Self, Other, and Community: Jewish Women's Autobiography

Self, Other, and Community: Jewish Women's Autobiography Tzvi Howard Adelman Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, Number 7, Spring 5764/2004, pp. 116-127 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/nsh.2004.0037 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nsh/summary/v007/7.1adelman.html Access provided by Queen's University Library (25 Jan 2014 16:02 GMT) SELF, OTHER, AND COMMUNITY: JEWISH WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Tzvi Howard Adelman Introduction Autobiography is the presentation of oneʼs self. The self, however, cannot be understood in isolation; it must be explored in relation to others. Writers can take their starting points either as members of a community, for whom selfdiscovery is based on a realization of how oneʼs self differs from that of other members of the community, or as individuals exploring how their selfhood is similar to others. Each term in the expression “Jewish womenʼs autobiography” raises difficult questions, because it locates the writers in two communities: Jews and women. If a woman is writing her life, how does it reflect the experience of Jews? If she is writing as a Jew, how does it reflect the experience of women? And if she is writing as an individual, to what extent does she reflect the experience of either community—Jews or women? I will use these questions as a guide to examining the problematics of autobiography, womenʼs autobiography, and Jewish autobiography, and I will then offer a reading and comparison of four Jewish womenʼs autobiographical texts from the early twentieth century. Autobiography Autobiographies present a paradox to the reader. The writers appear to offer first-hand information, factual repositories of historical data, and a faithful telling of their lives, and readers usually accept them as reliable sources of both memory and history. Upon closer examination, however, autobiographies are usually found to contain a mixture of omission and embellishment, exaggeration and understatement, candid confession and outright invention, presenting significant challenges to their use as historical sources.1 116 NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Womenʼs Studies and Gender Issues. © 2004 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography Many works, including novels, poems, letters, diaries, and memoirs, contain autobiographical features and personal references; without being formal autobiographies, they are self-revealing, self-reflective, and self-assessing. Formal autobiography, however, involves a self-conscious, self-contained narrative, told from a specific, usually retrospective point of view. Most often, the act of writing them follows some sort of conversion experience, that is, a radical change in self-orientation that has involved stepping outside oneʼs self and oneʼs community. The self becomes conscious of the self by leaving it. Autobiography thus constitutes an attempt to form a comprehensive, coherent picture of oneʼs self as a totality in the wake of such an altering, dramatic, or defining experience. The conversion experience, especially in the modern period, involves a wide range of turning points, traumas, or major changes, not necessarily or exclusively in the realm of religion, as was usually the case in the Middle Ages. Examples include setting up life with a new partner or in a new country; gaining or losing a major position; acquiring knowledge; or attaining or losing fame or fortune. Looking for clues about what prompted the autobiographical act, identifying the conversion, and seeing how it impacted on the telling of the life before and after it, constitute some of the main tasks in reading an autobiography. Paradoxically, while readers may turn to autobiography as a source of positivistic historical information, accurate reports of events as they happened, authentic memory, or just plain facts, they often find that faithfulness in conveying this information was not a priority for the writer, making these the least significant aspects of an autobiography. For those who persist in trying to gauge “what really happened” or what the author did or did not do, this mixture of what could be called fact and fiction is the most problematic aspect of autobiography. However, it offers the richest opportunity for understanding the writer and the historical period in which she or he wrote. The mixture of “fact” and “fiction” is not necessarily a willful distortion on the authorʼs part. While living life, one does not know the outcome of an event as it unfolds, but when writing autobiography, one does. The retrospective imposition of a design upon oneʼs life may express both fundamental realizations about it and a highly personal retelling. In constructing her personal narrative and presenting her sense of self, the writer draws upon certain information, perhaps embellishing it with invention or the fabrication of memory, and omits other details. She is conveying what she sees as true about her own 117 Tzvi Howard Adelman life, but this may elude those who are reading the work for facts that can be separated from the narrative, corroborated by other sources, and used to reconstruct the writerʼs biography or a history of the period in which she lived. The narratorʼs heightened sense of self emerges in the articulation of a unique voice, which conveys information that transcends the factual content of the message. Through intonation, exaggeration, understatement, embedded expressions, word order, embellishments, and omissions, the writer or speaker is able to express attitudes, feelings, relationships, and emotions. These include posturings in which she or he tests out forms of expression ranging from the assertive to the tentative. For some, the ability to express these aspects of