence Howe. The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series, No. 2. NY: Feminist Press, 1997. 528p.
This collection of brave letters charts a correspondence of more than 12 years between two 19th-century women. Maimie Pinzer was a former prostitute/nude model/actress who wanted to be a lady; Fanny Howe was a Bostonian lady with an understanding of tragedy. The match was unlikely from both sides, but Fanny offered moral support and a definition of what it was to be a "Gentle American," while Maimie contributed her honesty and a clearer view of "the human condition" that Fanny would otherwise not know. The letters intimately detail what life was like for a lower-class working woman--and how one woman struggled to make something more of that life.
LIFESPAN: 1885-1940?
KW: U.S. (Boston), Prostitution, Class
POGREBIN, LETTY COTTIN. Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America. NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991. 396p.
This is part autobiography and part political memoir by a prominent Jewish feminist activist, one of the founders of Ms. Magazine. It is revealing about Pogrebin's family and its secrets--both parents had previous marriages and children before marrying each other--as well as her religious upbringing. Pogrebin is frank about her father's limitations, her anger at his distance and divorce, and the religion to which he was so attached. After her mother's death, when she was 16, Pogrebin anger translates itself into rejection of Judaism. But she comes back, mostly--though not entirely--through feminism and Pogrebin recounts the "alternative" (not her term) observances she developed with her small Jewish community on Shelter Island. She details many of the issues that Jewish feminists raised in regard to patriarchal, sexist and heterosexist attitudes and practices in Judaic ritual and liturgy. At this point the autobiography becomes less of a personal account and more of a historical memoir of the issues, debates and tensions that dominated the feminist and Jewish feminist movements throughout the '70s and '80. Pogrebin discusses Ms., her encounter with anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism at the International Women’s Conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen and Nairobi. She also details her work in dialogue groups with African-American and Palestinian women. She proves herself very gutsy in moving forward in areas which are both frightening to her and sometimes actually dangerous. The one issue not raised is class--only alluded to occasionally in references to poor women. On a broader level--what is missing is the kind of personal look at her own marriage and family that she provided in her description of her relationships with her parents and sisters. We do not know how either feminism, religious practice, or her political activism affected her own marriage and her relationship with her children. Beyond admitting that she regrets not giving her children stronger Jewish identities, she tells us little of her adult personal life. It would have been good to see the consequences and benefits of her work on her day to day life.
LIFESPAN: 1939-
KW: U.S., Jewish Feminism, Activism, Anti-Racism, Israeli/Palestinian Conflict, Women and Peace
RAIDER, MARK A. AND MIRIAM B. RAIDER NORTH (eds). The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine: A Critical Edition. Trans. Maurice Samuel Hanover: U. Brandeis Press, 2002. 304p.
This invaluable edition of the Hebrew diaries, letters and memoirs of the early (1900-1920) Zionist pioneers is rich with materials which provide the context necessary for understanding the texts. The collection, first published in English translation in 1932 by Pioneer Women and then reissued in 1975, is accompanied in this edition by the original prefatory statements from Pioneer Women, Miriam Syrkin’s introduction to the 1975 edition and two new essays by the current editors on historical perspectives and women’s identity. In addition, the editors have provided expanded versions of the original glossaries of Hebrew terms, names (with biographical information), and places; a general index to the texts; and a selected bibliography.
The texts themselves represent the writings of over 30 pioneer women, whose unselfconscious writing evoke the complex conditions for women of that Zionist period, conditions which not uncommonly led to death from hardship and disease as well as from suicide. The writing brings out the women’s idealism and commitment to Zionism and also exposes their pain of dealing with strong sexism among the male pioneers and the disappointment many experienced when arriving in Palestine. A feminist consciousness is emphasized through the book’s organization (the same as the original 1932) which includes sections on work, group dynamics, and rearing children.
In addition, there is a section memorializing certain pioneers by comrades and friends and a final section on literary questions, including one by Rahel Katznelson-Shazar on the ongoing Yiddish-Hebrew language wars.
Minor disappointments: The title and copyright pages do not reflect the collection’s important history or even identify the translator, unfortunate omissions given the historical nature of this edition. Also, the photographs included in the 1975 version are absent and are worth looking up.
But it can’t be emphasized enough how important this resource is for anyone interested in early Zionist women pioneers; it should be required reading for any study of women in Israel.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: Hebrew, Palestine, Zionism, Activism, Feminism, Women Pioneers, Sexism, Motherhood
RAKOVSKY, PUAH. My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland. [Zikhroynes fun a yidisher revolutsyonerin] Ed. and introduced by Paula E. Hyman. Trans. Barbara Harshav with Paula Hyman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 204p.
First published in Hebrew translation in 1952 and then in the original Yiddish in 1954 in Buenes Aires, this memoir was written between 1940 and 1942. It recounts Rakowsky’s early beginnings in an Orthodox home in Bialystock and charts her intellectual curiosity, her desire for education and her emergence into secular Jewish life and Zionism. In her early twenties, she quickly became involved in both organizing and organizational activities of Bnei Moshe, the cultural arm of the Hibbat Zion movement. Committed especially to women’s emancipation and development, she was a leader in women’s education and founded and served as principal of a girls’ gymnasium where Hebrew was a major subject. At the same time, she maintained a strong attachment to Yiddish and continued writing for the Jewish press and, when her school closed, earned her living translating French and German texts into Yiddish.
