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33 Southern Discomfort: Revisiting the Jewish Question in Tova Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxiliary Maya Socolovsky In January 1929, an essay entitled, “Why Are Jews Like That” appeared in American Magazine. The writer, a Jewish man named Lewis Browne, composed it as a response to his non-Jewish friend who had asked him, as they walked among a Jewish crowd in Manhattan, “Say, Browne, why are Jews like that?” His friend later clarified the question: “I wasn’t thinking of their language or their beards. Those things, I realize, are superficial. . . . Nor was I thinking of their manners, either. No, it wasn’t their manners that bewildered me, but their manner. . . . There was a queer light in their eyes, and a sort of tenseness in their bodies; that was what made me put my question to you.” Browne’s friend then addresses him further and says, “For you, too, show those characteristics to a degree. . . . You are all somehow different from the rest of us. And I’d like to know why.”1 The anxious Jewish question that tried to identify the mark or stain of even a secular and assimilated Jew such as Browne, and tried to precisely identify the signifier of difference, surfaces again and again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The image of “the Jew” commonly appeared and developed out of journalistic, literary, and social-scientific sources as paradoxically both white and racially other, and vulgar yet highly cultivated,2 and Jewish American writers such as Anzia Yezierska depicted their own and the mainstream’s anxiety about the threat of this chameleon and shape-shifting identity in their work. The question of whether Jews could be full citizens of the state, despite their somewhat residual loyalty to something or somewhere else, has since then manifested itself, sometimes in a ghostly fashion, throughout twentieth-century Jewish American literary works: in responses to the immigrant experience, in 34 Maya SocolovSky postwar philo-Semitism and cultural assimilation, and in the narratives of lamentation that look back at the stain of the Holocaust and try to countenance its legacy for future writers. Now, in assessing the place and direction of Jewish American literature in both the canon and the classroom, literary critics have begun to notice a new trend; Derek Parker Royal, for example, writes that there is an energy in new writing that is fueled largely by “a renewed interest in Jewish religion and culture” and that “the centrifugal spin of assimilation gives way to a more centripetal pull toward ethnic definition.”3 Recent critics have also noticed a new emphasis in Jewish women’s writing, specifically, a “re-creation of cultural origins through discourses on homecoming and home-space,”4 and indeed, much of the critical work on writers such as Allegra Goodman focuses on the interplay of orthodoxy, domesticity, and feminism in her texts. While Goodman builds a reputable market for Jewish American literature in both mainstream and smaller literary circles, and forces us to recognize the uncertain place of Jewish American literature in multiethnic studies, she also creates a space—a postmillennial literary landscape—from which a newer writer such as Tova Mirvis can pose and rephrase the Jewish question.5 Because Mirvis sets her debut novel, The Ladies Auxiliary (1999) in Memphis , Tennessee, her characters inhabit an American landscape that is peripheral to the Jewish American imagination. In asking us to leave Goodman’s New York and enter the South, where Jews are a tiny minority, Mirvis moves in mostly uncharted territory; historians agree that despite a long presence in the South, there is relatively little historical research on Southern Jews, and critics have commented on the paucity of texts coming out of the region.6 Writing in 1993, Eli N. Evans asks, “Since the history of the Jews in the South is such a rich one . . . why hasn’t there been more written about it? Where are the poets and playwrights , the essayists and novelists? Only a handful of novels have been written on the southern Jewish experience in the last decade . . . compared with the tremendous outpouring from the centers of Jewish life in America, it’s almost negligible.”7 In crucial ways, early twentieth-century images of the Jew as paradoxically American and foreign, deviant yet normative, still haunt the Southern literary imagination and surface in Mirvis’s work as questions of home and exile . The Ladies Auxiliary is a story about Orthodox Jewish women in Memphis whose tight-knit and...

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