From Memory to Transformation: Jewish Women's Voices (review)

140 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 niche in American society, how can we make sense ofthe durability ofan image attributed here to the desire to fit in. By the end of the twentieth century, where this book ends, "fitting in" is no longer a problem. Yet the words and pictures used by Jewish men to describe and essentialize Jewish women surface with regularity and familiarity. The answers to Prell's questions might have been further teased out from sources extraneous to American life, perhaps intrinsic to Judaism. How much did the religious system itselfpush Jewish women and Jewish men to see each other in these typological and negative ways? While traditional Judaism underwent a massive process ofreform in America, what elements of the normative system shaped the ways in which Jewish women and men saw each other? Conversely, while Prell's focus is ambitious and broad and she definitely cannot be faulted for not asking comparative questions, it would be useful to at least raise the issue of how other immigrant and minority groups have structured their internal gendered discussion aboutmen andwomen and their "essential" characteristics. Indeed, this book might have contextualized American Jewish men's imaginings of Jewish women interms of how American culture-that is, men's culture-understood and constructed women. There is indeed a kind of assumption here of a uniquely Jewish problem. Fighting to Become Americans assumes that it was Jewish men and women who consumed negative images ofeach other and were bombarded with messages from within the group and from without that focused on the negative and the unflattering. Did other Americans enter into gender relations without a firmly entrenched set of images about the essential characteristics of men and women? The next scholar to tackle this question might juxtapose the wonderful material that Riv-Ellen Prell has brought together with a series ofother images, culled from the larger American culture and from other communities and see just how far apart and how conflicted were Jewish women and Jewish men from each other and from the reality oftheir diverse characteristics and complicated lives. Hasia R. Diner Hebrew and Judaic Studies New York University From Memory to Transformation: Jewish Women's Voices, edited by Sarah Silberstein Swartz and Margie Wolfe. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1998. 308 pp. $18.95. This collection ofarticles by Canadian writers, artists, scholars, rabbis, and playwrights explores ~e rugged terrain of Jewish feminism. Drawn from a conference held in Toronto in 1998, the essays accomplish many tasks: they reveal the discovery of new literature by Jewish women, explain artistic installations recalling the Holocaust, speculate about individual lives within Judaism, and report on women who challenge Book Reviews .141 traditional religious practice. As a guide to Jewish feminism, then, From Memory to Transformation is valuable for the general reader. . With so many different voices and purposes, the articles could simply bewilder the reader. But, as the title indicates, almost every author connects her experience to the function ofmemory in its many incarnations. Scholarship, for example, reclaims work lost in the past and joins it to our living memory. So here is the Yiddish story-teller Rokhl Brokhes, prolific and widely known in Minsk, where she died under the Nazis. Her work, described and quoted lovingly by Ethel Raicus in "Women's Voices in the Stories ofYiddish Writer Rokhl Brokhes," is only now being rediscovered, translated, and printed. Another Yiddish writer, the poet Anna Margolin, who wrote in New York 80 years ago, comes to life through the work of Shirley Kumove in "Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Anna Margolin." Othercontributors search out their families' memories ofthe Holocaust or evaluate its impacton the daughters ofsurvivors; "Memory Moving," Mimi Gellman's contribution to this anthology, describes artistic installations that strive to remember the Holocaust as it flows into the past. Constructions made variously ofhuman hair, light, lines oftiny writing, and photo collage, evoke, not the actuality ofthe death camps, but the echoes of suffering that reach us today, transformed into art as they touch the experience ofthe viewer. Many of the 22 articles deal with the present, where memory lends its power to Jewish feminist protest...