After World War I, Rakowsky moved to Warsaw. Always a champion of women’s rights, she was devoted to expanding women’s roles in the Zionist movement. She was present and active at the meeting in London in 1920 that saw the creation of WIZO. In that same year, at the age of 55, she emigrated to Palestine.
Rakowsky stayed only a year. Finding herself alienated from the leadership and to some degree from the culture (she retained her close connection to Yiddish and did not share the early Zionist disciplined approached to Hebrew), she returned to Warsaw. But in 1935, she moved once again and this time settled permanently in Palestine where she lived until her death in 1955.
This translation is an important addition to Jewish women’s memoirs and gives a detailed view of a feminist and activist life. Paula Hyman’s introduction provides an excellent context and significant background material for this memoir.
LIFESPAN: 1865-1955
KW: Yiddish, Hebrew, Poland, Palestine, Zionism, Feminism, Activism, WIZO, Education.
RETI, IRENE. The Keeper of Memory: A Memoir. Santa Cruz: HerBooks, 2001.
This is a memoir by the founder publisher of HerBooks, a feminist press in Santa Cruz. Reti's parents were German and Hungarian Jews--"Holocaust refugees"--who decided not tell their children of their origins. Reti suspects but cannot confirm the truth until she's 17. Conducting interviews with family members as well as drawing on her own recollections of family members who survived, Reti tries to piece together the family history of both parents. This is a difficult undertaking since she has to rely totally on people's memories and many of her family members (especially her mother) remain resistant to discussing the past. Especially in the beginning, the book's different threads can be confusing. But towards the middle, the work is more coherent and very engaging. Reti is especially moving when she describes her struggle to experience herself as an "authentic" Jew and to claim for herself Jewish spirituality. She finally finds a comfortable place for herself in the Jewish Renewal movement. Though Reti challenges the silence of a previous generation on the question of Jewish identity, she herself remains silent on certain other aspects of her own identity. For example, she is open about her lesbianism but never discusses its relationship (if any) to her struggle with her Jewish identity. We have no idea how she came out, what her parents thought about it and what kind of reaction she got. She becomes a member of Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors and gives LDHS much credit for her being able to write the memoir, but we don't really have a good sense of the group. It's clear that Reti is a committed activist, but we never hear about how and why she founded her feminist press and what her life is like. One could say that these are not "the topics" of this memoir; nevertheless, it would have been interesting if Reti had also explored the relationships between the different facets of her identity and her work.
LIFESPAN: 1961-
KW: U.S. (California), Holocaust, Second Generation, German and Hungarian Jews, Jewish Identity, Assimilation, Passing, Jewish Renewal, Lesbianism
ROSENBERG, SUZANNE. A Soviet Odyssey. Penguin, Canada. 1988. 212p.
Rosenberg's primary aim in this autobiography is to expose the conditions she endured during five years imprisonment in the Gulag. But because she is not a skilled writer this is not the most interesting part of the book. Rather, it is her upbringing by two Jewish parents who were committed Communist and who taught her to believe in Stalin and in the future of the Soviet Union; she traces this and her mother's and her own political disillusionment effectively.
Rosenberg was born in Russia, but spends some of her youth in Canada, where her mother wanted to settle after her father's death. Eventually, mother and daughter return to Russia only to be caught by the KGB and in 1950 sent into forced labor. Her mother dies in the Gulag, but Rosenberg survives and is "pardoned" five years later. The narrative is choppy and the descriptions are not particularly engaging. But what is interesting about the book is its attitude to Jewishness and anti-Semitism. Rosenberg and other Jewish intellectuals readily acknowledge Soviet anti-Semitism, but none of them are interested in their Jewish identity. They know they can't shed their Jewishness, yet they have no sense or desire to do anything with it. Their discussions about their situation and the dangers they face and how they respond to it are the most puzzling and most interesting parts of this autobiography. Also of interest, as always, is how intellectuals in general cope with censorship among themselves and with the authorities. Rosenberg describes various strategies--some of which work and others which inhibit--for intellectual survival.
LIFESPAN: 1915-1988
KW: Soviet Union, Canada, Activism, Communism, anti-Semitism, Gulag
ROSENTHAL, ANNA [Heller]. "Bletlekh fun a lebns-geshikhte" [Pages from a life history] in Di yidishe sotsyalistishe bavegung biz der grindung fun "Bund" [The Jewish socialist movement till the founding of the “Bund”]. Vilna, Paris: YIVO, 1939. 416-437.
This is an autobiographical Yiddish essay by one of the early activists of the Jewish Labor Bund. The essay describes Anna Heller's life from her birth in 1872 to 1897, the year of the founding of the Bund, and focuses on her intellectual and political development. It's a wonderful text that gives both the details of her early life in Volkovisk (Grodno Province) and her yearnings to do something with her life. It's important to remember that she was already 60 when she wrote this and that she must have developed a perspective and theories about her own evolution as a radical and leader. The writing reveals a strong feminist bent (it's not present theoretically) and this and her honesty about herself and her life make this a very interesting essay. Her description of her childhood and adolescence, the recounting of her various political allegiances throughout her teens are particularly effective. It makes one realize to what degree childhood was serious business in that time. It's also interesting to see her growing attachment to Yiddish and Yiddish culture as it emerges out of her activism among Jewish workers. One historical irony which emerges vivdly from this memoir: The Bund, which ultimately became the most passionate political proponent of Yiddish, really fell into that position only because Jewish workers couldn't understand Russian.
