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thesis entitled
The Process of Assembling Self Identity as
Exyressed in literary Works of Four American-
Jewish Women: Esther Broner, Faye Moskowitz,
Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley.

presented by
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MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Inditutlon
ammo-9.1

THE PROCESS OF ASSEMBLING SELF IDENTITY AS EXPRESSED IN
LITERARY WORKS OF FOUR AMERICAN-JEWISH WOMEN:
E.M. BRONER, FAYE MOSKOWITZ, TILLIE OLSEN, GRACE PALEY

BY

Karin Schreier

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of American Studies

1990

ABSTRACT
THE PROCESS OF ASSEMBLING SELF IDENTITY AS EXPRESSED IN

LITERARY WORKS OF FOUR AMERICAN-JEWISH WOMEN:
E.M. BRONER, FAYE MOSKOWITZ, TILLIE OLSEN, GRACE PALEY

BY

Karin Schreier

In their literature, E.M. Broner, Faye Moskowitz,
Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley demonstrate the value of
actively approaching self identity and the consequences of
not doing so. Their works reflect their personal
experiences as Jewish women. Writing about the effects of
gender and ethnicity on selfhood, about the anxieties Jewish
women experience forming their selves, the authors question
the socially and religiously structured female role and
offer new definitions. This thesis explores the literary
theme of participation in the process of assembling self
identity by looking at each author separately. It
establishes the context of writing, i.e. the authors'
personal experiences as Jewish women and the reflection of
these experiences in selections of their writings. Thus, it
identifies the pursuit of selfhood as expressed by each
writer in her literature and as defined in relation to her

personal values as a Jewish woman.

Copyright by
KARIN SCHREIER
1990

iv

To my family with love:
Helmut, Sarah, Axel and Micky

V

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Joyce Ladenson, Director
of the Women's studies program at Michigan State University,
who sparked my interest in Jewish feminism. A patient reader
of my drafts, she helped me with her valuable judgments.
Without her, my topic would have been quite different. And
I would like to thank Professor Ellen Uffen for reading my
thesis.

Although I was enthusiastic about the writings of the
four authors dealt with in this thesis, the process of
developing a comprehensive picture was long and sometimes
frustrating. I am most grateful to my husband Michael who
stood by me through both enthusiasm and frustration. He
supported me with his encouragement and faith in the qualities
of my work as well as in my abilities to write good English
(which, as a native German speaker, I often needed). He also
shared his knowledge of the Old Testament with me. And I
always appreciated the time he spent with me discussing Jewish
feminism.

I am also most grateful to my parents, Helmut and Sarah,
who instilled in me the thirst for knowledge and the value of
education. They taught me to be optimistic and confident in
my work. They also taught me patience, especially when I
applied for admission to U.S. graduate programs and was about
to give up. Without their support, I would not have had the

opportunity to complete a degree at an American university.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

E.M. BRONER: TO HEAL AND REPAIR

Roots of Upbringing

Reconciliation of Judaism and Feminism
Womenbonds

Ritual

Her Mothers

Summary

FAYE MOBKOWITZ: BREAKING FREE

Autobiographical Theme: Reconciliation of
Traditional Jewish and Modern American Values

Fictional Theme: Danger of Conformity
Summary

TILLIE OLSEN: THE POWER OF "CIRCUMSTANCES"
Yiddish Culture and American Socialism
Economic "Circumstances"

Gender "Circumstances"

Summary

GRACE PALEY: Back to Friendship
"Community" and "Social Consciousness"
Themes and Characters

Bonds Between Mother and Child
Friendships Between Women
Relationships Between Women and Men

Summary

13

15

17

24

27

28

37

48

50

51

53

59

68

71

72

75

78

82

89

90

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

vii

92

97

INTRODUCTION

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

---Rabbi Hillel

The process of assembling self identity is central to
the writings of four Jewish women authors: E.M. Broner, Faye
Moskowitz, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley. They teach us the
importance of self respect and the danger of a stagnant self
concept. These authors demonstrate the value of actively
approaching self identity and the consequences of not doing
so.

