Introduction: Jewish-American Autobiography

INTRODUCTION Jewish-American Autobiography AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS A WIDESPREAD and characteristic form of American expression. It first appears in exploration narratives and travelers' tales, and subsequently takes on varied forms: Puritan diaries and settlers' chronicles; captivity and slave narratives; the self-portraits of Franklin, Thoreau, Adams, and Whitman; and the memoirs of corporate heroes and movie stars. Yet despite its centrality in American letters, Robert Sayre has observed that there is no American Rousseau and no American chronicler of the spirit and intellect to equal Mill, Newman, or Jung.1 The reason, he claims, is the very identification of autobiography in America with America. "An American seems to have needed to be an American first and then an autobiographer, and this places some limits on his or her achievement."2 Sayre's provocative claim is that becoming an American is the sine qua non and perhaps the recurring and dominant theme of American autobiography. In short, a characteristic feature of the autobiography in the United States is the extent to which the autobiographer is self-consciously a representative American. Yet representativeness has always been a charged concept when it comes to autobiographical writing. Gusdorf, in his seminal essay on the genre, makes his case on the unrepresentativeness of the autobiographer, i.e., on the uniqueness of the subject. According to Gusdorf, this is what distinguishes the genre from testimonies and confessions in traditional societies. "The man who takes delight in thus drawing his own image believes himself worthy of a special interest___ [H]e calls himself as witness for himself; others he calls as witness for what is irreplaceable in his presence." In Gusdorf's scheme, "The conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life is the late product of a specific civilization. Throughout most of human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others."3 PROOFTEXTS 18 (1998): 113-120 O 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 114HANA WIRTH-NESHER Whereas Gusdorf's essay has served as a landmark in autobiography studies because he imposed some order in a field in which every first-person narration of an individual's past had been indiscriminately grouped into one category, it poses special problems for American writing (as well as Jewish writing). If we consider Sayre's claim about the distinctiveness of American autobiography and if we regard Franklin's autobiography as a prototype, then the central feature of American autobiography would indeed be its awareness of its own journey toward national identity. In fact, Franklin's self-conscious mythologizing of the making of an American has served as a model for successive generations. As a result, even a work as mainstream as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin would not conform to Gusdorf's definition, with his emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual, in that it, too, foregrounds representativeness rather than singularity. Moreover, autobiographies by members of minority or marginalized groups chronicle resistance to their claims to Americanness. Slave narratives and immigrant autobiographies, to cite two examples, are significant documents in the repertoire of American accounts of the self in which the authors designate themselves as the voice of their communities. Franklin's location in his culture, regardless of his deliberate self-effacement for the sake of typicality, is not that of Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, or Ludwig Lewisohn. If Franklin can be regarded as a form of minority discourse, then these autobiographers are twice removed, representatives of communities struggling to become representative Americans. For Franklin, typicality consists of Yankee ingenuity and Adamic selfinvention —he is moving toward something. For many Jewish-American autobiographers , typicality is the ever-present tension between Adamic self-invention and Jewish origins and destiny. The Jewish-American is moving both toward and away simultaneously. The American legacy is only one of the traditions shaping the JewishAmerican autobiography. Jewish literary history complicates the genre even further. Whereas the author writing in English in America is undoubtedly aware of precursors such as Whitman, Emerson, Franklin, and others, he may also be aware ofJewish literary precursors or of the attitude toward self-representation in Jewish culture. As Alan Mintz has argued in his study of modern Hebrew autobiography, the genre itself is antithetical to the...