LIFESPAN: 1872-1942?
KW: Yiddish, Lithuania, Russia, Activism, Russian Revolutionary Movements, Jewish Labor Bund, Feminism, Education
ROSENTHAL-SHNAIDERMAN, ESTHER. Birobizan mi-karov: Zikhronot, Me'ora'ot [Birobizan Close-Up: Memories, Observations] Trans. by Shlomo Eben Shushan. Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-meuhad, 1990. 233p.
In this detailed memoir, Rosenthal-Schnaiderman describes her life as a Communist in Poland and later on in the Soviet Union. Born in Poland to a very poor family, the author became active in the Socialist-Zionist movement, and later in the Communist movement. In the mid 20's she moves to the Soviet Union, in order to fulfill her dream of living in the Communist state. In the Soviet Union she joins the "Hebrew Section," and continues the educational work in Jewish Schools she has started in Poland. She becomes active in the efforts to collect and preserve the treasures of the Jewish-Yiddish culture that flourished in Eastern Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. She later became witness to the destruction of that work when Communist policy changed in the late 20's. Birobizan Mi-Karov tells of her experience as a settler in the autonomous Jewish Region of Birobizan. According to the author, it was in Birobizan that she realized the big lie of the Communist regime that led her to leave the Soviet Union in the late 50's. The book describes in detail not only the author's life, but also the lives of many other people, mostly victims of the Communist Regime.
LIFESPAN: 1900-1989
KW: Hebrew, Poland, Soviet Union (Birobizan), Activism, Socialism, Communism, Education
ROSTENBERG, LEONA and MADELEINE STERN. Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion. NY: Doubleday, 1997. 275p.
This memoir by and about two third-generation American-German-Jewish women--ostensibly about book collecting but really about their two lives -- is unique in the literature of Jewish women. It is the story of an extraordinary friendship and business partnership between two secular Jewish women that began in September of 1929 and continued into the next millennium. Both women chose to live at home with her parents until the remaining parent died. Neither woman ever married: "There were men in our lives but they remained on the fringe of our lives," they write and explain that although theirs was a deep friendship it was not a lesbian one. Both were highly-admired daughters (although they had older brothers), upper-middle-class, and college-educated at a time when most American Jewish women were not. One pursued a doctorate; the other wrote copiously. They became ardent travelers as well as rare book collectors. This is one of the most literate and intelligent memoirs in our bibliography, full of social detail about secular American Jewish life as well as rare books--and a pleasure to read.
LIFESPAN: Rostenberg 1908- ; Stern 1912-
KW: U.S. (New York City, New Orleans), Single Women, Friendship, Lesbianism, Education, Booksellers
ROSENZWEIG, ROSIE. A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1998. 173p.
The end of the 20th century saw a rebellion against the rule-based nature of Judaism and perceived lack of spirituality. For some this has meant fleeing religion altogether, amongst others there has been a movement within Judaism towards different types of Chassidism -- whether that be following Rav Cook, the Lubavitcher Rebbe or Shlomo Carlebach. However, another group made a far more radical move - leaving Judaism for Buddhism or creating a fusion of the two to become “JewBu’s.” Rosie Rosenzweig's son, Ben, became a Buddhist. Rosie, a self-acknowledged Jewish mother, found this difficult, but, rather than rejecting her son or pressuring him to conform, decided to follow him on his journey from Boston suburbia through a French Zen hermitage and a Tibetan Buddhist enclave in Nepal to her spiritual home in Jerusalem. While the tone of her book is deliberately humorous and fairly zany, utilizing stereotypes and poking fun at them and at herself, the book is also laced with sadness and compassion as she struggles to understand Ben and to connect her heritage with his chosen spiritual path. They eventually connect as she finds her own spirituality in Jewish meditation, which proves a way for her to yoke the disparate elements of her life together and to transform her relationships with her son, her religion and herself.
LIFESPAN: 1937-
KW: U.S. (Boston), Israel, International, Buddhism, Mother-Son Relationship
ROTHENBERG, PAULA. Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class and Gender. UP Kansas: 2002. 229p.
Rothenberg, who has edited collections and written on race, class and gender, decided to try to examine her own life in these terms. She begins with an opening chapter "A Jewish Girlhood" on her Jewish upper-middle-class, Orthodox background and shows her ability to analyze her background through multiple lenses. What is interesting is that this Jewish background virtually stands alone in the book. As Rothenberg advances in her education and life, she barely seems to look back. She analyzes academia, neighborhoods, friends, institutions always focusing on race, class and gender. But her Jewishness never seems to intersect with these three in anyway, even in the cases when anti-Semitism is quite evident. She seems unable to integrate anti-Semitism into her political analysis. It is unclear even at the end of the memoir whether she is raising her children with any sense of Jewishness.
This silence is very striking. After the first chapter, Rothenberg simply drops the topic of Jewishness and rarely refers to it again--even when she is being baited as a Jew. Though much of the analysis is good, it sometimes feels too easy. In addition, she seems to overlook certain of her privileges--among them tenure--which enable her to take dangerous or unpopular positions in academia with relatively little risk. Still, much of the analysis is thought provoking, in particular, her discussion of the integrated neighborhood with the segregated schools. All in all, Rothenberg shows how difficult it is in a dysfunctional society to do "the right thing." People with the best intentions get defeated by the structures and institutions around them.