Their personal experiences as Jews and as women
solidify their insights in two ways. First, Judaism, a
patriarchal religion, does not consider women as equals to
men. Susan Weidman Schneider explains that, historically,
Judaism defines women as the "other." "This concept of
difference allowed men to exclude women unjustly from much
that was important in Jewish life."1 The critic cites
examples for the Orthodox exclusion of women from religious
studies: a Jewish woman is not allowed to serve as witness
in a religious court; she cannot file for divorce; she does

2

not count for the initiation of prayers. In short, in an

orthodox religious tradition defined by participation,

 

1 Schneider, Susan Weidman. Jewish and Female. Choices and
Changes in Our Lives Today. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1984. 33.

2 Schneider 34-5.

2
Jewish women have been unable to establish self identity as
Jews in relation to their own culture and history.

Second, in America, assimilationist pressures burdened
Jewish immigrant women with the limitations of a sexist
society. Upon their arrival in the "New World" many Jewish
immigrant families quickly moved economically upward. In an
analysis of "Jewish Women in the Nuclear Family and Beyond,"
Schneider points out that the Jewish husband's growing
financial success was accompanied with his desire to
"assimilate to a more ‘American' style of behavior and

'fl More "American" meant, among other things, the

thinking.
notion that a woman's place was in the home. The critic
comments:
What a shock this must have been to women whose image
of themselves, and of their mothers and grandmothers
before them, had been of hardy, active people. The
real roles of Eastern European Jewish women included
helping support the family, making decisions, and
having (at least in much of family and community life)
shared responsibilities with their husbands.
The American cultural ideal of a woman, however, was the
"lady" who belonged to the middle-class and depended on her
husband's income. Thus, Jewish immigrant families underwent
a change from traditional Jewish values to American cultural
values, i.e. from the female's loss of power to the male as
family breadwinner and the emergence of her subjective

dependent status.

 

3 Schneider 270.

‘ Schneider 270.

3

Both the Orthodox Jewish and assimilationist pressures
must be taken into consideration for an accurate
understanding of these writers' works. Their writing is an
expression and affirmation of the active pursuit of their
own female identities. Assembling self identity is a process
that emerges out of the ethnic and gender identity
boundaries these Jewish women writers, to individual
degrees, confront. The process itself is an interaction
between cultural context and individual choice. To
participate in this process is to define a place in society
for oneself; it is to seek meaning in life, at least for
that moment. Entire identities may change, the difficult
part is allowing it to happen. One is successful, i.e.
fulfills the task of achieving security in her/his own
identity, only by being open to an exchange of ideas and
beliefs other than one's own. Thus, participation in the
process of assembling self identity is rewarding.

The authors draw on their Jewish heritage in different
ways, i.e. Jewishness has different meanings for each of
them; each writer seeks her own meaning for herself. Their
literary works reflect their own personal experiences. They
write about the effects of gender and ethnicity on selfhood,
about the anxieties Jewish women experience forming their
selves: the authors question the societal and religiously
structured female role and offer new definitions. Thus,
their literature demonstrates participation in the process

of assembling self identity.

4

As a religious woman E.M. Broner challenges the
interpretations of Jewish law that assign women a second-
class status: she creates rituals and ceremonies that
include women, i.e. she provides means for religious
identification: she writes fiction about Jewish women
participating in the process of assembling self identity.

Faye Moskowitz draws upon the tension between broad
social experience and the boundaries placed on her by
traditional Jewish values while growing up: the writer finds
value in both aspects of her experience, humanitarian values
and values of political and educational opportunity. Both
her autobiographical and fictional stories provide a
framework for participation in the process of assembling
self identity by reconciling modern American with
traditional Jewish values as viewed by a Jewish woman.

Tillie Olsen adds the effect of class on selfhood. Her
experiences in a working class environment and a secular
socialist home, with ideals rooting in Yiddish culture,
influenced her writing: her fiction emphasizes limitations
on participation in the process of assembling self identity
dictated by restrictive "circumstances" of class, ethnicity,
and gender. Women in particular, Olsen demonstrates, find
it difficult to adequately express and develop their own
positive self concepts. Trapped by the limitations of
economic and gender circumstances, they receive little room
to grow or develop friendships.

Like Olsen, Grace Paley grew up in a secular household.

