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DIPARTIMENTO DI
FILOLOGIA, LETTERATURA E LINGUISTICA
CORSO DI LAUREA IN
LINGUE E LETTERATURE MODERNE EUROAMERICANE
TESI DI LAUREA
Mothers, workers, writers:
Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley.
CANDIDATO
RELATORE
Sara Cozzani
Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Cinzia Schiavini
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Table of contents.
Introduction. p.4
Chapter 1. Historical and cultural context. p. 6 1.1 The United States of America. p. 7 1.1.2 The middle class and the working class in the society of the USA. p. 11 1.1.3 History of female labour. p. 13
Chapter 2. Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley: lives and literary productions
. p.20
2.1 Tillie Olsen. p. 25 2.2 Grace Paley. p. 29Chapter 3. Jewish-American fiction in the XX century. p. 33 3.1Story-telling and textuality: a historical perspective. p. 33 3.2 Jewish fiction in the XX century. p. 36 3.3 Paley and Olsen’s choice of the short story. p. 40
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Chapter 4. Motherhood. p. 53
Chapter 5. . Womanhood and women solidarity. p. 75
Chapter 6. Olsen and Paley’s critics to the school system in the United States. p. 84
Chapter 7. Conclusion. p. 94
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Introduction.
In my thesis, I focus my attention on two revolutionary women writers of the XX century. In particular, I am deeply interested in exploring their similar backgrounds and the circumstances of their lives, that strongly influenced their literary choices and creation. My attention was caught in particular by their “normal” and common lives: they came from middle and working class, and they primary spent their lives taking care of their families, as mothers and wives, and working on paid-jobs as well. Their innate passion for literacy and creation was subjected to the needs of their families. As a working mother and a scholar, I found myself represented in the characters of their stories and I can recognise pieces of my life in the events told in the stories.
I started my thesis talking about the historical and cultural background of the United States of America in the XX century: the changes happened after the Second Industrial Revolution, especially in families of the working class and the increase of the female work.
Then, I introduced Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, showing their similar backgrounds, their conditions of immigrants of third generation and their primary occupations as mothers and workers. In the third chapter, I discussed about Jewish tradition of story-telling, the literary choice of both the writers.
In the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, I explored and compared three of Paley and Olsen’s major themes. In the fourth chapter, I discussed about the experience of motherhood, depicted without any misrepresentation typical of the past traditional literature that represented mothers as angel or evil, but exploring the real struggles that almost every mother experiences in her maternal role. In the fifth chapter, I showed the importance that female friends and the condition of womanhood represent for the female protagonists of Olsen and Paley’s stories: women offer a net of support and help, where men are almost absent.
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In the last chapter, I talked about the experiences that Olsen and Paley lived in the school system: the incapacity of teachers to promote the mental and creative development of their students and the racial discrimination towards children from a low social class and from ethnic minorities, by both students and teachers.
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Chapter 1.
Historical overview from the late XIX century to the XX century.
“The history of humanity, I am sure to say it, is the history of migration: they change shape, but they are always emigrations”
Monsignor Geremia Bonomelli, 18991
From about the 1870s, a new intricate transformation process started in some of the most powerful states of the world, such as Great Britain, Germany and the United States of America. It is known as the Second Industrial Revolution and it affected many fields of the everyday life, from the improvements in the ways of transport and communication (for example, the one that concerns the railways) to new important discoveries in medical and science topics. The Second Industrial Revolution peaked from 1870 and 1914 and its main causes were due to natural resources, abundant labor supply, strong government policy and new sources of power. This process was assisted by new labor forces and production techniques, such as innovation in transportation, especially railroads, but also roads and steamboats, that linked distant communities together. Transportation was a major break through during this time because it allowed local communities to sell their products out of their regional agricultural based economies. For example, for the first time goods from the American inland could be shipped to the Atlantic coast, and vice versa. Especially in the period from 1870 to 1890, there was an economy and productivity boom in the industrialized countries. As a consequence, living conditions improved significantly and the prices of goods fell dramatically.2 The population grew, also due to improvements in the health field that reduced the
1 Francesco Malgeri, “Bonomelli Geremia”, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 12, Roma, Istituto
dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971, p. 45
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rates of infections and death from many diseases. Most of them moved from the country to the growing cities, looking for a job as a worker in the new industries. As a consequence, the share of the population that engaged in agriculture dropped drastically. A new system of organisation of the work was invented by Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915). He was an American inventor and engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor suggested that production efficiency in a shop or factory could be greatly enhanced by close observation of the individual worker and elimination of waste time. His idea consisted of a production strictly divided in steps, so that every worker had to do the same duty for ten or more hours a day. Despite the life of low and middle-low class was not easy, the end of the XIX century was characterized by a feeling of optimism and faith in the development of new technologies and in what seemed-to-be a never-ending progress.
In the 1800, immigration from Europe headed to Australia, South America but especially to the United States of America. A lot of people moved, not with their own communities, but alone, often leaving their families, wives and children, in their land of origin.
1.1 The United States of America.
The first industrial changes started in the United States in the early 1800 and continued through the American Civil War. Despite of this, at the end of the Civil War hand labour remained still widespread. After 1865, the country changed fast and dramatically, thanks to a better national wide network of railways, that made trades easier. Therefore, the U.S.A experienced an increase in industrialisation and urbanisation. In addiction, machines replaced hand labour and it determined the increase of the production capacity of the industries. The industrial growth was mainly in the North, especially in the cities. As a result, people moved to them in record number.
At the same time, there was a clear contrast between poor working people and the middle and upper class also about the places where they lived. Providing housing for all the new residents of cities
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was a problem, and many workers found themselves living in urban slums; open sewers ran alongside the streets, and the water supply was often tainted, causing disease.
The workmen place in the social scale was superior only to women workers, then immigrants from Europe and black people. Their life situation and their need for better job and life conditions led to the Progressive Movement in the early XX century, that fought to obtain new laws to protect workers.
