Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (review)

184 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 Writing Their Nations: The Tradition ofNineteenth-CenturyAmerican Jewish Women Writers, by Diane Lichtenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 176 pp. $24.95. Aside from Emma Lazarus, even specialist readers might not recognize the names of the other writers who populate this study. They were women from well-to-do German or Sephardic families, most of whom wrote as an avocation. Collectively, they tried to articulate the tensions they felt in their sense of American, Jewish, and American-Jewish identity. The book ends with a coda on Edna Ferber, a professional writer of our own century, whom Lichtenstein sees as continuing the work of her nineteenth-century precursors by substituting regionalism for Jewish ethnicity. Lichtenstein has done what used to be called spadework-unglamorous but necessary excavation into primary materials to retrieve important artifacts not always in and of themselves exciting but part of the record of life in some past culture. Future scholars interested in such writers as Rebekah Hyneman, Penina Moise, and other women who published in Jewish newspapers or periodicals like The Occident and The American Hebrew will have a reliable place to begin. Lichtenstein goes one step beyond retrieval by placing her discoveries in appropriate literary contexts. As none of these writers produced riveting work, she might have given even more attention then she does to their social and cultural ambience. The tradition Lichtenstein has identified drew on American and Jewish motifs. It included patriotic praise ofAmerica as a bastion of freedom and democracy, often invoked to brand antisemitism as un-American, along with exhortations to Jews to retain and cultivate their separate religious identity. The tradition also blended the American myth of the True Woman with the Judaic myth of the Mother in Israel. The True Woman uplifted her male relatives, making their home a sanctuary from the world's harshness and from its many temptations to sin. A Mother in Israel maintained a Jewish home, not so much as a place of refuge but to preserve Judaism in the Diaspora. Both myths served to glorify women as mothers and homemakers, but could also justify the extension of their influence through educational and charitable activities beyond the home. By the 1890s, the model of the New Woman encouraged some American women to seek greater opportunities for education and fuller participation in public life. Lichtenstein notes that manyJewish women writers embraced this desire for larger roles in the secular world, but retained the Mother in Israel as the model for Jewish families. This seeming paradox results from the "emancipation" of Jews throughout the West in the last 200 years: the same liberalizing tendencies which offer Jews increased Book Reviews 185 participation in the larger society also threaten their religious and ethnic cohesiveness. Although Lichtenstein mentions the "potential disintegration of Judaism in permissive America" (p. 31), which remains the central problem in American-Jewish life, neither she nor the writers she surveys provide much analysis of the contradictions inherent in promoting social integration on the one hand and sustaining the Jewish family on the other. In examining Jewish responses to the New Woman of the 1890s, Lichtenstein provides a fascinating discussion of the Jewish Women's Congress of 1893 and of its offshoots-the founding of the National Council ofJewish Women and of its organ, The Americanjewess (189599 ). Although Lichtenstein here offers a richer sampling of the historical changes impinging on Americans in gene'ral and Jews in particular than she does earlier, one still feels a need for fuller contextualization. What, for example, underlies the ambivalent responses of these women from highly assimilated, prosperous, Reform German-Jewish families to the mass immigration of "Ostjuden," whose ranks included threateningly large numbers of Orthodox Jews, Yiddish speakers, artisans and unskilled laborers, Zionists, and socialists? For Lichtenstein, the work of Emma Lazarus sums up these and other ambivalences. Lazarus praises America for its willingness to receive this "wretched refuse," yet also acknowledges the immigrants' "yearning to be free." In general, Lichtenstein admires her ability to articulate most of the tensions implicit in the tradition, a feat she accomplished by outflanking other writers in terms of American or Jewish identity. Perhaps the exceptional...