5
She also emphasizes the limitations of class, ethnicity, and
gender on selfhood. While Olsen stresses the impact of
economic "circumstances," Paley accentuates an interactive
approach: the formation of "communities" and inspiration of
"social consciousness," ideas she shaped from her Jewish
heritage. Through these, one exceeds boundaries of class,
ethnicity, and gender. Thus, central to the writer's
stories are forms of community: bonds between mothers and
children, friendships between women, and relationships
between women and men. Central is also political action, an
expression of social consciousness. Both bonds and
political action, Paley's stories demonstrate, help find
security in self identity.

This thesis explores the theme of participation in the
process of assembling self identity by looking at each
author separately. It establishes the context of writing,
i.e. the authors' personal experiences as Jewish women and
the reflection of these experiences in selections of their
writings. Thus, it identifies the pursuit of selfhood as
expressed by each writer in her literature and as defined in

relation to her personal values as a Jewish woman.

E.M.: TO HEAL AND REPAIR

"How do people sustain themselves, how do they survive?
Nothing interests me more than that," says E.M. Broner in an
interview by Nancy Boy for the Massachusetts Review (1983).
Broner's concern is primarily with Jewish women, how they
"sustain themselves" and "survive" in sexist society and
patriarchal religion. In other words, how do Jewish women
successfully assemble self identity when their participation
in the modes of life that would fully allow it, is stifled?
How do they seek meaning out of the interaction between
their cultural context of restriction and their individual
choices to be complete human beings?

Broner's non-fiction criticizes women's subordinate
role in traditional Judaism and the exclusion of women from
religious studies, and are political in objective. As a
solution to this problem, Broner re-forms Jewish rituals and
ceremonies: she stresses the need for Jewish women to
"connect" with their female "origins" and bond with other
women. Through feminist rituals, Jewish women will heal
their hurt and repair the damage inflicted upon them by
patriarchal Judaism, i.e. will participate in the process of
assembling self identity as Jewish women.

Broner's fiction also demonstrates her concerns. She
writes about women who research their identity as women and
Jews, who strive for a more active role in shaping their

lives. The novelist prescribes a search for and connection

6

7

with female origins and suggests a bonding of women. Broner
teaches Jewish and other women to say: "Here we are, we're
priestesses, we're gods, we made the exodus. We are
defining ourselves, and finding a new way of looking."5

Broner's feminist critique is motivated by her personal
experiences as a Jewish woman. She grew up in a traditional
Jewish household which subordinated women under men's rule,
but matured in a society developing feminist ideas of gender
equality. Traditional Judaism and feminism seem
irreconcilable-~yet they are not if we value difference and
assert equality, insists Broner. The process of assembling
self identity demands discourse regarding the validity of
patriarchal subordination. Herein lies Broner's answer to

the question of how Jewish women "sustain themselves" and

"survive:" they actively pursue their own identity.

Roots of Upbringing
E.M. Broner grew up in the thirties and forties in
Detroit as the daughter of East European Jewish immigrants.
Her family actively participated in the Jewish traditions.
When she was little, her father was her Sunday-school
teacher, "which was both an embarrassment to me and a piece
of luck," as she recalls.

A second aspect of Broner's traditional Jewish

 

5 Hoy, Nancy. "Of Holy Writing & Priestly Voices: A Talk

With Esther Broner." Massachusetts Review 24, no.2 (Summer
1983):259.

8

upbringing was the mother's and daughter's subordination
under the husband/ father. "Esther," Marilyn French
explains, "suffered from the second-best status often
accorded to girls in traditional Jewish families."6
Information concerning Broner's specific religious
upbringing was unavailable. Concluding from French's
statement, however, it follows that Broner was raised
according to Judaism's traditional concept defining women as
the "other." As a result, she was excluded from
participating in formal religious studies. A further result
was that the family's middle-class status forced
assimilationist pressures on Broner as a female, idealizing
the conformity of women to stereotypical perceptions of
"femininity," e.g. to "ladylike" looks and manners. The
increase in her family's economic and social status, French
remarks, made Broner "unhappy": "she hated the social and
economic competition of middle-class youngsters."7

Despite her family's belief in traditional Jewish
values, Broner worked as an editor for her father, a
political journalist, when she was nine years old. She
clipped out newspaper articles on labor issues and thus was
politically trained from an early age on.8 The

"unhappiness" Broner felt as a consequence of her family's

 

6 French, Marilyn. Introduction. A Weave of Women. By E.M.
Broner. 1978. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. XII.