LIFESPAN: 1943-
KW: U.S. (East Coast), Orthodox, Activism, Anti-Racism, Class, Academia
SARRAUTE, NATHALIE. Childhood. [Enfance, 1983]. Trans. by Barbara Wright. Braziller, 1984. 246p.
Reading Childhood is like watching a memory at work, wrote one reviewer. Images and moments from Nathalie Sarraute's early years are presented in chronological order but without any attempt to fill in the gaps that are naturally present when a mind looks back ten, twenty, thirty years. What emerges is still a story: the childhood of a young girl living in the first half of the twentieth century who divides her time between her divorced parents in Russia and France. By dismissing the need for a cohesive narrative, Nathalie Sarraute gives her memories immediacy. Her search for truth brings in a second voice that interrupts, testing, reassuring, prompting, creating a dialogue. Childhood puts the reader in a child's place as she relives the ritual of cutting open the pages of a book, the love for a favorite doll, the pain of intentional and unintentional slights, the joy of creating a first story.
LIFESPAN: 1900-1999
KW: French, France (Paris), Russia, Psychology, Literary
SARSHAR, HOMA. In the Back Alleys of Exile, 2 volumes, Los Angeles: Ketab, 1990 .
The first volume of this book was published in 1982-1983 as editorials in SHOFAR, the monthly Persian Jewish magazine, for which Sarshar was the first editor. They later became part of a radio program broadcast from Radio Omid.
These writings are a diary of reactions of an unwanted immigrant facing everyday life in a new land called America The second volume is from 1988-1989 and represents the culmination of a decade of living in Los Angeles. “Unlike poets,” the author writes in her preface, “we journalists do not have an propensity for poetic license, not are we as creative as novelists, nor as imaginative as artists. Thus, we experience the everyday events of life with simplicity and naturalness, and record our sentiments and feelings as such on paper. Like other ordinary human beings, we have an immediate, spontaneous, and mirror-like reaction and our works do not need extensive analysis; they are exactly what they seem. When I was editing this book, I realized that these writings reveal my natural passage through the five recognized stages associated with loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. At the time I was denying the catastrophe of the revolution, my pen was paralyzed and my tongue silent. During the stage of anger, I started to protest with excitement and emotion: Insulted others, and they in turn treated me unkindly. Even though I had chosen to come here I berated my host country and attacked its leaders whom I held responsible for my own misery and that of other Iranians. I started to search for a new identity, and even began to compose poetry with a boldness which surprises me today - all this in order to temper my heightened feelings. In the stage of bargaining, I started to address my past mistakes. I thought that if I were to read, to learn, to grow and to increase my awareness, I could make the past more alive. I speculated that if I do things this way, I should expect that result. So I made theories and compared them to others. Then I got frustrated with these unfulfilling efforts and fell into a deep depression. In this period, I became convinced of the futility of all things. Exhausted, withdrawn and in despair, I chose to keep silent. Finally, having survived this stage, I found an opportunity to come out of my own shell to look at myself, at others, and at the past.”
LIFESPAN: 1946-
KW: Farsi, Iran, U.S. (Los Angeles), Immigration
SCHIFFMAN, LISA. Generation J. NY: Harper, 1999. 166p.
This autobiography traces Schiffman's search for Jewish identity and Jewish meaning in her life. Married to a non-Jew and feeling alienated yet at the same time incapable of abandoning her Jewish background altogether, Schiffman searches for spiritual content among Jewish Buddhists and members of the Jewish Renewal movement. She spends a lot of time talking with Roger Kamenetz (The Jew in the Lotus) and Rabbi Jane Litman. She studies the meaning of the mikve and creates comical experiments in kashrut, trying to understand her own non-rational responses to various treyf combinations of food. In the end, Shiffman, like so many other Jews, gains ease and comfort by creating and accepting her own brand of Jewish expression and observance. What is intriguing about the work is its lack of grounding. Except for the 1990 census, there are no dates in this autobiography so when Schiffman writes , "We were a generation of Jews who grew up with television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn't something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born...." the reader wants to ask--exactly when was this? The assumption is the late '60s early ‘70s. But it would be good to know specifically. This lack of historical perspective is reflected also in Schiffman's seeming indifference to or unawareness of a feminist revolution (which was incorporated by the Jewish Renewal movement) in Jewish rituals and religious institutions. On the one hand, she takes the existence of women rabbis such as Litman totally for granted. On the other, she makes no reference to the new feminist perspectives and new interpretations of rituals such as those of the mikveh. Nor does she seem to be aware that Litman herself was almost excommunicated for being a witch. In short, Jewish feminism and Jewish women's spirituality are either unknown or deemed irrelevant. Schiffman starts from scratch, when in fact there is much that she could have drawn on.
LIFESPAN:
KW: U.S. (California), Assimilation, Jewish Renewal, Spirituality, Intermarriage
SENESH, HANNAH. Hannah Senesh, Her Life & Diary. Schoken Books, 1971. 257p.
