Jewish American Literature & Culture

American Studies Seminar: The Promised Land

We have discussed both how old roles are recycled in this era and how a number of new gender roles & stereotypes were created

MEN

1. The Feminist (Kaaterskill Falls)

2 .The Counter-feminist

3. "The Lost Girl"

4. Jewish American Princess

5. Baal Teshuva

 

"Rina and Sonya, Seattle, 1982." Sonya Masinovsky's Family History Page, English 303 Reed College. http://www.reed.edu/%7Emasinovs/projects.html#1973 (28 April 2004).

Other Teshuva Gender Images:

Miranda's Photo Album

Joey's Family

Avigail's Family

Sophie's Family Images

Sonya's Family

Laura's Wedding Photo

Passage from Gerry Albarelli's Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva:

"'Of course I remember you,' I had said to the boy in the hall. 'Who's your teacher this year?'

'It's a boy!' he said, as if hardly able to contain himself. And then others boys from that same class, other boys I also remembered, stepped forward from the wall of boys in the hall, suddenly materializing, all talking at once, laughing, to regale me with stories of the boy teacher as if I would understand, never doubting for a second that the dwarf teacher deserved to be tormented. It occurred to me that he was the quintessential English teacher: a teacher, all English teachers, reduced magically to true spiritual size" (35-36).

Compare to this the following quote from "The Lost Girl":

"And to make matters worse, if you didn't count the public high school teachers who came into the building in the late afternoon for the secular subjects...he, Rabbi Yehiel Berman, was the only man on the premises" (Norton 1047).

What changes are made in Jewish American literature and from the end of 1973 to the present? For the sake of comparison to the previous sections, here are our same four topics.

• Gender
• Language & Storytelling
• Humor
• Space
• Relations with African Americans

One of the main things that we noticed with Kaaterskill Falls with respect to language and storytelling was the multiplicity of perspective and the way that almost all the characters were well rounded. We compared this to the characterization in The Changelings and noted that there is a fuller and broader sense of community in Goodman's novel. We suggested that the reader's empathy for characters in the novel placed the reader in a role similar to the Tzaddik in works like The Chosen.

.

Poet Rodger Kamentz recounts how in 1989 the Dalai Lama compared the plight of the Tibetans to that of the Jews and "turned for the first time to the Jewish people for help. 'Tell me your secret,' he said, 'the secret of the Jewish spiritual survival'" (The Jew in the Lotus 2). Kamentz has his own answer to this, but other writers have suggested that the "strength of American Judaism is that American Jews are constantly testing, trying, experimenting, and innovating." (Max Dimont,The Jews in America 1978: 188). Conversely, secular writer Robert Eisenberg suggests that strictness of observance is the future of American Judaism. Eisenberg proposes, "Imagine: It is the year 2075, and the only Jews left in the United States, aside from a few old-timers, are Hasidism and other Orthodox Jews. Impossible you say? Actually, it's quite likely" (1). Your job is to a formulate a response to the Dalai Lama's query, with an American bent. What is the secret of Jewish spiritual and literary survival in the 1970s to the present?

Our discussion of humor mainly focused on "The Lost Girl," and"Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven." We felt that it was important to think about a possible change in the relationship between the narrator reader and the community/person being satirized. Was the narrator and reader more distant than before? To what extent did this position change the notion of Jewish humor as an insider game and how does this shift outwards relate (challenge?) to the theme of return?

We discussed a few new spaces in this era. Some of these are spaces that existed before, but which just didn't arise in the literature we have read, for example the woods in "The Lost Girl," or the South in "Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven." We related the space of the woods to the exile motif we had linked to our discussion of Zionism and to the American Frontier Tradition.

Joey's artifact addressed the importance of a relatively new space in this era: The Jewish Community Center (JCC). As Joey notes, "The JCC offers a social institution that serves as a type of assimilation-friendly anti-assimilation force. Namely, it is not a synagogue, it is not dedicated to the study of Torah, it caters to Jews of all denominations and levels of belief--yet, it is dedicated to the enrichment of Jewish lives, to ensuring the Jewishness of Jewish lives." We might compare the JCC to the previous role that the Synagogue played in centralizing Jewish life.