The immigration and the resulting growth of the population was also determined by the myth of the “American Dream”. The historian James Truslow Adams coined this term in his book The Epic of America, in 1931. He referred to
that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, […]a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. 3
This desire was influenced also by the fact that in 1914 the USA became the first producer of iron, coal, oil, copper and silver. In those years the workforce grew of 700% and the production of 2000%. As a result, the U.S was perceived as the land of economic opportunities, but also as a land of freedom from political and religious persecution. The first wave of migration, from 1815 to 1890, was from the Northern European countries. Nearly 12 millions immigrants arrived there from 1870 to 1900, especially from Germany, North of Italy and Ireland. From 1890 to 1914, the majority of immigrants were Southern Italians, Jewish from Russia and Polish. Then, the immigration decreased during the First World War in Europe and it started again later, following the laws of the 1921, 1924 and 1928, that permitted the arrival of immigrants from the same nations of the majority of the immigrants that had previously arrived. They occupied the lowest places in
3 Jim Cullen, The American Dream: a short history o fan idea that shaped a nation, New York,Oxford University Press,
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the social hierarchy of the complex and multi-ethnic US society. 4 In 1900, immigrants were 1/3 of
the entire citizens in cities such as New York or Boston. The great immigration wave that delivered some 40 million newcomers to the United States between 1830 and 1940 was comprised largely of unskilled workers with minimal English-language proficiency. Some of them had little interest in being Americans, their primary interest was to earn money and go back home. An exception could be represented by people escaping from racial and religious oppression in their birth land, as the Jewish ones.
Obviously, employers took advantage of the immigrants: they were paid less than the other workers, and the women less than men. Really often they suffered for discrimination and they were called with derogatory names, for example Italian immigrants were called dagos, from “dagger”, to allude to their violent behaviour.5 Discrimination set off social tension that involved both class and race conflicts.
At the same time, immigration also helped transforming America in a blending of different cultures and traditions, showing that diversity can be a source of national strength.
Historians and politicians started to refer to the United States as a Melting-Pot, a metaphor used to indicate “an environment in which many ideas and races are socially assimilated”. Actually, during the first years of the Twentieth century, Americans exhibited a broad range of attitude towards immigrants, many retained a faith in the transforming potential of the America environment and the flexibility of its political, social and economical institution. Others were worried about urban disorganisation and labor conflict and exploitation6.
This word was used for the first time with its ethnic meaning in the book Letters from an American
4 Anthony Daniel Perez and Charles Hirschman. “The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the US Population:
Emerging American Identities” Population and Development Review vol. 35,1 (2009): 1-51.
5 Jessica Jackson, The “Privileged Dago”: Race, Citizenship and Sicilian in the Jim Crow Gulf South, 1870- 1924,
University of California, Santa Cruz, 2017, p. 198
6 Fred Wacker, “Assimilation and Cultural Pluralism in American Social Thought”, Phylon (1960-), vol. 40, no. 4, 1979,
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Farmer, written by Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèveceour.7 The book, written during the Revolution War and published in 1782, reflects the real experiences and feelings of a European-born American, who long asks himself “What is an American?”
“America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!”8 With these words, the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) celebrated the affirmation of the concept of Melting Pot. Son of Eastern European immigrants, he became a novelist , a playwright, a Zionist leader and one of the major interpreter of the Jewish immigrants life. He composed a play that decided to entitled The Melting-Pot, despite his first choice was The Crucible. The drama was represented for the first time in Washington on 5th October in 1908 and was published in 1909. It tells the story of a Jewish family that lives in New York.
The protagonists represent typical behaviour patterns, as a consequence almost every immigrant can identify himself in one of them. The Quixano family is composed of three generations: the grandmother Frau Quixano will never learn English but only speaks Yiddish, uncle Mendel left orthodoxy and lives in a non-Jewish neighbourhood in Staten Island and David Quixano, a young man that falls in love with Vera Revendal, daughter of an anti-Semite man. These three generations are living the passage from the past to the future, that is identified with the Melting- Pot. It is interesting to notice that Mendel, who represents the second generation, blends in himself his own Jewish identity and the American influence.
As in the play, it is a typical custom to consider three generations in the immigrants families: the first generation includes the first immigrants, often poor and unskilled workers and with little or no English proficiency that moved to a foreign country to improve their financial situation “I was without money ... [...] what about going to America. [...] There were ropes. I slept inside the ropes", the second one includes their children, born in the USA and English speakers, usually
7 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, trad. it. Alchimie d’America:identità etnica e cultura nazionale, Roma, Editori
Riuniti, 1990, p. 93
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educated, that often experience feelings like guilty and embarrassment towards their ignorant and humble parents "Up to fourteen years I was Josephina Dessimone. I hated him. [...] I was ashamed of my parents, they spoke with a wrong accent .. "9
The third generation incorporates a positive revaluation of own ethnic roots “... being part of an ethnic group is an important and beautiful thing, because you are part of something, which is not if you are just a simple American”10. About the condition of the third generation of American Jews, Cynthia Ozick describes them as “perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and perfectly marginal”.11
About the difference between consent and descent, James Kettner, professor at UC Berkeley, in his The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 claimed a new concept of American citizenship, based on a voluntary membership, by consent, “the idea of volitional allegiance”12, more than by descent.
“Citizenship by descent [...] is considered a mere juridical calculation, while citizenship by consensus [...] is consecrated as a model of behaviour”.13.
1.1.2 The middle class and the working class in the society of the USA.
There are many characteristics that could be used to describe a person’s class, but among the most influential are a person’s occupation, education, income and wealth. The United States is the most highly stratified society in the industrialized world. Class distinctions in America operate in every
9 Werner Sollors, cit, p. 189
10 Andrew Rolle, The Italian Americans: Troubled Roots, University of Oklahoma Press, 1984
11 Cynthia Ozick, “Toward a New Yiddish”, in Art and Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick, New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1983,
p.u7u152
12 Brook Thomas, Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina P,
2008, p. 250
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aspect of everybody lives, determining the nature of the work, the quality of the schooling, and even the health and safety of the citizens.
The late 1800s and the 1900s can be called the centuries of the middle class, due to the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the economical boom. The middle class was not homogeneous in term of occupation or income, but generally they received a salary and not a hourly wage. In order to be considered middle class, a family had to have at least one servant. Middle class could include ministers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, businessmen and traders. In other words, middle class worked for the upper class, formed by traders and owner of companies, and at the same time ordered what to do to the working class.