Senesh's story, her life and death are legendary: the young girl who came from an assimilated background in Hungary, converted to Zionism, immigrated to Palestine, returned to Europe to try to rescue Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust, was caught and executed by the Nazis. Her biography was used in Israel to help cement a national identity and she remains a national hero. The diary was started by Hannah around the age of 13 in Hungary in 1934. She was part of a sophisticated, assimilated Jewish family and her father Bela was a well known Hungarian playwright. In her diary she documents her school days, her feelings about her father's death, and her everyday activities. She seems well adjusted, not particularly attached to her Jewishness and she is popular in school. When she is voted president of a club, however, she is denied the position because she is a Jew. She does not detail her response, but soon after announces in the diary that she has become a Zionist and wants to emigrate to Palestine. She reaches Palestine, works on agricultural collectives, writes letters urging her family to join her. Ultimately, she volunteers as a paratrooper to help the British and eventually, on the mission, she is caught. The diary and letters illuminate Hannah's emotional life, her closeness with her family, her undying passion for life and justice. They give us an intimate view of someone whose reputation has made her larger than life. One curiosity: Senesh's values--her ardent Zionism and commitment to Palestine--should make her an instant hero in the U.S. Yet the book is out of print, in contrast to the millions of copies of Anne Frank's diary still being sold.
LIFESPAN: 1921-1944
KW: Hungarian, Hebrew, Hungary, Palestine, Activism, Zionism, Holocaust
SETTON, RUTH KNAFO. “Homing Pigeon: Sephardic Jew.” in Jewish Women 2000: Conference Papers from the HRIJW International Scholarly Exchangtes 1997-1998. Ed. Helen Epstein. Hadassah Research Institute on Jewish Women, 2000. 129-135. and “Ten Ways to Recognize a Sephardic Jew-ess” in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing. Ed. Michael Lerner. NY: Joseey-Bass, 2001. 20-35.
In the first essay, “Homing Pigeon,” Setton describes her Moroccan roots (she left when she was three), her beloved grandfather, her own return to Morocco, and the hostility of Ashkenazi and Christians in Pennsylvania Dutch country (the Setton’s are called “Jungle Jews). Setton traces her father’s desire to assimilate and to pass and her inability to escape her Jewishness.
The second essay, “Ten Ways...” is an original, non-linear narrative in which Setton reveals some of the contradictions inherent in a variety of prejudices, including those of Ashkenazi against Sephardim. It is a sharp, sometimes bitter exploration of family history and of identity in many contexts.
LIFESPAN:
KW: Morocco, U.S., Sephardim, Ashekanzi-Sephardi Relations, Racism
SHAPIRO, MALKAH. The Rebbe's Daughter: Memoir of a Hasidic Childhood. Translated from the Hebrew, Edited, and with an Introduction and Commentary by Nehemia. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2002. 272 p.
This autobiography was written mostly in Kozienice, Poland and partially in Israel. The first part of the narrative was written by Malkah when she was about twelve years old, while the second part is a bit more retrospective, written later in the author's life, after she has left Poland. Born in 1894 in Kozienice, Poland, to Rebbe Yerahmiel Moshe Hapstein and Brachah Tzipporah Gitl Twersky, Malkah Shapiro entered into a large family of "tightly interwoven hasidic nobility". Malkah discusses her every-day twelve year old life in reference to the Hasidism in which she is immersed. Her narrative revolves around the holidays, preparation for the holidays, and her religious study. The intimacies of her life seem to be comprised of religion and religious reflection. Malkah is at a time in her life, during the early part of the narrative, when she is starting to enter adulthood and is being forced to begin to abandon her childhood ways. She turns to her religious studies to aid her in this transition.
Malkah's life offers a window into Hasidic life during this time. The stories told by her relatives that she weaves into the narrative are rich, and illuminate the tight-knit relationships characteristic of Hasidic community.
LIFESPAN: 1894-1971
KW: Poland (Kozienice), Israel, Hasidim, Father-Daughter Relationship
SHTERN, LUDMILA. Leaving Leningrad: The True Adventures of a Soviet Emigre. Hanover: Brandeis UP, 2001. 139p.
In a slight and humorous collection of essays, Shtern, the daughter of a Leningrad law professor and an actress, describes her life in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, her work as a geologist, her family's decision to immigrate to the United States in 1975 and her adaptation to the new country.
LIFESPAN:
KW: Soviet Union (Leningrad), U.S. (Boston), Immigration
SILLS, BEVERLY (BELLE MIRIAM SILVERMAN). Bubbles: A Self-Portrait. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976; 240p. Bubbles: An Encore. Grosset & Dunlap, 1981 Beverly: An Autobiography. NY: Bantam, 1987. 356 p.
This is a trio of very light and breezy as-told-to autobiographies by the celebrated soprano and impresario that begins in her birthplace of Brooklyn and takes us through her professional education and training in the operatic repertoire. It is also a memoir of Jewish family life, drawing portraits of her devoted mother, her father, her brothers, two children (one deaf, one autistic), stepchildren and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant husband, Peter Greenough.
LIFESPAN: 1929-
KW: U.S. (Brooklyn, New York City), Opera, Intermarriage
SIMON, KATE. Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood. NY: Harper, 1982. 179p.
