WOMEN'S VOICES, WOMEN'S VISIONS: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN-JEWISH WOMEN WRITERS (KAPLAN; SCHAEFFER; JONG; OZICK)

CONNIE BETH SAULMON BURCH, Purdue University

Abstract

Although much critical attention has been devoted to American-Jewish literature in the last twenty-five years, American-Jewish women writers have been practically unheard of. Yet American-Jewish women writers have been producing energetic, thought-provoking fiction. This study, the first to concentrate on these female writers, describes several themes emerging from their work. The first chapter analyzes the autobiographical writing of three foremothers of Jewish women writers--Mary Antin, Emma Goldman, and Anzia Yezierska--and shows how the themes in their work emerge and re-emerge in the fiction of women writing later in the century. The remaining chapters focus on individual themes--America, the family, the attitude toward sex, a concept of feminism--as they are manifested in the work of one particular writer. Besides the three foremothers, the work of Johanna Kaplan, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Erica Jong, and Cynthia Ozick is explored here. Although the purpose of this study is to describe the writing of contemporary Jewish women in America, it does conclude that Jewish women have a different sense of the world than Jewish men; the writing by Jewish women seems more self-reflexive, more in search of self. This study also finds that Jewish women resemble women of other religious backgrounds in their concern for family, and for the rights and welfare of women. But Jewish women are working through their personal struggles for autonomy under some conditions derived from their culture and their religion--and these differences leaven their work.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature

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