7 French XII.

8 French XI.

9
middle-class status also enabled her to complete college.
She got her BA and MFA degrees from Wayne State University
and a PhD in English literature from Union Graduate. Today
she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She married early,
after her sophomore year, and gave birth to four children
over the succeeding years.

The American notion of equality combined with her
personal Jewish experiences, her political education during
her childhood and her college education, formed Broner's
thinking about women in general and their relation to
Judaism in particular, and greatly influenced her writing.
Her fiction, she explains, tells of "woman alone, hunting
for her role in genealogy, in history, in relationship to

herself and to the issue of her womb."9

Reconciliation of Judaism and Feminism
The various aspects of Broner's life seem

contradictory, especially in regard to her Jewish religious
beliefs and her identity as a feminist. Judaism's
definition of women as second-class citizens and feminists'
belief in gender equality seem to be irreconcilable. How
does Broner define herself as a Jewish feminist and what
ways does she offer for religious Jewish women to feel
secure in their identities?

Broner attempts to re-form Judaism through her writing

 

Hoy 255.

10
in such a way that grants Jewish women equality with Jewish
men. The writer challenges Jewish law by including women in
Jewish customs and rituals, thus her challenge is political.
"I speak with the tongue of my people's prayer, yet I change
the gender. I speak out of a history, but I research
it. . . "10
Broner's approach challenging traditional Judaism is
careful yet radical. She emphasizes the "correction" of
traditions, not their destruction. Old Jewish traditions
must be stretched to include women and changed to allow
women identification with their heritage. Broner insists,
[I]f our religion tries to kick us out of it, I think
we have to carefully elbow our way back in it and make
a new tradition. Rewrite ourselves and correct that
tradition...I will not be elbowed out of my religion.

There's room. I have to turn it around; we have1to
rediscover our mothers. It's a political thing.1

Broner's recent publication of "Mornings and Mourning:
A Kaddish Journal" (1989) illustrates women's subordinate
status in traditional Judaism and calls for a "correction of
the tradition." After her father's death, Broner feels a
big loss and decides to mourn him in the traditional Jewish
way. Attending daily services at an Orthodox synagogue,

however, is not as easy for her as a woman as she had

 

m Hoy 264.

11 Windstone, Shebar. "Idlith Interview: Esther Broner."
Liiigg 1 (Fall/Winter 1977/78):34.

11
hoped.12 The male members of the synagogue make clear that
she is worth only "half a man." She does not count for the
minygn which requires ten men over thirteen years of age to
read the kaddish prayer. Although the rabbi has trouble
finding ten members every morning, he rather keeps looking
for them on the street instead of counting Broner, a woman.
While the men pray, Broner has to stay behind a curtain, as
the law forbids men to see into a woman's face during
worship. When Broner refuses to remain in her "place," she
is lectured: "You're an educated woman. I shouldn't have to
explain to you that this is the way it is, this is the law

'3 She is

of separation. You've got to obey the law.'
accused of "sowing dissent" and "spoiling the services."“

Only slowly she begins to "feel secure enough...to take
action." Broner invites some of her women friends to join
her for a minyan. They come and fill the little room faster
than the men can. "In the place where I have always been
alone, they spill over onto the rows reserved for men, and
the mekhitza [partition] doesn't cover them," Broner

notes.15

A troublemaker who overdid it by conducting a
women's min an, Broner receives a call from a lawyer who

tells her to obey the rules--stand behind the curtain--so

 

n Broner, E.M. "Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal."
Tikkun 4 (Sept./Oct. 1989):19.

B Broner, "Mornings" 21.

n Broner, "Mornings" 22.

6 Broner, "Mornings" 90.

12
not to jeopardize the chances for women to become members.
"‘They'll vote against women becoming members because I
won't stand behind the ekhitza,'" Broner wonders?16 Broner
does not agree with the lawyer and is excommunicated from
the synagogue. The rabbi, trying to reconcile, develops a
plan to get Broner back into the community.

