From Amerike to America: Language and identity in the Yiddish and English autobiographies of Jewish immigrant women.

Abstract

The Yiddish and English autobiographical narratives considered in this study demonstrate a wide range of possibilities for representing the experience of American Jewish women and of the autobiographical subject. These seven authors represent seven strategies for autobiographical self-expression. They wrote both as individuals and as communal representatives, emphasizing their political, family, or intellectual involvements. Yet while the narratives are highly diverse, there are similarities, linked primarily to language. The English texts, by Mary Antin, Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Stern, focus tightly on the speaking "I," and their narrators' personalities and careers unfold in roughly chronological order. They tell of the development of an individual, within the context of constructing an identity that the narrator sees as authentically American. This often involves a painful separation from family or other community of origin. The Yiddish narratives, by Aliza Greenblatt, Rokhl Kirsh Holtman and Fannie Edelman, are less likely to follow a linear form or concentrate exclusively on the "I" of the narrator. Their chronologies are interrupted and rearranged, the narrators stray from the stated subject to attend to other matters, and they sometimes focus more on communal concerns than the subject's inner life. Their autobiographical identities develop within Jewish political or communal contexts, so that being "American" has relatively little significance. This study finds that despite these similarities, each woman's view of her experience and her self was unique. Each author expressed her own view of identity and of the nature of autobiography itself. The narratives consider common questions about the self, ethnic and national identity, and relationship to community, but arrive at different answers. For some, the construction of an autonomous, highly Americanized identity was a prized goal, regardless of the alienation it might produce. Others were interested primarily in pursuing their own political work as part of international movements. Several of these authors saw themselves as caught between opposing cultures and value systems, while others sought new ways of envisioning the self that could accommodate such complexity. These narratives acknowledge the personal and communal conflicts and opportunities with which these women were confronted, and depict the varied ways in which they responded.