Having written classic books on Mexico, Italy, New York and London, the travel writer Kate Simon turned to her own background and, at the age of 70, wrote and published a memoir of her girlhood in the 1920's in the Bronx. A Polish-Jewish immigrant (she and her family came from Warsaw when she was four), Simon recounts in vivid details her own and her family's struggles. The memoir is beautifully written. Consciously or not, Simon brings to the work a contemporary feminist sensibility. Especially in the area of sex and sexuality, Bronx Primitive diverges from previous Jewish immigrant memoirs. Simon talks frankly about abortion (her mother had 13) as a form of contraception, about the constant harassment and abuse she experiences from neighbors and relatives (male and female) who become temporary borders in the Simon household, about sex as she learns to understand it from the street. Even her parents sexuality and her father's obsession with her own maturing are part of Simon's story. The female immigrant experience is thus recounted from a perspective that allows previously taboo subjects to be discussed openly.
Simon also evokes the strong influence of street life and the movies on her self image as an individual and as a woman. The education that other writers considered a required element in their American narratives is examined by Simon in a far broader framework and Americanization is depicted as taking place outside of books and schools. Simon's sense of Jewishness is rather thin. Her parents are committed secularists who pass on neither language nor specific culture. They're Yiddish speakers and progressives, but no institutional framework is provided for the children through which this legacy can be passed on. Bronx Primitive became as much of a classic as Simon's travel books. It was followed by A Wider World and Etchings in an Hourglass. These were increasingly bitter, homophobic, and unpleasant. Bronx Primitive stands very much apart from them.
LIFESPAN: 1912-1990
KW: Poland, U.S. (Bronx), Immigration, Sexuality, Abortion, Education, Movies
SIMONS, SHOSHANA. “In Search of Fritada.” in Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends. Winter 1997-98, VII, 1. 10-14
Simons associates her Sephardic identity with food cooked by her paternal grandmother and passes on the Sephardic tradition by making fritadas for her nephew. She describes her father’s Turkish background and the abuse he faced among Ashkenazi Jews in England.
LIFESPAN:
KW: England (London), Turkey, Sephardim, Jewish Food, Racism
SLOVO, GILLIAN. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country. NY: Little, Brown & Co., 1997. 282p.
This is an interesting memoir or rather exploration and semi-detective story. Slovo is the middle daughter of two famous Jewish, Communist, anti-apartheid activists. Her mother, Ruth First (see above 117 Days), was murdered in exile in Mozambique in 1982 and her father, Joe Slovo, who later became Nelson Mandella's first Minister of Housing, died of cancer in the early years of the new government.
Slovo is seemingly interested in trying to find out the details of her mother's murder and the secrets of the apartheid government, but it is also clear that she wants to uncover the secrets of her parents marriage. It's an interesting exploration of public and private lives. She finds out perhaps more than she wanted to, particularly about the sexual lives of both Ruth and Joe. At the end, she even discovers a half brother whom her father never acknowledged.
Most of the book is extremely interesting. Slovo tries to recreate her own perspective as a child witnessing her parents unexplained activities and behaviors. Mandella at one point tells her that the biggest price for political activism is paid by the children of activists. But there are loose ends--as for example her own response to the half brother.
Jewish identity is acknowledged but never deemed of particular interest. Both First and Slovo came from Eastern European backgrounds--with their parents fluent in Yiddish. But there doesn't seem to be very much attachment to this identity--at least the way Slovo explains it. Feminism, perhaps because it is Slovo’s concern, is discussed particularly in relationship to Ruth and her mother (Slovo’s grandmother), who resented her role as traditional housewife and raised Ruth to do--everything.
LIFESPAN: 1952-
KW: South Africa, Apartheid, Racism, Activism ,
SPEWACK, Bella. Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side. Feminist Press, 1995. 175p.
At the age of 23, Bella Spewack, who had already taken up a career in journalism, wrote a memoir of her life with her mother, step-father and half-brothers. For whatever reasons, she never published it. Clearly this was a conscious decision, for she went on to have a successful career as a writer. Over the next four decades she collaborated with her husband, Sam Spewack, and co-wrote more than 35 movies and plays. Among them was the classic Kiss Me Kate, the musical based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Streets was published posthumously when the executors of her estate discovered the manuscript.
Streets is an unrelentingly grim memoir which contains no hint of Bella's future career and success. Spewack came with her mother from Transylvania when she was about three. Her mother may have been an agunah or possibly unwed. In any case, the life that Bella portrays is almost totally without joy. Her mother marries an abusive man who ultimately deserts her, Bella, his own son (Bella's half brother), and his unborn child. Spewack describes their lives in terms of the constant moves the family must make, their unrelieved poverty, and the humiliation of charity. Nothing seems to help--not school, not friends, not community. The world that Spewack depicts is without empathy or compassion. There seems to be no supportive Jewish community and Spewack rarely refers to her Jewish roots or to her Jewish identity. One scene stands out: when she is a maid in a summer resort, and she and some of the other women go for a walk. Each reverts for a few moments to their native culture--through a Swedish song or an Irish reel. They seem to become alive again. But the moment vanishes quickly.
LIFESPAN: 1899-1990
KW: U.S. (New York City), Transylvania, Immigration, Lower East Side, Agunah,, Mother-Daughter Relationship
SULEIMAN, SUSAN. Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook. University of Nebraska, 1999. 243p.