Your husband will be voted in as a member. Then
Tuesday night the shul will vote for the first time in
sixty years to give membership to women. For sure, you
will be a member.

Then, in September, you and your friends-—remember
Doris?--will attend a membership meeting, and you'll
talk about the mekhitza and you'll talk in a sweet
voice...

You could say that the mekhitza is a symbol and
that it might as well be a bank of flowers.

"Sweet voice" and "flowers" certainly are stereotypical
female associations. The rabbi--although at least willing
to understand Broner's demands--still has difficulties
accepting her as an equal, entitled with the same rights to
worship as men are. This shows how deeply orthodox Jewish
beliefs root in people's conscience. The male members of
the synagogue Broner met were "lonely, elderly widowers or
single men, their days stretching emptily before them."18
They lived in their own little world and were afraid of
intruders, of changes. Through her actions, however, Broner

shook this conscience and at least was able to make the

synagogue members aware of her and other women's existence-

 

m Broner, "Mornings" 91.

V Broner, "Mornings" 92.

m Broner, "Mornings" 22.

13
-she questioned the patriarchal status quo and demanded
respect of her human identity. In this sense "Mornings and
Mourning" is an appeal to women to bond against patriarchal
religious structures and for women's equality within
Judaism-~to heal and repair the damage done by their

exclusion.

Womenbonds

In her work, Broner stresses women's "connection" with
their female "origins," the definition of a common female
history in that process, and of bonding with other women.
Feminist rituals are a basis for and expression of women's
bonds. Through bonds Jewish women can heal their hurt from
patriarchal Judaism, and women in general can repair the
damage done by stereotypical associations and
misunderstandings. This is how women will sustain
themselves and survive.

The idea of women bonding and acting together as one,
Broner expresses in her address to the National Women's
Studies Association at Ohio State University in 1983 "The
Mikveh Ceremony--Connecting Black and Jewish Women"
(published 1988). The author created this ceremony in an
effort to eliminate racism and anti-semitism among Jewish
and Black women within the women's movement and to bond
them. "There are impurities that must be cleansed from the
soul," Broner explains, "the impurity of separaticui frofl'

another woman, the impurity of suspicion of another colOr'

14

the impurity of superiority over another religion."19

Broner stresses the need to "connect" while embracing
difference. "Each, looking at herself, tells her history as
a woman of color, a woman of another accent, another tongue,
a woman of a different body...," Broner leads the ceremony.
The women speak of their stereotyping and cursing of "the
other" in their relationship--each other. But they must not
forget their commonalities. For, "When we speak of
connections, we can move closer in this wide—gapped circle."
And the ritual moves on to the "exchanging and changing" of
their selves. They start out each for herself, encountering
each other as a stereotype; they end connected with one
another, like a chain existing of many different pieces yet
still one chain. "We write psalms of difference, of the
rainbow of women. We become one another." The ceremony is
concluded with the "song of purification: immersion." The
women are singing in praise of the "Mother" who created them
as they are, gave them the strength they have. "We are part
of the body of women, / of earth and water. / May we survive
at sea, on land, / in shallow straits or over our heads. /
May we rescue one another / in deep water."20 Through
ritual, these women are healed and repaired from hurt and

damage done by stereotypical associations and

 

w Broner, E.M. "The Mikveh Ceremony. Connecting Black and
Jewish Women." The Womanspirit Sourcebook. Ed. Patrice
Wynne. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. 195.

m Broner, "Mikveh" 196-99.

15
misunderstandings, existing in their relationship. Thus, we
learn through this ritual that we can be open to
"difference" without reducing ourselves and participate in

the process of assembling self identity.

Ritual

Broner began creating ritual to "mark life," as she
says. It was based on her need to connect with other women.
"For myself, it isn't enough to be Esther or E.M., there
have to be great, surging, epic events that occur; I have to
connect myself to some kind of passion..."21 To find
security in their identities, Jewish women must find their
origins and determine their independent periodization of
religious history. Then they must connect with one another
through rituals, the "great, surging, epic events"--to heal
and repair.

