Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women (review)

Book Reviews 109 Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women, by Janet Handler Burstein. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. 205 pp. $34.95 (c); $14.95 (p). In the 1970s the astonishing popularity ofIrving Howe's World ofOur Fathers (1976) provided indisputable evidence of an "ethnic revival" in the United States. The immigrant and slave pasts that the nation had called upon its citizens to forget and forswear took center stage in a variety of publications, television specials, and films. Ethnicity, however, often meant the experience of men, as Howe's book so amply demonstrated. Even within the book's many silences on women, his passing remarks on the immigrant Jewish mother certainly claimed a new low for anti-momism. He remarked, in one ofhis more reserved judgments, "It was from her place in the kitchen that the Jewish housewife became the looming figure who would inspire, haunt, and devastate generations ofsons" (p. 174). He concluded his section on the Jewish family's adaptation to America with a winsome meditation on the Jewish mother, "Everyone spoke about her [the immigrant mother], against her, to her, but she herself has left no word to posterity, certainly none in her own voice" (p. 177). Janet Handler Burstein has taken up a task that would have been unimaginable to a misogynist, let alone one so singularly focused on Jewish mothers. She has explored a century ofliterature and memoir by Jewish women that reveals how complex maternal powers are in the lives oftheir daughters. Rather than finding the devouring, wordless, or even worse, romanticized mother, Burstein [mds generations ofJewish writers whose art and truth are powerfully tied to telling stories about their mothers. Burstein provides a sophisticated interpretation of Jewish women's writing that, to use her language, "recovers," "dismantles," and "reconstructs" daughters' relationships to their mothers. Janet Burstein undertakes an impressive project. She analyzes the writing ofJewish women in the twentieth century, from classic immigrant works like Mary Antin's The Promised Land, to great American feminist writers like Tillie Olson and Grace Paley, to less well-known writers ofthe 1920s and 1930s like Jo Sinclair and the once popular but now largely forgotten Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber. Burstein also integrates the Jewish women whose writing reflects a different vision of women and Jews from the 1970s to the 1990s, ranging from mainstream literary greats like Cynthia Ozick to a well-known lesbian writer, Judith Katz. In this wide-ranging consideration of Jewish women writers, Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters has a great deal to say about the production of a Jewish American culture, the development of an American Jewish life, and most important, the complex and creative ties between mothers and daughters in these written works. 110 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 What is particularly impressive about Burstein's analysis is her ability to interpret these writers in a way that fully situates them within the context ofAmerican society, at the same time that she provides a sophisticated understanding ofwhat is Jewish about their work. This framework suggests that the Jewishness ofthe writing and the motherdaughter bond is sometimes revealed and sometimes concealed, depending on the dominant culture's relationship to cultural difference. The hegemonic influences of the 1950s and 1960s from both the political right and left wings that emphasized universalism, produced a writer like Grace Paley who barely traced ethnicity and religion into her characters. The challenge to that cultural consensus created the writers of the 1970s, like Cynthia Ozick, Esther Broner, and others, who wrote strongly identified Jewish characters, who found important battles to fight as women within the Jewish community. Burstein's centering her study within history and the culture of the United States eschews any single evolutionary view of relationships between mothers and daughters in the writing oftwentieth-century Jewish women. Rather, in storytelling about mothers, she fmds the centrality ofseparation between daughter and mother in this writing. More often than not, her analysis suggests that separation is neither absolute nor destructive. Writers fmd a great deal oftheir mothers to take with them as they separate, turning to their mothers' abilities as story-tellers, pioneers, and women with...