According to Oxford Dictionary, the working class is a social group that includes people who are paid only for their hours of working, and they often do physical duties. In the United States, from the end of the XIX century onward, it was formed by immigrants, but also American workers that worked in clothing factories, industrial plants and meat packaging facilities. They usually worked as long as fifty-four to sixty-three hours per week in factories. Neither children nor women were excluded from these dangerous and backbreaking jobs. 1900 census counted 1.75 million children aged between 10 and 15 that were workers.14 The wage they received only allowed them to survive, in fact they usually lived in little rent houses in ghettos or in crowed neighbourhoods created for immigrants, as the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Here people lived in huge tenements, divided in small and suffocating apartments of two or three rooms, and the same overcrowding was in the sweatshop, the main work place. The owner was usually called sweater or “cockroach boss” and he was often an ex- worker arrived in America years before. High mortality rate was caused by accidents, due to the machines, but also because of the condition of the air, that could cause lung problems “.. the skin changed every day, and the lungs every hour...”15 It is considered that about
14 Donald M. Fisk, “American Labor in the 20th Century”, in Compensation & Working Conditions; Fall 2001, Vol. 6
Issue 3, pp. 3-16
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35,000 people died every year and 500,000 people were injured per year in industrial accidents in America.16
Women could work as long as 12 hours a day, 6 days a week because every family needed the financial contribution of every member to survive. For this reason, they usually accepted blackmails from the boss “If you don’t come on Sunday, you won’t come on Monday”. 17 at the same time, the sweatshop became a place where the workers could obtain information about politics and unionism. In the noisy rooms, the workers of the cloths industry got the right to speak and sing during their job. As a consequence, there were people singing synagogue songs but also American songs and it became at the same time a place of memory, to remember the old life in Europe, but also a place of meeting with the American culture, in a process of blending cultures. 18
1.1.3 History of female labour.
Today women can aspire to perform to nearly any profession, but it is interesting to examine the role played by women in the American economy during and after the Second Industrial Revolution. The years between 1870 and 1930 in fact represent a turning point in the history of women in America. Until 1900, the female workforce participation rate was fairly stable at around 20 per cent, as Shannon Banaszak demonstrates in his Women in the Workforce: Before 1900. First, women were considered labour force only if they worked outside the house, excluding the household and the childbearing. In fact, the ancient society depicted the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the homemaker. The myth of the natural inferiority of women greatly influenced the status of women in law. Reasons for choosing marriage at the time were vast. It was the natural order of events for a woman to marry, as she had few other prospects. In middle class, economic necessity
16 Jeffrey Helgeson, “American Labor and Working-Class History 1900-1945”, American History: Oxford Research
Encyclopedias (September 1, 2016)
17 Mario Maffi, cit, pp. 82-83 18 Mario Maffi, cit, p. 83
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often played a part. In fact, as marriage could bring wealth into a family, it enabled a woman to live comfortably, and avoided destitution. On the other hand, a married woman lost some rights she had had before marriage: in fact a single woman could own property, make a contract, or sue and be sued. But a married woman, defined as being one with her husband, gave up her name, and virtually all her property came under her husband's control. In addiction, women were prevented from receiving a decent education and discouraged from working. They could work only if they were unmarried or windows, or if they belonged to poor families of the working class.
Women were long considered naturally weaker than men and as a consequence unable to perform work requiring muscular or intellectual development.
Even medical reasons were used to justify the exclusion of women from a social and also working life outside the house: they were seen as human being whose primary role was the procreation and consequently they should avoid other activities “If the feminine abilities were developed.. her material organs would suffer”19. From 1870, women from the working class were expected to work in factories until they got married.
In the 19th century, women began working outside their homes in large numbers, notably in textile mills and garment shops. In poorly ventilated, crowded rooms women (but also children) worked for as long as 12 hours a day. Factory work lasted long and exhausting hours, with low wages and brutal conditions. They often experienced sex discrimination and they were forbidden to obtain skilled jobs. In 1911 women earned 52,8% of men. The low-wages for more than 10 hours a day in bad and unsafe working condition, provoked a movement toward social and economical reform, as Pauline Newman, a Jewish woman emigrated to New York City from Lithuania and nominated by the Socialist Party as their Secretary of State, said “Let us think of a working woman as a being
19 Gertrud Pfister, “The Medical Discourse on Female Physical Culture in Germany in the 19th and Early 20th
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who has her desires…”. On November 22nd , 1909, Newman was in the audience at Cooper Union when Clara Lemlich famously incited the crowd of immigrant workers to strike. In the following months, more than 40,000 female New York City factory workers protested their poor working conditions and low wages. Newman was at the center of the strikes, planning strategies, inciting crowds. The strike symbolized the first organized resistance of female labourers.20
In the United States it was not until the 1910s that the states began to pass legislation that limited working hours and improved working conditions of women and children. The 1900 U.S. Census revealed that the 1.75 million children ages 10–15 who were employed composed about 6 percent of the nation’s labor force.
In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was established to examine the impact of child labor. The NCLC initially promoted state reforms, but because of vast differences in the implementation and enforcement of such reforms state to state, the committee began in 1912 to push for national legislation.
In 1916, Congress passed the Keating–Owen Child Labor Act, the first national child labor bill. This legislation banned the sale of products manufactured with the labor of any child under age 14 and heavily restricted labor for children under age 16. In the long time, the promulgation of these laws, in conjunction with local compulsory school attendance laws, has had a significant impact on the U.S. education system. Because more children were required to attend school, more children started to complete high school, thus creating a better educated workforce.
Women struggled against discrimination, different treatment and pay and the labor movement has played a central role in the advancement of women’s rights. In 1871, after her cloths shop burnt down, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones began working as a labor organizer. Years later, in 1903 Women’s Trade Union League formed at the AFL convention. There were also numerous
20 Gertrud Pfister, “The Medical Discourse on Female Physical Culture in Germany in the 19th and Early 20th
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strikes, promoted and organized by women that also experienced the racism due to their condition of immigrants, for example the “Bread and Roses” strike in 1912, that begun with immigrant women in Lawrence, Massachusetts and ended with 23,000 men, women and children on strike and with as many as 20,000 on the picket line. In 1933 Frances Perkins becomes the U.S. secretary of labor and she was the first woman to be appointed to the U.S. Cabinet. 21
During the 1960s several federal laws improving the economic status of women were passed. For example, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal wages for men and women doing equal work and banned wage discrimination based on gender.