Quoting Cynthia Ozick, Broner emphasizes that religious

Jewish works like the Torah are only the works of men

 

because women--half of the Jewish people-~were never allowed
to contribute to them. Therefore, these works are

"frayed."22 The Torah, for example, as the object of Jewish

 

ritual, excludes women from participation in worship.

Further, men's religious writings begin with the Testaments,

 

a Windstone 34.

22 Broner, E.M. "Honor and Ceremony in Women's Rituals." The

Politics of Women's Spirituality. Ed. Charlene Spretnak. NY:
Doubleday, 1982. 237.

16
ignoring the true beginning of worship. In the beginning
women gee actually pray to Mother Gods: women gege
priestesses, Broner informs. As women we have to learn of
"those ancient women," our foremothers, otherwise we will
lose our identities. "If we do not remember our womanly
origins," Broner warns, "then we lose our images, our
language, and the meaning of the cave of self."23 Jewish
women have to correct religious history and rituals so they
include women.

In co-authorship with Naomi Nimrod, Broner created her
"first corrective ceremony," "A Woman's Haggadah" (1975).
The Haggadah is the tale of Israel's deliverance from
Egyptian bondage. It is read at Passover, the outstanding
festival in Jewish life. The text is solely directed at
fathers and sons. Women are left out of the ceremony--
except as caterers to the men. "How is it possible," Broner
asks, "that a ceremony in which I have participated my
entire remembered life makes no mention of my coming out of
Egypt, and I am not commanded to remind my daughter of the
exodus?"%

The "Woman's Haggadah" tells the exodus of women. "We
used the male Haggadah as the spine of our ceremony and,

25

within it, reincorporated women," Broner states. Broner

 

3 Broner, "Honor" 236.

n Broner, "Honor" 237.

a Broner, "Honor" 238.

17
and Nimrod made not only changes in gender but also in
language. They named and renamed women, and changed rhymes
and rhythms of ancient chants.%’ They altered the first
four questions asked at the beginning of the ceremony, and
added more questions during its course. They added, for
example, "Mother ...who are our mothers? Who are our
ancestors? What is our history? Give us our name. Name

"N, These are illustrative questions of

our genealogy.
Jewish women's search for an identity. Broner and Nimrod
thus provide a means for Jewish women to ask about their
"origins" and secure their identities as Jews--and in that,

to heal and repair. They felt their approach was "radical"

in nature and hence took a "political stand."28

Her Mothers
The novel Her Mothers (1975) reflects Broner's beliefs
maintained in her political essays: the idea of women's
"connection" with their female "origins," their defining of
a common female history in that process, and thus their bond
with other women. Most important, it is an attempt to
answer her central question of Jewish female "survival" and

"sustainment," and thus demonstrates successful

 

a Broner, "Honor" 240.
27 Broner, E.M. and Naomi Nimrod. "A Woman's Passover
Haggadah and Other Revisionist Rituals." Ms. 5 (April

1977):54.

m Broner, "Honor" 240.

18

participation in the process of assembling self identity.

Although Broner's novel centers around women, she does
not ignore men's experience. Rather, French states, Broner
and others "have tried to retain the overall structure of a
male [literary] tradition and to stretch it so it can hold a
female as well as a male voice, female as well as male
concerns. Such an approach feminizes--humanizes--the entire

"8' However, it is important for women to

tradition.
assemble their own identities first, before they can
negotiate male voices while keeping their own identities
intact.
My sense of change is of women getting stronger. We
have been dependent too long. We have to become sure
of our myths, sure of our voices...Years have to elapse
before we allow men into that psychic part of our
world. We must raise tender men and strong women,
women who will be political warriors as well.0
Her Mothere tells the story of a Jewish woman, Beatrix
Palmer, whose journey searching for her run-away daughter
Lena turns into a quest for her self identity. The reader
follows Beatrix from childhood to old age on this search
that has significant religious and personal implications for
Beatrix. Broner stresses the importance of a woman's
"connection" to her "origins," here to Genesis of the Old
Testament, as a means to achieve security in self identity.

At the same time, her novel warns women of consuming

connections, here maternal and sorroral connections among

 

a French X.

3° Hoy 263.