This book is part of the literature narrating a woman’s return to her Jewish roots in Central European after the Holocaust. Suleiman, a professor of French at Harvard University returns to Budapest in 1984 for the first time after emigrating with her parents in 1949 to show her childhood home to her own children. In a second visit, she returns as a visiting scholar. Budapest Diary recounts her family history: her father was a Hasidic rabbi, her mother a devotedly secular Jew who ridiculed his upbringing. “Motherbook” in Hungarian is the technical term for the paper trail remaining after one dies--birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree, death certificate, etc. and Suleiman's journal records her journey to reconnect with her birth culture as well as with her mother.
LIFESPAN: 1939-
KW: Hungary (Budapest), Assimilation, Mother-Daughter Relationship
SWADOS, ELIZABETH. The Four of Us: The Story of a Family. NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1991. 243p.
In a four-part memoir -- one for each member of her family--writer and composer Liz Swados tries to understand and describe the mental illness that eroded life in her Jewish-American family.
LIFESPAN: 1951-
KW: U.S., Mental Illness, Music
SZWAJGER, ADINA BLADY. I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance. Trans. by Tasja Darowska and Danusia Stok. London: Collins Harvill, 1990. 184p.
A young medical student at the start of the war, Blady worked in the Warsaw Ghetto children’s hospital under terrible conditions. She resisted recounting her experiencing for many years and finally with the encouragement of Marek Edelman wrote this memoir, which originally was circulated in the underground press before the collapse of Communism in Poland.
Among other things, the memoir relates the kinds of moral dilemmas faced by doctors. For example, on one occasion Blady describes giving morphine to Jewish children about to be sent to extermination camps so their deaths would not be so tormented and, on another, euthenizing a woman who was endangering hidden Jews, among them her own daughter. Such actions made her later question her fitness to be a doctor. She did, in fact, become a pediatrician after the war and specialized in children with lung diseases.
She survived the Warsaw Ghetto before uprising and served as a courier for the ZOB (Jewish Fighters Organization) on the Aryan side. Her personal losses were devastating, including her mother and her husband.
The memoir is striking for its directness, honesty and self-effacing modesty. It is an important contribution in making vivid the context outside of concentration camps in which moral decisions had to be made and lived with. Unintentially, it provides us with a portrait of a remarkable woman.
LIFESPAN: 1917—1993
KW: Polish, Poland, Holocaust, Resistance, Activism, Jewish Doctors, Hidden Children
TALVE, SUSAN. “Sarika” in The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. Eds. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz. Boston: Beacon, 1989. 179-181.
Rabbi Susan Talve writes this autobiographical essay by paying tribute to her Greek Jewish grandmother Sarika. She describes her grandmother’s courtship, relations with family members and her immigration to the U.S. She also recounts her grandmother’s responses to her own ordination and leadership as a rabbi.
LIFESPAN:
KW: Greece, U.S. (New York City), Sephardim, Feminism, Women Rabbis.
VOLK, PATRICIA. Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family. NY: Knopf, 2001. 242p.
Patricia Volk's light and entertaining memoir is built around her father's garment-district restaurant. Her great-grandfather Sussman brought pastrami to the New World. Grandfather Jake, a demolition expert, was profiled in The New Yorker. "Everybody did one thing better than anybody else. Aunt Gertie sang the works of Victor Herbert. Aunt Ruthie mamboed. Granny Ethel braked with such finesse it was impossible to tell the moment the car went from moving to a stop." Of course, perennially negative Aunt Lil embroidered a pillow with the motto "I've Never Forgotten a Rotten Thing Anyone Has Done to Me.’
LIFESPAN: 1943-
KW: U.S. (New York City), Food, Recipes
WALKER, REBECCA. Black, White, and Jewish, Autobiography of a Shifting Self. NY: Riverhead Books, 2001. 320p.
This autobiography was written when the author was in her early thirties. Born in 1969 to a famous Black author Alice Walker, and a white, Jewish lawyer father, Rebecca Walker exists in the midst of a constant struggle of self-definition. The author was born in Jackson, Mississippi in the midst of the civil rights struggle. She herself was brought into the world as a symbol of hope--a child of mixed race and heritage whose parents had visions of an equal society free from color barriers. This book follows Rebecca through her inability to exist as such a symbol, and traces the lengths to which she goes to define herself, from New York to San Francisco, to Yale University, and beyond. Rebecca is the only child of her parents' marriage, which ends in divorce when Rebecca is young. From the time she is born, she is faced with the stark differences of her Black and Jewish relatives and their dislike and prejudice towards each other. Once her parents get divorced, Rebecca finds herself by experimenting with different friendship circles, dabbling with drugs, and testing the boundaries of her sexuality. As her story unfolds, it is incredible to be reminded of her young age throughout these experiences; she seems mature beyond her years throughout the memoir. Rebecca recounts her life with extreme insight, clarity, and honesty. The most engaging parts of the memoir are Rebecca's attempts to define herself as both Black and Jewish. Eventually, she identifies more as Black because she feels estranged and betrayed by the white, Jewish community and the middle- class existence of her white family. It is also interesting to read of the stark differences between her two worlds and the subsequent differences between her different friendship circles.
LIFESPAN: 1970-
KW: New York, San Francisco, Jewish Identity, African-American, Interracial Marriage, Lesbianism
Weisgall, Deborah. A Joyful Noise: Claiming the Songs of My Fathers. NY: Grove Press, 2000. 262p.