voice allows them both to evoke their own lives and to articulate aspects of the lives of others, making the autobiography feel as if it were an accurate report of the life of the author and of the period in which she lived. Nevertheless, it necessarily consists of a mixture of past experience and present reflection, of specific, verifiable events and fantasies. The value of the work, for both writer and reader, must be determined as much by personal feeling as on the basis of corroborative research. The autobiographer is faced with the dual task of sorting out the meaning of events and reporting them in a language that has taken on new meanings over the years, and that may convey different associations to others. There may be significant differences between recollection and the experiences themselves; memory is not a fixed point, but a changing story. Just as events are remembered, constructed, and have meaning assigned to them, so the self, too, is further invented. Time, space, memory, and language thus separate the self presented in an autobiography from that of the author of the work, but this may be the closest that both the author and the reader can get to it. Sometimes the reader, particularly one who is familiar with the life and times of the writer of the autobiography, may feel that he or she is in possession of more reliable historical information. Discrepancies with other writings or indeed other autobiographies written by the same person may emerge. Much of what has made a person famous may not be found in the autobiography, and what the autobiographer does write about may not have happened at all. As Gertrude Stein wrote: “I do not know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.”2 While the facts in an autobiography may not necessarily be empirically verifiable, the voice presented is authentic. Indeed, autobiography may be more about voice than about information. 118 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography Womenʼs Autobiography Many attempts have been made in the theoretical literature to characterize womenʼs autobiography. On the basis of a limited sample of four early autobiographies written by English women—Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Bradstreet—Mary Mason offers a suggestive and representative model of womenʼs autobiography. In contrast to men, she proposes, most women do not, like Augustine (354–430) in his Confessions, experience a dramatic conversion or victory in a battle of opposing forces in their lives, or, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his own Confessions,3 an unfolding of self-discovery. In most autobiographies by men, characters and events are described as part of the authorʼs own evolving consciousness. For women, on the other hand, the constant is their experience of alterity, being an other. As a consequence, their autobiographies are usually relational, requiring a significant other, another consciousness; personal interconnectedness is integral to the process of forming an identity and achieving illumination. The other can be an autonomous being such as a husband or child, a transcendent divine other, two others, or a collectivity.4 Sidonie Smith argues that such a theory does not do justice to womenʼs self-representation. She asks whether relationship with the other is an essential aspect of womenʼs psychobiology, an externally imposed social and cultural expectation, or a feature of all autobiographical writing.5 Smith also rejects attempts such as that by Estelle C. Jelinek to characterize womenʼs autobiographies as being located, because of womenʼs subordinate position, in the domestic, private, emotional realm. As Smith points out, women do write about public experiences, and men write about private ones, contradicting such binary characterizations.6 It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare the autobiographies of women with those of men; rather, our task here will be to draw on these theoretical considerations as an aid in reading autobiographies by Jewish women. Jewish Autobiography Until the modern period, very few Jews wrote autobiographies. With their lives, like those of most pre-modern people, embedded in religion, community, and family, they did not articulate an acute sense of self; and the other was 119 Tzvi Howard Adelman an alien, possibly hostile community. The autobiographical fragments written by Jews during the Middle Ages and the early modern period frequently were contained in the spiritual testaments of those facing death, recalling a mystical experience, retelling a dream, reporting a voyage—real or imagined—or justifying conversion out of the faith. As we have seen, the autobiographical moment consists not in reporting the functioning of the self within the confines of the community, but, rather, in the realization of the self through experiencing some kind separation from religion, community, or family. The term “Jewish autobiography” may thus be problematic, because the report of a person separating from the community does not reflect the experience of Jewish people in general. Autobiographies by Jews therefore do not necessarily represent a reliable source for Jewish history, though they may, often inadvertently, contain significant information.7 Jewish womenʼs autobiography is even more problematic. Historically, the opportunities of Jewish women for the expression and transformation of self were fewer than both those of Jewish men, whose sense of self might be enhanced by literacy, study, spirituality, or travel, and those of Christian women, whose individual consciousness might sometimes be developed through monastic religious experience. In such a context, autobiographies reflect rare and significant expressions of self-awareness generated by movement in or out of the usual confines of religion, community, and family. Others