Female workers were not sometimes supported by men, because they saw them as rivals, fearing that the entrepreneurs would have preferred female workers to pay less. In addiction, moral reformer sustained that working would impair the femininity and the female high moral standards , beside of distracting them from their primary roles of wives and mothers of numerous children, a condition where women usually “became powerless as wives and mothers. [...] they must produce care in exchange for food and clothes [...] they must take orders and obey as a condition of the contract”. 22In the first half of the 1900 the labour situation gradually changed, due to some factors and changes in the society structure. First of all, the new structure of the American family, formed by the parents and the children, replaced the previous extended family with the grandparents in it. This does not apply to immigrant families, that often lived with their relatives in small house inside huge tenements, creating a net to support the whole family and keep with their own habits and language23. In 1900, a woman had an average of four children, in 1921 they reduced their fertility by a third: this happened due to their entering in the labour market, especially during the World war I. Some of the more well-known roles of women in WW1 include: nurses, munitions factory
21 Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His
Moral Conscience, Random House, 2009
22 N. Hoffman, A Journey into Knowing: Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois
Press, 1991, p. 174
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workers, sewing bandages, and selling war bonds and shipyards.24 In addition, despite contraceptive methods were illegal, from the Comstock Act of the 1873 that prohibited advertisements, information, and distribution of birth control and allowed the postal service to confiscate birth control sold through the mail, from 1916 Margaret Sanger, an American nurse and birth control activist, opened her first birth control clinic in the United States. Despite her arrests, she persevered her mission and in 1938 a judge lifted the federal ban on birth control, ending the Comstock era.25
Since the Second Industrial Revolution, unmarried women started working in factories to contribute to the family budgets, but in this way they earned some money to themselves and gained some freedom and independence. According to Goldin (1990), about two-thirds of single women workers kept for themselves 100% of their income. That hardly achieved independence contrasted with the routine of a married woman, addicted to childbearing, household and dependence from her husband. This could explain the decline in marriage rate at the end of the XIX century. Women could work only if they were part of low social class, such as the working class, and the earnings obtained from the husband were not adequate to sustain the whole family. Cvrcek concluded that the changes in woman role in the society started from the labour market but subsequently affected the organisation of the family and the decline in marriage rate. During the First World War, as 16 million American men went off to fight, women essentially took over maintenance of the U.S. economy. Some six million women were recruited to work in military factories, producing munitions and other military goods. When the war was over, it became clear that American women could work just as hard and effectively as American men, and the second wave of American feminism was born. Numerous researches have been done about changes in women’s lives perspectives. Tomas Cvrcek, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville (USA), observed the changing roles of the American women from the Second Industrial Revolution to 1930s He noticed that while fertility kept falling through
24 Chloe Owings Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Schneider, Dorothy, and Carl J. Schneider. Into the
Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I. New York, Viking, 1991
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that period, marriages picked up from 1890s. The Nineteenth Amendment was born after World War I and the women's liberation movement only began after World War II. In 1966 the National Organisation for Women, or NOW, was founded by Betty Friedan and it represents the major women's liberation organization. Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, took on "the problem that has no name," the cultural gender roles, workforce regulations, government discrimination and everyday sexism that left women subjugated at home, at church, in the workforce, in educational institutions and even in their government.26
Despite their increasing presence in the work force, most women still had primary responsibility for housework and family care. In the late 1970s men with an employed wife spent only about 1.4 hours a week more on household tasks than those whose wife was a full-time homemaker.
As a consequence, women from the working-class struggled among childbearing, household and also their paid-jobs outside house, with no free-time.
On the other hand, women from the Feminism Movement often refused to have children , in order to escape from the practice that saw them as obligated to be mothers, according to the patriarchal culture. Later, they started to underline the key element of the motherhood, such as the one based on the choice: the choice to be a mother, described not as a woman who has children, but as a woman who takes care of them27. Women began to distinguish between the sexual act from the procreative act, when they choose knowingly to start a new like of taking care of someone else. This new mentality freed women from the obligation to be mothers, and points out the idea of motherhood as a social action.28 As Sara Ruddick claims in her book Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace all the mothers are adoptive mothers, because they have the opportunity to choose
26 Michael P. Fogarty. International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift Für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue
Internationale De L'Education 19, no. 1 (1973): 151-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3442984.
27 Annalucia Accardo, “Grace Paley”, Àcoma, Numero 35, inverno 2008, anno XV
28 Sara Ruddick Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, New York, Ballantine Books, 1989, tr. it.: Il pensiero
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Chapter 2.
Workers, mothers, writers: Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley.
"Memorability is one of Olsen's distinctive trait . Anyone can recognize a fragment of their own existence. [...] The novel and, above all, the stories represented a manifesto of their own existence ".
Cinzia Biagiotti ,Silenzi infranti. La scrittura di Tillie Olsen. 29
The United States have been the destination of immigrants from different countries in the world in different periods of the history. As we have seen, during the XIX century, people arrived mostly from Southern Italy, Poland, Russian Empire, Romania, and Austria. The latter were the home countries of many Jewish immigrants, who escaped from there because of economical reasons, but also for the political situation and the religious persecution.
Historians have traditionally divided American Jewish immigration into three periods: Sephardic, German, and Eastern European. In 1600, the first Jews to arrive in America were Sephardic , that means that their ancestry was from Spain and Portugal. German Jews began to come to America in significant numbers in the 1840s. Jews left Germany because of persecution, restrictive laws, economic hardship, and the failure of movements, hoping for a revolution and reform there. They looked to America as an antidote to these ills, a place of economic and social opportunity. Eastern European Jews began to immigrate to the United States in large numbers after 1880. Pushed out of Europe by overpopulation, oppressive legislation and poverty, they were pulled toward America by the prospect of financial and social advancement. Between 1880 and 1924, over 2 million Jews from Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania came to the United States. Of all Jewish immigrants to
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the United States from 1886 to 1914, forty-four percent were women, far more than for other immigrants groups arriving during the mass immigration. Only 7 percent chose to return to Europe, as opposed to about 30 percent of all immigrants, because they were escaping from pogrom and persecution30. Jewish immigrants intended to raise American families. Even though the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe was a “family migration,” the process of leaving the Old World for the New often temporarily disrupted families. Jews engaged in chain migration, in which one member of an extended family secured a place in the new country and then bought a ticket for siblings so that they could settle in America. Oftentimes, married men set out in advance to prepare them economically and planned for their wives and children to join them once they were settled.31 The immigrants used to settle in the poorer neighbourhoods of the major cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago. They lived above all in the cities of the East Coast, in crowded, tenement-filled districts that were often called “ghettos”. Their major destination was the Lower East Side in New York, where they represented the 79% of the population in 1900. 32 Living conditions in these neighbourhoods were often unfavourable. Immigrants found work in factories, especially in the garment industry, but also in cigar manufacturing, food production, and construction. It was a process in which they became proletarian: Talmud scholars, melamed or teachers, chazan and rabbis, merchants and artisans had to start as workers in the sweatshops or as streets vendors.