19

women that often stifle individual identity by demanding
conformity to self-effacing roles, for example to
stereotypical ideals of "feminine" looks and manners.

Beatrix recalls her childhood relationship to her
mother as emotionless. She and her mother never have
expressed their love for each other nor have they shared
friendship (except in one incident where Beatrix tells her
mother she loves her). Usually the mother makes fun of
Beatrix's inexperience and innocence. Instead of
explaining, for example, what was happening to Beatrix's
body when she started to menstruate and was afraid it was
caused by something she ate, the mother only laughed at her
daughter. Also, she did not accept Beatrix's studiousness;
she believed education would make her daughter unsuitable
for the marriage market. And, as her parents saw it,
Beatrix lacked manners and looks ("Although American, she
was a peasant..." "What was unbecoming about Beatrix? Her
hair, makeup, dress, gestures").31

This inexpression of love between mother and daughter
is the cause of Beatrix's incomplete self identity. The
literary critic Rose Yalow Kamel terms it "maternal
deprivation." The mother-daughter dialogues, interspersed

throughout the book, Kamel argues, exemplify Beatrix's

 

M Broner, E.M. IHer Mothers. NY: Holt, Rinehart and.Winston,
1975. 26.

20
problem of not finding herself or her gender significant.32

"Mother, I'm giving birth to a baby girl."

"Ah, soon she will have the gift of life."

"Oh no. He [the male] will have life enough for both
of them."

"Soon she will have speech."

"Oh no. He will speak for the both of them."

"Soon she will be independent."

"Oh no. She wants to borrow."

"Borrow what?"

"Borrow courage."

As Beatrix suffers from "maternal deprivation," so does
her daughter Lena. Beatrix tried to define Lena's identity
for her instead of allowing the child to be herself. For
example, as a baby girl, Lena could not play with "male"
toys like trains and boxing gloves. When Beatrix wrote
stories about Lena, the child angrily replied: "You took my

name from me."“

She is worried that her daughter might
inherit certain "flaws" her parents had detected in Beatrix
herself. So Beatrix insists that Lena learns "manners" and
has "becoming looks." She teaches the girl how not to "talk
too much," how to "be helpful, silent, polite, energetic,

"5 As Kamel remarks, "Beatrix processes

and organized.
Lena. Bea's daughter born in ‘twilight sleep,’ is reduced

to sugar, spice, everything nice.T“ On her sixteenth

 

32 Kamel, Rose Yalow. Aggravating the Conscience. Jewish-

American Literagy Mothers in the Promised Land. NY: Peter
Lang, 1988. 168-9.

E Broner, Her Mothers 92-3.
M Broner, Her Mothers 114.
5 Broner, Her Mothers 175-7.
36

Kamel 174.

21
birthday, Lena ran away.

Her Mothers is political. Here Broner re-forms the
teachings of Orthodox Judaism through a fictional text by
offering a reinterpretation of the early Genesis story of
"The Temptation."

At the end of Genesis, chapter two, Adam and Eve were
together in the garden of Eden, unaware of masculine and
feminine distinctions between themselves or even of the fact
that they were "naked." Men and women were yet unconcerned
with distinctions between them, "they were one flesh...they
were both naked...and were not ashamed" (Gen. 2:24,25). God
tested their love: "Of the fruit of the tree which is in the
midst of the garden...Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall
ye touch it, lest ye die" (Gen. 3:3). Upon the taking of
the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
however, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew
that they were naked: and they sewed figleaves together, and
made themselves aprons" (Gen. 3:7).

Thus, upon making the distinction between "good and
evil" and thereby choosing this knowledge over love, humans
were burdened with the curse of "enmity," the attitudes or
feelings of enemies: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and
thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children"
(Gen. 3:16). This curse is the Old Testament's answer to
humankind's search for knowledge of good and evil, in this
case the search for and establishment of exclusive human

categorizations that deny equality. In the garden of Eden,

22
humankind started out unaware of distinctions like masculine
and feminine, "beautiful" and "ugly" looks or "good" and
"bad" manners: the painful distinctions made between men and
women concerning their "proper" roles were not present and
did not get in the way of love. To expose of the curse
humankind must "put forth [its] hand, and take also of the
tree of life, and eat, and live forever," i.e. since
humankind betrayed love, it's curse is enmity—-and the way
out of enmity is love (Gen. 3:22).