may share in the same movement, or the authorʼs self-report may reflect other selves with whom she or he has acted in concert, or against whom she or he is reacting. The autobiographies of Jewish women to be discussed below express processes of developing an individual identity that often distanced the writer from Jewish religion and community and from her own family. At the same time, however, they connect her with other Jewish women who were going through similar processes, in a period when migration and modernization were presenting openings for rupture with the traditional circles in which their lives had been embedded. Early Twentieth-Century Jewish Womenʼs Autobiographies The following paragraphs treat four major autobiographical works published by American Jewish women in the first half of the twentieth century: Mary Antin (1881–1949), The Promised Land (1912); Leah Morton/Elisabeth G. 120 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography Stern (1890–1954), I Am a Woman and a Jew (1926); Anzia Yezierska (1880?– 1970), Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950); and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).8 Each of these is a compelling account of a womanʼs successful struggle to make it in the public, professional realm. Antin enjoyed a promising writing career; Yezierska made it to Hollywood; Morton/Stern described careers as a writer, businesswoman, and social worker; and Stein was a major figure in the world of literature and art. However, each also suffered major reverses. In these four works, what the writers conceal and distort is at least as intriguing as what they reveal. I believe that their struggles may be seen as the conversion experiences that typify autobiographical writing. The four women broke with Judaism in various ways. Antin left the Jewish community and married a non-Jew. Yezierska struggled with the Judaism of her father. Morton/Stern postured an attempt to break from Judaism but also described occasional returns to it. Stein did not mention being Jewish even once, and her autobiography traces her path in joining the Parisian world of writers, artists, and Catholic saints: “We were all born of different religions and most of us were not practicing any.”9 They all continued to struggle with if not radically negate their Jewish identity. This is one of the major elements in their “conversion” experiences and also belongs to the confessional aspect of their autobiographies.10 The development of the self in these works often takes place in conjunction with an other—not necessarily the writerʼs husband or children. While the identity of the characters is sometimes obscured, each writer highlights her relationship with a famous, older, non-Jewish and non-related male other. Antin names, among others, Senator Edward Everett Hale. For Yezierska, this role was taken by the educator John Dewey, disguised as an employer named John Murrow, with whom she had a brief relationship. For Morton/Stern, it was a series of teachers at the school she attended, and ultimately her boss, called Dr. Morton, whom she married. Several others—an artist, a writer, and an editor—also played this role for Morton/Stern, even after her marriage. Stein speaks of her relationships with William James and Pablo Picasso, among others. These autobiographies do not deal any more or less with private, domestic matters than many autobiographies by men. In fact, one of their major “fictional” qualities is the way some of the authors conceal the presence of their domestic partners or children. In general, they contain very little significant 121 Tzvi Howard Adelman information about the writersʼ domestic lives. Except for mentioning him as such in her acknowledgements, Antin refers to her husband in the text of her autobiography, if at all, only obliquely: “a friend of mine, a distinguished man of letters” (p. 333). Similarly, her statement that she had received “an invitation to live in New York that I did not like to refuse” (p. 360) appears to be a sly reference to her marriage. Yezierska, who had two Jewish husbands—the first of whom she left to pursue her career—postures as though she were single and childless, though the book is dedicated to her daughter, who also contributed an afterword. Much of Morton/Sternʼs book revolves around her relationship with her husband, purportedly a non-Jewish man. Stein, writing, as it were, the life story of Alice B. Toklas, barely touches on Toklasʼs story or on any relationship between herself and Toklas. Morton/Stern and Yezierska wrestle with dominant, old-world fathers as they set out on new world careers, callings, and relationships. Steinʼs father died when she was young, leaving her brother Leo to play the fatherʼs role in her autobiography; like the other autobiographers, she broke with him as if he were her father. Each of these authors wrote more than one autobiography. Stern, under the name Elizabeth Gertrude Levin Stern, also wrote My Mother and I (1917); Yezierska wrote Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925); Antin wrote From Plotzk to Boston (1899); and Stein wrote Everybodyʼs Autobiography (1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). This is not untypical of autobiographers, including Jewish ones. Philip Rothʼs The Facts: A Novelistʼs Autobiography (1988) consists of an autobiography followed by a counter-autobiography, and Julius Lesterʼs Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (1988) provides alternative versions of many events that he had described ten years earlier in All Is Well (1976). Autobiographical writing is not a static moment. Issues of fact and fiction are heightened when the same autobiographer, not another author or a critic, reports different versions of the same event. The critical literature on these womenʼs works invests much effort in trying to discern whether these are autobiographies or novels, based on the assumption that one type of writing is true to the course of events, while the other is based on the authorʼs imagination. In fact, the two are inherently intertwined. Yezierska mentions many recognizable names, such as those of Richard Wright, Will Rogers, and Samuel Goldwyn, but she obscures the name of the man who had the biggest impact on her—John Dewey. 