The Jewish ghetto was the most crowded, with 989 tenements, 8 public schools, 3 theatres and 172 clothes sweatshops. 33 The tenements were enormous houses that were divided into small flats, where a family used to live with at least one boarder. At the ground floor there were shops and
30 Mario Maffi, cit, p. 116
31 Paula E. Hyman, “National Contexts, East European Immigrants, and Jewish Identity: A Comparative Analysis.” In
National Variations in Modern Jewish Identity, edited by Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk, pp. 109–123. Albany, 1999
32 Cinthia Dwork, After Ellis Island. Newcomers and Native in 1910 Census, edited by Susan Cotts Watkins, 1981, p. 5 33 William English Walling, “British and American Trade Unionism”, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political
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markets.34
After their arrival in America, Jewish people helped each other thanks to their group solidarity and to the concept of the tsedaka, a word used to indicate a charity act as a justice one. This behaviour derived from their religious precepts but also from their history of persecutions and pogrom. Hevra, the Jewish name to refer to voluntary organisations, comprehended the landmanshaft , a confraternity among people of the same town that helped the immigrants and their families, but also the Russian-American Hebrew Association or the Federation of Galician and Bukovinian Jews. In 1889 the Hebrew Institute was born, then it changed its name in Educational Alliance in 1893: it became a settlement house that offered English courses, history, music and personal hygiene lessons, in order to form right American citizens. It was forbidden the use of Yiddish.35
Jewish workers supported the labour movement struggle for better working conditions. Many of them supported socialism or communism as a means of securing economic and social equality. In this manner, the Eastern Europeans established a strong link between American Jews and liberal politics.36 People from the ghetto came from experiences of political revolution in their home countries and they used to meet in places such as Sussman, a coffee-house in Ludlow Street, Sachs’s or Suffolk, two of the Jewish’s favourite headquarters in the East Side “ ...all the Radicals met, the Socialists and the anarchists of the East side, young writers and Jewish..”37
Immigrants were determined to learn English language, therefore they attended libraries, as Astor Library in Lafayette Street, but also conferences about Socialism and Anarchism at Cooper Union, Educational Alliance or Justus Svhawab. At the same time, their daily lives were characterized by the use of Yiddish, a vernacular language that Eastern Jewish people spoke at home, that writers such as Sholem Asch or Sholem Aleichem were pulling out from the margin. Yiddish spreaded
34 Mario Maffi, cit, p. 118
35 Mario Maffi, cit, p. 121
36 Joellyn Zollman, Jewish Immigration to America: three waves, My English Learning, www.myenglishlearning.com 37 Emma Goldman, A Documentary History of the American Years, Candace Falk, University of Illinois Press, 1980
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also in the press, that included especially socialist press as the newspapers Naye Tsayt, New Yorker Yiddishe Volks-Zeitung , Naye Velt and Forverts, edited by Abraham Cahan from 1903 to 1946. Promoting socialism instead of the American capitalism, these papers captured the attention of the immigrants that lived in the suburbs of the Lower East Side and worked in the sweatshops.
Lower East Side was a proletarian community and a place were different cultures met and mixed together, in a process of contamination and hybridization. Immigrants used the American language and modified it, forming a “lingua franca” that contained items and sounds from the original languages and changed English words. Yiddish language, due to its surviving experience among different places and cultures, incorporated American words, creating the “Yinglish”, a compound word formed by Yi(ddish) and (E)nglish, that refers to a dialect of English, a lingua franca spoken by Jewish immigrants.
World War I ended the era of mass Jewish immigration to the United States, since wartime conditions and then restrictive quotas stemmed the human tide. Soon, for the first time in many decades, the majority of American Jews would be native born.
Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and emphasizes the problems that women writers faced to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women. At first, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers descending from affluent Sephardic and German families tended to portray Jews and Judaism though a Judeo-Christian point of view. As Eastern European immigrants arrived in the United States from 1880 to 1924, the number of Jews in American cities increased, and many first- and second-generation authors depicted the distinctive Jewish immigrant experience. In fact, they often found a world different from what they expected to find. As their stories, novels, and letters indicate, life for immigrant women was really difficult. Relationships between husbands and wives, and between parents and children were often arduous. Despite the American preference for the full-time “true woman” homemaker mother, few families were able to survive on the earnings of the husband alone, and both girls and married women
24
worked long hours. On the other hand, other writers preferred to talk about Socialism, devoting little space to their ethnic roots. 38
During the economic crisis and the Depression, Socialism and Communism spread in the United States, as it never happened before. Many artists, writers, photographers and painters chose unusual subjects from social classes that had never been artistic subjects. Michael Gold, with his essays Towards Proletarian Art (1921) and Proletarian Realism (1930) is considered the father of the Proletarian Realism in literature. The economical crisis made clear that the United States were not a nation without social classes, and since that moment, art and literature became strictly close to politics. Artists discovered “the land of masses whose existence they had ignored, [..] the motive power of modern history”, as said Joseph Freeman. Gold declared that “Proletarian Literature will reflect the struggle of the workers in their fight for the world. It portrays the life of the workers [...] with a clear revolutionary point” and declared the fundamental points of the canon of this new literature genre: the writer did not have to use poetic features but they had to concentrate about the real conflicts that working class men and women had to afford in order to survive. Proletarian literature had a social function and it had to say only the truth “we do not have to lie in order to win our case”, said Gold in his Proletarian Realism. The writing should be clear and direct, without dramatic features and the writer should talk about his/her own personal experience as a proletarian, describing his/her life. The results are reportages, pictures, movies, documentaries, literary production that are interesting testimonies from a specific cultural, literary , political and historical point of view. 39
38 Sylvia Barack Fishman, "Fiction in the United States", Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1
March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive, www. jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fiction-in-united-states
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2.1 Tillie Olsen.
Tillie Olsen, whose real surname was Lerner, was born on 14th January 1912 in a farm in Nebraska from Samuel and Ida Lerner, Russian Jewish immigrants that left their country after the failed Revolution in 1905. Her father served as State Secretary the Nebraska Socialist Party in Omaha and her parents’ political belief influenced hers, too. In fact, at home she grew up reading Socialist essays, magazines and literature. At school her readings included poets as Shakespeare, Hardy, the Romantic poets, Emily Dickinson, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and the philosopher Schopenhauer. However, what she appreciated the most were tales, short stories, and the novel Life in the Iron Mills written by Rebecca Harding Davis, that gave her the idea of writing about the real life of the workers and the outcasts, lives full of poverty that often caused violence among people, also inside the own family and it influenced her first story called Not You I Weep For, written in 1931.