This is a memoir written by a woman commemorating her parents and grandparents and their lives in Judaism and in music. It has a glorious opening paragraph, as Weisgall brings us to Baltimore in the 1950s for Passover at the synagogue where her grandfather, Abba, was cantor. Listening to Abba's tenor, her father Hugo's baritone, and her uncle's bass, "singing connected them . . . it was as real and mighty and unattainable as God." The music is the leitmotif.
LIFESPAN: 1948-
KW: U.S. (Baltimore), Czechoslovakia (Prague) Music, Liturgy
WENGEROFF, PAULINE. Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Women in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. by Henny Wenkart. Bethesda: UMaryland Press, 2000. 243p.
Rememberings is an abridged and translated version of Pauline Wengeroff's World War I era, prolific German work, "Memoirs of a Grandmother," which she finished in 1919, in her eighties. Born in the early 1830s in Bobruisk, Lithuania (then the Pale of Settlement), Wengeroff was the daughter of a large, wealthy, religious, Jewish family, and lived a very typical Jewish life for a woman of her time. She affably and carefully describes her family's holiday practices, as well as life cycle events like beginning kheder (Jewish primary school), her engagement and wedding, among others. The religio-political changes she discusses regarding her family life from childhood to adulthood are some of the most striking and emotionally driven passages in the book. Her personal account of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), and its effects on her family indicate the strain individual Jews dealt with in balancing Jewish and secular education. European Judaism was also tested by Chasidism, and more evidently later in the 19th century during the rise of anti-Semitism and, simultaneously, the Reform Movement. Wengeroff discloses her inner conflict of desiring to sustain the sort of traditional observance consistent with her upbringing, while also trying to live peacefully with her husband's fickle practices. Wengeroff's attention to detail, frequent interspersion of Yiddish, and intimate and evocative voice reveal her excitement in writing as well as her passion for Judaism. It is often apparent that she feels her religious grounding loosening, and that this book was a way for her to maintain a museum of sorts for the Judaism she knew. One of the most intriguing moments is towards the end of the book when she makes an ardent appeal to God when she is forced to give up keeping a kosher kitchen. Her story is important essentially because of the time in which she lived. The turn of the 20th century was perhaps the most religiously tumultuous era for Jews, and her internal conflict is evidence that supports it personally.
LIFESPAN: 1833-1916
KW: German, Russia, Lithuania, Orthodox, Haskalah, Holidays
WESTHEIMER, RUTH. All in a Lifetime. NY: Warner Books. 1987 225p.
This is a breezy conversational and not very thoughtful summary of an extraordinary life that begins with a small girl named Karola Siegel who lives in Frankfurt, Germany just before the Nazi era. Karola is sent away by her parents on a kindertransport to Switzerland, where she survives the war. The greater part of the book, however, is taken up with her experiences in Israel (on kibbutz and in the army), her sojourn as a student in the small Israeli colony in Paris of the 1950s, and her eventual home in the United States. The narrative is full of interesting detail yet reads more like a travelogue than a memoir. Fascinating figures like the pioneer sex therapist Helen Singer Kaplan are barely sketched in, as are Westheimer's relationships with friends, lovers and husbands. Perhaps the most in-depth writing is about Westheimer's recollections of an orthodox Jewish childhood in Germany. She tells the reader that, despite her own psychotherapy, she finds it difficult to write about personal matters, and manages to discuss intimate issues such as sex and love with a brisk efficiency that keeps the reader moving.
LIFESPAN: 1928-
KW: Germany (Frankfurt), Switzerland, Israel, U.S. (New York City--Washington Heights), Orthodox, Holocaust, Kindertransport, Zionism, Psychology, Education, Sex Therapy, New School
WOLF, NAOMI. Promiscuities. NY: Random House 1997. 286p.
Part memoir, part reportage, Promiscuities is Naomi Wolf's story of coming of age in the post-sexual revolution of Haight-Ashbury. According to Wolf, promiscuous is "a word that holds within it the mixed message girls today are given about sex: 'You're promiscuous if you do anything, but you are a prude if you do nothing.'" The writer grew up in a secular Jewish family of academics in San Francisco, lived briefly in Israel and became a successful writer of non-fiction.
LIFESPAN: 1963-
KW: U.S. (San Francisco), Adolescence, Sexuality
Zakutinsky, Rivka. Around Sarah's Table: Ten Hasidic Women Share their Stories.
This book tells the stories of 10 Hasidic women who gather "around Sarah's table" each Tuesday for lunch and Torah discussion. The women are quite different from one another: all live in Brooklyn, yet they come from Italy and Russia as well as the U.S., and not all were raised in "Torah homes." Some are housewives, while others balance demanding careers in law or publishing with home responsibilities. All are united in their devotion to faith and family, and in their determination to live their values. Each chapter blends the group's weekly parsha (Torah portion) with one of the women's life stories. They discuss the dark times, such as dealing with near-fatal nephritis or the challenges of raising special-needs children, alongside the blessed events: a long-awaited pregnancy, a shidukh (match) made for a daughter or son. Readers will come away with a deep appreciation for the resiliency of these women, as well as important details of the world of kosher-keeping, modest dress, mikveh attendance and the rejuvenating cycle of holidays and Sabbaths.
LIFESPAN: NA
KW: U.S. (Brooklyn), Hassidim, Ritual
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