Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity by Nora Rose Moosnick (review)

Books with “Arab” and “Jewish” in the title could be assumed these days to be about conflict and armed struggle. Refreshingly, then, this book weaves tales of the lives of first-, second-, and third-generation immigrant women, focusing on the role that Arab and Jewish women play in their family businesses and looking at similarities rather than differences across the cultures.

Basing her work on oral testimony interviews carried out over a five-year period while teaching at the University of Kentucky, Nora Rose Moosnick has crafted a book that presents not only doubly, as she suggests, but triply overlooked lives—lives of merchants, lives of working women, and lives of Arabs and Jews—in a Kentucky landscape, which is more commonly presented as populated by working-class, mountain-dwelling Americans from the South (to whom an Italian oral historian was quite “other” enough). Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) was my first in-depth introduction to the people of this area; this book, however, speaks of a different world from the Appalachian mining community lovingly observed and charted by Portelli.

In these “stories of accommodation and audacity,” Nora Rose Moosnick spins stories born of nostalgia, starting from the love in which she holds the memory of her father. Although he became a university professor, her father never cast of his “trade” background, always had a good eye for a bargain, and knew all there was to know about fabric. It was through her Jewish father that Moosnick met Sido (“grandfather” in Arabic), a former salesman of fine linen, with whom she spent many hours listening to stories about fruit trees in Ramallah and his days peddling rugs around the mansions of the southern United States. These conversations of her youth led to an interest in chronicling the lives of other Arab and Jewish merchants. And it did not take long before she realized that, although these Arab and Jewish merchants’ lives had been overlooked, the stories of the women in those families were particularly worth hearing and recording.

The Jewish and Arab women who Moosnick spoke to as part of her study—and the men in the families who spoke to her about their aunts, mothers, and grandmothers—had vivid memories of the Ku Klux Klan, of anti-Semitism, and of strong resourceful women in their families who pushed to make a success of their lives, took risks, and carried with them the memories of older, long-dead ancestors who influenced their own lives. For instance, Teresa Isaac, a Christian Arab, had heard since girlhood the story of her mother’s grandmother from Lebanon who had stowed away on a boat at the age of fourteen. She tried hard to “encourage that fearlessness in the next generation of girls in the family,” herself following in her father’s footsteps as Mayor of Lexington (70).

In each chapter Moosnick weaves a tale of one or two Arab women and one or two Jewish women, linked in some way—through their tenacity, their success, their attitudes to mothering, or simply their shared invisibility. There is much talk of being asked “who are you” or “what are you.” The Arabs are told they look Italian or Mexican; one Jewish man was often told “you don’t look Jewish” (22). Identity is an important theme within the book; as Moosnick says, “racial and ethnic boundaries can bewilder even those within them” (22).

Many of the stories are of new immigrants who used the income from their stores to get an education for their children, so that, like Moosnick’s father, they could leave the business behind and become doctors, lawyers, or teachers. Other families, in contrast, felt it was important for the children and grandchildren of the first generation to take over the businesses.

The vivid, warm photographs...