Reading Harding Davis’s book, Olsen paid attention on the workers’ hard world and on their difficulties and struggle to obtain more rights. Her Jewish background, the multicultural place where she grew up but also “the experience of an America far different from that one propagated in Europe to entice workers”40 became the fundamental points of Tillie Olsen as a writer and as a political activist.
Charismatic and precocious, she attended the Elementary School in 1917 and entered the Omaha’s Central High School in January 1925. There she started writing a humour column that gained a lot of success and gave her popularity at school. It was apparently her free spirit that led her to an unwanted pregnancy in 1928, that ended with an abortion41. Then, she went back to school, but she left without graduation.
40 Cinzia Biagiotti, cit, p, 15
41 Penney, Sherry H.; Humez, Jean McMahon; and Women's Studies Program, University of Massachusetts Boston,
"Women's Studies at UMass Boston: Celebrates 25 years 1973-1998" (1998), Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Publication Series, Paper 2, www.scholarworks.umb.edu/womst_faculty_pubs/2
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At the beginning of 1930 she joined the Young Communist League and was arrested after her participation in a workers protest. She was sentenced to jail and she took pleurisy or tuberculosis there. After she got out of prison, she gave birth to her first daughter, called Karla in honour of Karl Marx.
During her imprisonment, in 1932, she started writing “Yonnondio: from the Thirties”, a novel about the experiences of a working-class family whose hopes for a better life are dashed by a cruel capitalist economic system. That was her first novel but she did not publish it until forty years later. The reasons should be looked for in the events of her life. After her release from the jail, she moved to San Francisco, where she met her future life-long husband Jack Olsen, during the General Strike of 1934. With him, she had other three daughters. She spent her life struggling among low-paid jobs, childbearing and activism for every human being’s rights. Her challenging life did not prevent her from “capturing voices, words, thoughts”42 on small slips of paper during the small moments she could do it, even if she lived many years away from the world of literature.
In 1953 she decided to follow her eldest daughter’s suggestion about sign up in a writing class at San Francisco University. Her talent was soon recognized by her instructor that suggested her to take a high level course. That led her to won a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1955 and 1956. In those years she began writing her short stories then collected in Tell Me a Riddle, published in 1961. This book gave her prizes, awards and honorary degrees. It remains her most famous work.
During the 1970s, her husband found out her manuscript Yonnondio. Olsen published it in 1974, after a work of selection of the better fragments of it, sums and creation of the final arrangement. In 1978 she printed Silences, a collection of essays that explore the circumstances that prevent people, especially women, from writing. In the modern world, where the existences of people like
42 www.tillieolsen.net/life
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her, immigrants, are not important but irrelevant, in her opinion the solution can be represented by the literature. This is not intended as a way of escaping from the real world, but as a fight tool to spread information and knowledge, to denounce injustice and to start a change in the society.43 In one of her story, called “Tell Me a Riddle”, Olsen, through her narrative strategy and plot, suggests the tragic situation of social silencing, imposed on working-class people by physical and routinized work, intellectual deprivation and gender ideologies imposed on women.
Since she had the desire to encourage women in writing, despite their imposed “discontinuity” in doing it, and she had the desire to save from the oblivion women’s works, she asked to the founder of the Feminist Press to re-print long-forgotten women’s writings. In her opinion, the spread of almost unknown books of female writers would help women to overthrow the statistics of “one-out-of twelve”: one female writer every twelve writers.
In her foreword of Silences, written at the McDowell Writers’ Colony in the New Hampshire, Tillie Olsen explains that “This book is about silences. It is concerned with the relationships of circumstances […] to the creation of literature”. She was not talking about natural silences, necessary in the cycle of creation, but about unnatural silences, “the unnatural thwarting of what struggle to come into being, but cannot”. The aim of this book, consisting of two unwritten talks from 1962 and 1971, an essay-afterword and an aftersection, is “to re-dedicate and encourage” to write who would do it, but cannot. This is what happened to her, too. As the writer says “the years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks”: raising children without any help, neither that kind of help that Virginia Woolf called “the essential angel”, a person that assumed the care of her house and the physical responsibilities for daily living. Obviously she worked in paid jobs as well. Therefore, writing was seen and perceived as a hobby, to be spent after the real vocation and duty of women: caring of husband and family.
The writer saw this as a coercive working of sexist oppression that often led the few writers to
43 Cinzia Biagiotti, cit, p.48
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create less in quality and in quantity than male writers. As Paul Lauter claims in his 1979 study Working-Class Women’s Literature, the working class, intended as people that sell their labour for wages and also who works at home, even if their work is not paid, “have always produced literature”. Its forms and transmission have been different from the written form: it has taken oral forms, because most people of the working class did not learn writing and reading. Some example are songs, religious songs and lullaby and they often show a conservative structure, using refrains and formulas. “Women of the past, generally excluded from formal schools, [...] used what was familiar or what came readily to hand, like songs that they learned from their grandmothers or in church...” 44
This is what Tillie Olsen stated during an interview with Cinzia Biagiotti in 2002, about black women and how they can use the language to create their own art, explaining that
For the most part they did housework. And then [...] the things they said and the way they said it was, oh ... [...] it was like to hear a great poet. And they had no idea that they had that enormous linguistic gift45.
In this way she praised their innate but too often unheard capacity of art creation.
Olsen addresses her essay Silences primarily to teachers, asking them to promote creativity among their students and to read books from women writers, because she believed that there was a whole literature to be re-estimated and appreciated:
...if we change the situation. We still live in a world of sex, class and race and they are terribly determining about how much expansion you can have in life. Every time I appear somewhere women come to me and show me things they’ve worked on and it breaks my heart. If only they
44Paul Lauter, “A History of American Working-Class Literature” In N. Coles & P. Lauter (Eds.), A History of American
Working-Class Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 121
29 could have the chance that they never will have.46
She died on 1st January, 2007 in Oakland, California, because of Alzheimer disease. Hundreds of people attended her memorial on 17 February 2007, showing their affection to Tillie Olsen and her personal, political, and literary importance.47
2.2 Grace Paley.
Grace Paley is a Jewish American writer, almost contemporary of Tillie Olsen, and their personal stories and origins are quite similar. Critics referred to her as a “woman writer” or as a “Jewish writer”, and it is impossible to separate her background from her “work” as a writer: I consider her as a Contemporary American writer that linked in her literary production her life as a mother, a worker and a Jewish woman. Grace Paley devoted her attention to social problems that characterized Jewish women, incorporating social activism and political protests.