122 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography Of these writers, Morton/Stern perpetrated the most complex act of posturing.11 Contrary to the claims she makes in the autobiography, she was born in Pittsburgh as the illegitimate child of a Welsh Baptist mother and a German Lutheran father. She was raised by Rabbi Aaron Levin as his foster child from the age of seven until she was seventeen. When she was fourteen, her foster father, the rabbi, raped her. She became pregnant as a result, and he forced her to have an abortion. For the rest of her life, she gave varying accounts of her parentage and birth. Contrary to her assertions in the autobiography, she and her husband, Leon Stern, were married in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony, so that he must have been Jewish. By all other accounts, he was supportive of her career, raising serious doubts about two of the autobiographyʼs major themes. Rather than dismissing Stern as a novelist or an ethnic imposter, however, I would like to stress how she exemplifies the genre of autobiography. On the one hand, it can be argued that she hitched her wagon to the genre of Jewish womenʼs autobiography. On the other, she was raised during her impressionable years by a rabbi, in a Jewish home. While her autobiography may contain few factual revelations about her life, this does not mean that there is no truth to the fiction. The truth is that Elizabeth Stern wrote an autobiography, or rather two autobiographies, in which she constructed two alter egos, Elizabeth Stern and Leah Morton. The reader can learn much from these constructions. Gertrude Stein uses a similar strategy in writing about herself as if she were writing about Toklas. Sometimes it is difficult to tell who is the “I” in the course of the narrative, especially since there is so little about Alice B. Toklas and so much about the intimate thoughts of Gertrude Stein. The ruse is exposed on the last page: About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. . . . And she has and this is it.12 This strategy, which caused readers to wonder who had actually written the book, prompted several of the people mentioned in it to publish an attack, accusing it of being “without relations to reality,” “a great confusion of dates, places and persons,” “entirely false,” “the realm where lie and pretension meet.” Her brother referred to “misrepresentations” and even called her a liar.13 123 Tzvi Howard Adelman Such characterizations of Stein and Morton/Stern do their work a disservice. Since it is already not clear from the book covers who the real authors are, the accusation of deliberate misrepresentation seems misplaced. Overtly, Stein wrote the autobiography of another person, Toklas, while Stern wrote an account of Leah Morton, who never existed in the first place. Each author employs strategies for hiding the truth. Steinʼs narrative, despite all attempts to give an impression to the contrary, is not written sequentially but moves back and forth over vast expanses of time. Stern obscures as many basic facts as possible by inventing names and masking even the names of cities. However, these are intriguing works that address many issues in a direct and articulate way. Stein creates a unique voice, one that is still identifiable today as hers. Stern explores the issues of women and careers, husbands and wives, children and parents. She describes her husbandʼs delicate male pride and the challenges that feminism offered to her and the women of her generation. She attempts to weave elements of her own life into a larger historical and social context: the life of an immigrant, tensions between generations, and the problem of clannishness. Despite attempts to offer a positivistic analysis of the autobiography, the voice is that of Elisabeth Stern. Both works, then, partake of the essence of autobiography: the creation of a self and the presentation of a voice. As Sternʼs son reported, his mother said: “I have to publish my book! It makes me what I want to be [and] it shows our family as I want people to see us.” Similarly, Yezierskaʼs daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, makes it clear that her mother was a very inventive writer: But the inventions which she chose to add to the spare essence of her life, I think make this fictional autobiography more truth-revealing. Her best creations are the most believable.14 Conclusion The exploration of the self does not take place in a vacuum. Individuals show the influence both of the religions, communities, and families into which they were born and raised, even if they turn from them, and of their gender. Nevertheless, though the authors of the works discussed above were both women and Jews, they employed autobiographical strategies that cannot necessarily 124 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography be pinned down as characteristic of women or of Jewish writers; they are characteristic, rather, of the autobiographer. All of the writers record conversion experiences of a sort, although these usually did not take them towards an intensification of Jewish religious and communal concerns. More often, the opposite was true; the narratives record a struggle with their family, community, and religion. For women, but not only for women, some sort of other is necessary in order to appreciate and evaluate the self. As we have seen, significant others are present in all