Strands of the Cable: The Place of the Past in Jewish American Women's Writing (review)

128 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 course of the study not just among the observed, but within the observer as well. These are minor issues, however, compared to the major contribution El-Or's work makes to the field of education and feminist studies. Despite a most sophisticated analysis, El-Or manages to maintain a text accessible to scholar, student, and general reader. This is no mean feat, and I suspect some of this is attributable to Haim Watzman's fine translation. I highly recommend this book to those interested in the ways in which religious identity and meaning are maintained within traditional communities in contemporary times. Debra Renee Kaufman Matthews Distinguished Professor Northeastern University Strands of the Cable: The Place of the Past in Jewish American Women's Writing, by Ellen Serlen Uffen. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. 193 pp. $30.95. Until recently, women writers rarely appeared in anthologies ofJewish American fiction; only male writers were included. For Ellen Serlen Uffen, Jewish women have different realities from those of Jewish men and different relationships to present and past. The more "Jewish" the writer, the more complex her relationship to being a woman and an American. This book is not comprehensive but covers women writers Uffen feels are representative of a particular era or perspective. The first chapter, "The Beginnings," is about the works of Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, and Anzia Yezierska. Antin wrote autobiography, Stern wrote fiction labeled autobiography, and Yezierska wrote autobiographical fiction. These writers were all immigrants, all originally speakers of Yiddish; all dealt with issues of acceptance in America as Jews and in Judaism as educated women. Each author wrote ofyoung women who left traditional Judaism but who did not necessarily find ease and happiness elsewhere. Uffen points out that Yezierska's works were the most intense; although her writing was in English, she allowed her characters' speech to ring with the rich cadences of Yiddish. Perhaps additional information about authors' lives would be useful in this chapter on autobiographical writing. For instance, Antin said she wrote to exorcise her immigrant past, but she later had a nervous breakdown and stopped writing, making her success at exorcism questionable. Book Reviews 129 In the 1930s, Beatrice Bisno, office manager for the American Clothing Workers ofAmerica, wrote Tomorrow's Bread. Tess Slesinger, a New York intellectual, wrote The Unpossessed. The next chapter focuses on these two writers. Bisno's writing was conventionally realistic, "proletarian," a style most often used by men, as in Michael Gold'sjews Without Money. Uffen calls Bisno's book a fictionalized documentary of an "important period in American labor history that Bisno knew well." Slesinger wrote "tapestries of consciousness" and described radical politics satirically. Her dislocated intellectuals appeared earlier than Bellow's or Roth's. Though writing about proletarians and radicals, neither Bisno nor Slesinger portrayed women as robust and direct, as did Yezierska; by the 1930s, Jewish women needed to appear weaker than they were to fit middle-class American ideals. In the 1940s and 1950s, psychoanalysis often took the place of politics as a fictional topic. Jo Sinclair's The Wasteland described this means of dealing with the past and Jewish identity. Sinclair's The Changelings, recently republished, covered a more unusual topic for the period, JewishBlack relations in a midwestern city, seen through the eyes of a young girl. Her novel Anna Teller, not as well known, dealt with the aftermath of the Holocaust, through a female protagonist and her Americanized family. This chapter on Sinclair provides some depth of analysis. All Sinclair's characters "seek definition in continuity," but Sinclair does not provide easy answers at her stories' ends. She does not "try to smooth the edges of her fictions or of our memories." "The 1960s to the 80s: Zelda Popkin and Marge Piercy" compares two writers with different styles, concerns, and audiences. Each wrote a book about the lives of two women: Herman Had Two Daughters and Braided Lives, respectively. Popkin used a male narrator primarily; the past was seen as if on a fast train ride. Piercy had a female narrator, who told of her own and her cousin's pasts in some detail. The...