The Outsider within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction

Abstract

For quite some time now issue of identity in Jewish-American fiction has posed a central concern for critics and writers alike, a concern bred from necessity to identify place of Jewish fiction within broader scope of American literary culture. Not unlike other literatures that we have come to call ethnic, black or chicano fiction, for instance, or even those which comprise in fiction (such as Maxine Hong Kingston's novels of Chinese-Americans), Jewish-American writing emerges as yet another example-if not primary paradigm of both an ethnic and an fiction. Certainly Jewish-American literature that directly grew out of early immigrant experience in America, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts (1920), for example, yielded to such literary concerns as dialect and a preoccupation with themes of assimilation and identity. Perhaps best-known novel of Jewish immigrant's journey from steerage to New York tenement life, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), self-consciously calls attention to problematic mingling of languages and customs that characterized greenhorn's struggle to integrate into American culture. This novel in many ways stands as a beacon to immigrant's epic survival, much as Roth's metaphorical description in prologue of towering statue in New York's harbor ironically illuminates immigrant's precarious passage into mainstream America: the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling air; shadow flattened torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light -the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. By its very nature, then, early Jewish-American fiction was relegated to a certain outsider status. Both writers and their fictions were