She wrote short stories but also essays and poetry. Her family roots are similar, for some aspects, to Olsen’s. She was born on December 11, 1922. Despite her real surname was Gutseit, she was born as Grace Goodside, after her parents, Jewish Russian immigrants, changed their surname at Ellis Island when they arrived in 190448. She was the youngest of three children and lived in a middle-class neighbourhood in the Bronx. Later, her father became a doctor, thanks to her mother that went to work to sustain the family economically and thus allowed him to complete his medical studies and career. Her grandmother’s arrival allowed them to speak Yiddish and Russian at home. She left school and did various office jobs, but also took part in courses at Hunter and City College, but she never got a degree.. A class she took with W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research was especially significant. Auden read her young student’s poetry and advised her to echo
46 Tillie Olsen, Silences, Delta, Seymour Lawrence, 1978, p. 32 47 Cinzia Biagiotti, cit, p. 254
48 Cinzia Scarpino, “Arrivederci e tanti auguri. Scrittura e dintorni nella vita di Grace Paley”, Àcoma, numero 35,inverno
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the spoken language in which she lived rather than the language of some literary ideal.49 This became really important for her writing: in fact, she affirmed, in the short story called Debts, that her purpose was to tell her friends’ stories and events as simply as possible. The co-existence of more than a language (Russian, Yiddish, English) at home and several cultures in the streets of New York are the basis of her stories, as she explained:
I felt the influence of Russian writers because we read them at home. And of the Jewish storytelling, through my parents and the stories of my father that were not literary, but then they became literature50.
In this way she explained her literary background that influenced her way of writing and the topics of her stories.
Like Tillie Olsen, she was a political activist too. She described herself as a “combative pacifist” and “cooperative anarchist”.51 She fought against the use of the atomic bomb and the American participation in the Second World War. During the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest. In 1969 she came to national prominence as an activist when she took part a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She served as a delegate to the 1974 World Peace Conference in Moscow and, in 1978, was arrested as one of "The White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. In the 1990s she supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America.
Her first collection of short stories was The Little Disturbances of Men, published in 1959 and written after that her two children started to go to the day care, giving Paley some time to spend to writing and reading. Then Enormous Changes at the Last Minute followed in the 1974 and Later
49 Anita Norich , Grace Paley, www.jwa.org
50Annalucia Accardo, Grace Paley. La difficoltà di ascoltare e l’impossibilità di tacere, in “Àcoma”, 5, (Estate- autunno 1995), p.6
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the Same Day in 1985. The publishing of the Collected Stories in 1994 gave her the nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and also for the National Book Award.52
She died on 22nd August in 2007 in Thetford Hill, Vermont, because of a breast cancer.
As a short story writer, she was considered outside the literary mainstream by the critics. They usually sentenced that she was not able to tell the whole story , often writing a “too short story”, as Joan Lidoff said. She answered that her choice for brevity depended from “ starting to write later in life. Time goes so fast. And I think you can cover a lot in a short period of time. It’s one of the gift of the short story.[...] Art is too long and life is too short”.53
Her stories are a consequence of a story-hearing, therefore they are the result of a historical and literary memory, transmitted in an oral way. She told about what she saw and heard in the streets of New York, the landscape of the majority of her stories, giving voice to minorities and sharing pieces of their lives, the lives of single mothers, women and men sitting on city stoops or walking through the park with their baby carriages, in order to remember those who usually are the forgotten of the society.
“I was writing stuff that was trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, and not interesting [...] this is my limitation, this is my profound interest, this life of women, and this is what I really have to do”, Grace Paley explained about her choice of topics that were considered unusual for the literary canon. She added that “When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women”54, highlighting the importance of her personal community of women, that included her mother, her grandmother but also a lot of female friends. They represented an extended family for her.
Her characters are represented both in the streets, but also in the private places in New York, the
52 Cinzia Scarpino, Arrivederci e tanti auguri. Scrittura e dintorni nella vita di Grace Paley, in “Àcoma”, 35, p. 20. 53 Jacqueline Taylor, Grace Paley, Illuminating the Dark Lives, University of Texas Press, 1990, p. 95
54 Grace Paley, A Grace Paley Reader, edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
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omnipresent city of the “noisy taking in and loud giving back” in Paley’s writings55, the landscape of her stories, the microcosm recreated by a community of mothers and children who meet, move and, above all, talk with one another in various intermediary places, such as stoops or staircases, parks or piers, subways or sidewalks. In her stories, Grace Paley created her own map of New York: though she refers to landmarks of the city, for example Central Park, where mothers and children “row on [the] lousy lake”56, the Theater District, where Vlashkin, an actor of the Yiddish theater, becomes “the Valentino of Second Avenue”57, Coney Island, where Faith visits her parents at the Children of Judea residence for the elderly, or the Bronx, Brooklyn, Broadway and Brighton Beach, these sites and toponyms remain abstract and undefined entities. The park, the library, the Methodist church, and the street, with its benches, its grocers’, its butchers’, its shops and, above all, its chorus of multiple voices delineate a new map of the neighbourhood. Indeed, Paley relied on daily rituals in order to reveal the urban setting of her stories and show its ethnic, racial or social differences. Everyday life becomes a way of shaping an uncertain world, creating familiar forms that allow men and women to transcend the misery of their condition.
She explained that the inspiration for her writings came from the act of listening someone else’s confidences and stories, and the following act of transforming these into short stories is her way to give immortality to usually unheard people. In this way, her story-telling gives a solution to the need of being listened, illuminating what’s hidden “I think a lot of my story telling really comes from ‘I want to tell you something’ ”58. In this way, the fundamental requirement for writing is the capability of listening other people’s stories and anecdotes.
55Grace Paley, Begin Again: Collected Poems, New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2001, p. 34
56 Grace Paley, Enormous Changes At The Last minute, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1947, p. 60
57 Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man: stories of women and men at love, New York, The American Library,
1973, p.10
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Chapter 3.