these autobiographies, but they are usually famous, public people rather than family members. These women autobiographers wrote about their public concerns and professional lives while concealing many of the private, domestic aspects of their lives. Although the quest for self involves an other, it does not necessarily involve a binary opposition between public and private, men and women, Jew and non-Jew. Most importantly, these autobiographies express voices that are true to the writerʼs sense of self, convey the writer to the reader, and create a relationship between the two, transcending the inaccessibility, if not irretrievability, of the historical past of both the individual and the community. Autobiographies are letters to the past. As people write letters and perhaps never send them, either to help forget what they did or to remember what they wanted to say and do, autobiographies, too, offer a mixture of catharsis and fantasy. They serve the writer as an opportunity to tell events as she or he would like them remembered and as she or he would like them to have happened. Autobiographies are both an aid to memory and a tool for forgetting. Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Benjamin Ravid, Muhammed Abu Samra, Gershon Bacon, and Renée Melamed Levine for their comments on drafts of this paper and Deborah Greniman for her extensive efforts in improving the argument and the style. Any remaining errors, of course, are my own. Notes 1. The term auto-biography itself can be found in use as early as 1809. See Robert Southey (1774–1843), Quarterly Review (1809), p. 836, cited by Gaby Weiner, “Disrupting Autobiographical Narratives: Method, Interpretation, and the Role of Gender,” 125 Tzvi Howard Adelman http://www2.educ.umu.se/~gaby/autobiography.html; and James Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” in idem (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 5–7. On autobiography see Anna Robeson Brown Burr, The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909); James Olney, Metaphors of Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), and idem, Autobiography (op. cit.); see also Karl Joachim Wientraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); and Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Prineceton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 2. Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, (New York, 1945), p. 1. 3. The Confessions of St. Augustine (English transl. by F. J. Sheed; Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1942); see also Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 158–183; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (English transl. by J.M. Cohen; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953). 4. Mary Mason, “Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Olney, Autobiography (above, note 1), pp. 207–235, esp. p. 210. 5. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Womenʼs Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 18. 6. Ibid., p. 16. 7. The major collections of Jewish autobiography are Leo Schwartz (ed.), Memoirs of My People (Philadelphia: JPS, 1943), and David Zubatsky, Jewish Autobiographies and Biographies: An International Bibliography of Books and Dissertations in English (New York: Garland, 1989). Other fragmentary and early works not found in these include Flavius Josephus, The Life, in The Works of Flavius Josephus (English transl. by William Whiston; Boston: D. Lothrop, n. d.), pp. 1–25; “The Conversion to Islam of Samauʼal ibn Yahya al-Maghrabi,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research, 32 (1964), pp. 75–93; A. Momigliano, “A Medieval Jewish Autobiography,” in Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 109–117; Israel Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia: JPS, 1926); Louis Jacobs, Jewish Mystical Testimonies (Jerusalem: Keter, 1976); Leon Modena, The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi (ed. and English transl. by Mark Cohen; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Abraham Yagel, A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel (ed. and English transl. by David B. Ruderman; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); and E.N. Adler, Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages (New York: Dover Publications, 1987). 126 Jewish Womenʼs Autobiography 8. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912); Leah Morton/ Elisabeth G. Stern, I Am a Woman and a Jew (New York: J.H. Sears, 1926); Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (New York: Scribner, 1950); and Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1933). 9. Gertrude Stein, Writings 1903–1932 (New York: Library of America, 1998), p. 870. 10. For a basic survey see, Sally Ann Drucker, “ʻIt Doesnʼt Say So in Motherʼs Prayerbookʼ: Autobiographies in English by Immigrant Jewish Women,” American Jewish History, 79 (1989), pp. 55–71; for additional essays on these works, see the articles in Studies in American Jewish Literature, 3 (1983). 11. The following is based on Ellen Umansky, “Representations of Jewish Women in the Works and Life of Elizabeth Stern,” Modern Judaism, 13 (1993), pp. 165–176. Umansky draws on the autobiography of Elisabeth Sternʼs son, Thomas, called the “Secret Family,” and on interviews with him. See also Laura Browder, “ʻImaginary Jewsʼ: Elizabeth Sternʼs Autobiography as Amnesia,” http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/ symp/brow_txt.htm. 12. Stein, Writings (above, note 9), p. 884. 13. Testimony against Gertrude Stein = Transition, Pamphlet no. 1, supplement to Transition, 23 (February, 1935), cited by S.C. Neuman in Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration (Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1979). 14. Yezierska, Red Ribbon (above, note 8), pp. 222–223. 127