Jewish-American fiction in the XX century.
The Jewish people have preserved their traditions and passed them on using two primary modes of transmission, the oral and written one, sometimes competing with each other and other times coexisting. The relationship between folklore and literature continues to be of interest for both literary critics and folklorists. Raphael Patai remarked in his study On Jewish Folklore that
The Jews were throughout their long history a literate people, who developed the habit of committing to writing whatever they regarded as important in their oral tradition. As a result, the history of Jewish folklore is characterized, in each epoch, by a continuous process of lifting out considerable bodies of folklore from the stream of oral tradition and freezing them in writing.59
Patai observed that almost each epoch showed the inclusion of oral tradition into written works. Both oral and written forms have had the importance in the creation and preservation of Jewish culture and identity.
3.1 Story-telling and textuality : a historical perspective.
Orality and textuality, as modes of transmission, coexisted for much of recorded Jewish history, at times conflicting and at times playing complementary roles.
Through the Geonic era (from the eighth century onward) the oral tradition was primary, reinforcing the authority of those who bore it, while written texts were seen as a potential challenge to the ruling authorities. The Talmud continued to be transmitted in oral forms as late as the tenth century and it happened in order to preserve the tradition. In fact, because texts were largely
34
inaccessible, only the Rabbinic figure was the source of knowledge.
During the Medieval period, there was an increase of literacy, associated to social and intellectual progress. As texts become available to the masses, they help to bridge the gap between the learned and the unlearned, increase the potential for challenges to traditional authority, and open society up to new ideas.60
Both ways of communication and transmission of ideas and concepts have positive and negative sides. Oral transmission requires great expenditures of energy, and despite the striving for fixity, inevitably brings with it unconscious and unexpected reshaping. On the other hand, while access to texts by the masses can bring about a lessening of the authority of the scholars, control of the production of those texts can have the opposite effect.
After the Jewish diaspora, such as the exile that Jewish people suffered outside Israel since 135 CE because of the Romans, Jewish writers began to write about their experiences in order to escape from isolation. They usually used the language of the host country 61 even if Yiddish was the everyday language for most of the Jews in Eastern Europe for over than 1000 years and the elegant use of Yiddish phrases indicated one’s knowledge of and connection to their roots.
Malachi Beit-Arie explored the question of the attempt of transmitters to control the texts they promulgated in the Middle Ages. He concluded that those manuscripts produced after the middle of the Thirteenth century “present texts not only corrupted by the accumulation of involuntary copying errors, but also distorted by editorial or even redactional reconstruction … and by the deliberate integration of related texts … visual texts were as flexible as oral ones.”62 The possibility for
60 Elman, Yaakov and Ephrat, Daphna, “Orality and the institutionalization of tradition; the growth of the Geonic
yeshiva and the Islamic madrasa”, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, Y. Elman and I. Gershuni (eds.), Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 107-127.
61 Lisa Van Suntum, A. Rainwater, "Creating Jewish Identity through Storytelling: The Tragedy of Jacob Bendixen."
Scandinavian Studies 73, no. 3 (2001): 375-98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40920322.
62 Beit-Arié, Malachi, “Publication and reproduction of literary texts in medieval Jewish civilization; Jewish scribality
and its impact on the texts transmitted”, in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, Y. Elman and I. Gershuni (eds.), Yale University Press, 2000, p. 225
35
intentional corruption in transmission becomes more acute when dealing with translations and anthologies, thus when a literary work is translated in another language. The processes of translating and anthologizing present the challenge of retaining enough of the original cultural weight of a text in its new cultural context, and open the possibility for distortions, both intended and unintended. On the other hand, also in the act of telling tales, for example those of the Scriptures, the storyteller could create his own Midrash, his interpretation, because biblical legends were seen as an educational tool.
In her comprehensive work called A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction, Victoria Aarons explained that in early nineteenth century, Jewish writers almost did not use Yiddish and only in the other half of the century they began to use some Yiddish words in their writings, often explained in footnotes. According to Yudkin, Jewish writers were fixed between two worlds: the world of the host country and the world of the Jewish tradition. In his opinion, the Jewish author might self-identify with the Jewish group and aim at his Jewish audience. In so far he operates within the framework of a host nation, he might try to integrate into that national entity.
Jewish identity was not lost. In fact, despite writers used to write in the host language, they included in their writings Jewish legends, hagiographic tales and biblical stories. Jewish people started to write and fixed their oral tradition into written form, to make them alive and known also among those who did not belong to their culture. It is important not only turn to oral tradition to understand the Jewish culture, but also to their extensive written tradition, as Patai suggested, because “ no Jewish custom, or belief, or piece of unwritten literature can be fully understood and studied without a thorough search of the vast accumulation of written literature [...] of the Jews, who have been the people of the book for millennia”63.
63 Raphael Patai, cit, p. 43
36
The capitalistic Revolution in Europe had a profound impact on the European society and in the course of time, the Jewish education began to weak the ancient religious traditional culture. Jewish people migrated to capitalist countries as proletarians. The new ideas and influences of class-consciousness, socialism and trade-unionism weakened both the religious culture and the old structure of the religiously sponsored educational system. Storytelling has been an educational tool in the development of a child’s ethics, morality and personal identity, because stories “recreate the quest for identity and depict characters in the process of inventing selves in relation to others. The active telling voice becomes both a metaphor for and the clue to identity”64. But the telling of stories is not only a method to educate young people; in fact, according to Bascom, it represents a way to reinforce the behaviour of the grown-up. He defined it as
a mechanism for maintaining the stability of a culture. It is used to inculcate the customs and ethical standards in the young, and as an adult [...] to provide him with a compensatory escape from the hardships, the inequalities and the injustices of everyday life. 65
3.2 Jewish fiction in the XX century.
Critics discussed for a long time how to define and place the Jewish fiction inside the American literary culture.
As Victoria Aarons observed in her article early Jewish- American writing emerges as both “ethnic” and immigrant fiction. At first, it was situated and perceived as an outsider from the American literary heritage66. But, since the Second World War, Jewish writers have spoken about and within the American culture. In his Jewish Writing and Identity in the Twentieth Century, Leon Yudkin
64 Victoria Aarons, A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction, Athens, U Georgia P,
1996, p. 62
65 William Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore”, The Study of Folklore, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice Hall, 1965, p. 298 66 Victoria Aarons, “The Outsider within: Women in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction.” Contemporary Literature,