In the concluding scene of Her Mothers, Broner provides
the crucial elements of the problem of enmity between mother
and daughter. In Lena's final meeting with her mother, love
is still, after all these years, being held at bay: old
wounds remain open. The reader knows that Beatrix loves
Lena, but she allows enmity to get into its way: still the
mother "wishes Lena would wash up, comb her hair. She
wishes her daughter would take off the mother's green sun
hat." They quarrel with each other and accuse each other}7

By this time Beatrix has reached the end of her life.
Her preoccupation with Lena's looks and manners is something
traded in for Lena's love. The tragic cost of her constant
petty demands of Lena to be something other than she is
repeats the cycle Beatrix lived with her mother. Love and
self identity are stifled by qualifying, superficial

distinctions and cause enmity between each generation of

 

y, Broner, fie; Mothers 239.

23

women. Beatrix realizes this while contemplating her
relationship to Lena. She knows that she "destroyed the
present, but, much worse, the past."138

Beatrix's final wish is for a rebirth:

Birth me, mothers. Carry me in your brine of your

belly and your tears. Let us sit on each others' laps,

daughters and mothers. We have hired our own hall.

We hold hands. Our engagement rings do not scratch.

Our wedding bands do not disband us. The musicians are

women. The one ascending the podium is a woman.
This scene of rebirth is crucial to an understanding of
Broner's political ideals. It expresses the novelist's
belief to include women's experiences in Jewish tradition
and provides a means for Jewish women to achieve security in
self identity: "Birth me, mothers," clearly alludes to Eve
as the "mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20). Broner
reinstates the significance of Eve, a woman, in Jewish
tradition. "Hold hands," "engagement rings that do not
scratch," express Broner's hope in love. A life of love,
free from enmity, will allow us to be ourselves. Thus
Broner wishes for a rebirth of Jewish tradition, love, the
self.

Her Mothers teaches that women must actively pursue
their self identities to "sustain themselves" and "survive."
At the same time the novel warns of the myths inherited from

generations before, to the damage of their relationships

with one another; myths placing Jewish and other women in

 

:” Broner, Her Mothers 240.

:” Broner, Her Mothers 241.

24
their "proper" roles--and driving them from their real
identities. The character Beatrix inherited her mother's
belief in certain feminine looks and manners, and tried to
impose the same beliefs on her daughter Lena. Thus Beatrix
stifled not only her own, but also her daughter's identity,
resulting in Lena's running away from home.
The novel further warns of consuming connections, i.e.
relations demanding and perpetuating conformity to self—
effacing roles. Broner's message: only through love will we
allow ourselves and others to be free from the conformity of
exclusive traditions. Making Jewish women realize that they
are not themselves by conforming to Jewish tradition, might
allow them enough freedom to ask their own questions.
Broner not merely reconciles Jewish feminism but creates a
new Jewish tradition, as exemplified with her
reinterpretation of Genesis. Broner truly heals and

repairs.

Summary

Broner's explicit concern with the selfhood of Jewish
women reflects her own experiences. A religious woman and
feminist, she was unable to identify with traditional
Judaism. Feminist inspirations led her to re—form Judaism
and rewrite traditional rituals. Thus her writing is both
religiously and politically significant for Jewish women--
and humanity. She stresses the importance of remaining

faithful to the individual truths we all know as humans, yet

25
also acknowledges the difficulties involved in having those
truths accepted. As readers, Jewish women can draw on
Broner's experiences and apply them to themselves: to "weave
a seamless fabric out of these two skeins [woman and Jew] of
our identities."w

Broner leads the way for Jewish women in demonstrating,
through literary examples, the necessity of participation in
the process of assembling self identity: she questions the
validity of patriarchal subordination and insists on the
validity of all human experience. The reader of Broner's
work becomes aware of the painful distinctions that
consistently divide'the human community. For Broner
"enmity" is a concept present in both the family and in
politics, as well as in religion. Her experience as a
Jewish woman is clearly related to the context of her
writing. Women, for all the various reasons patriarchal
society and religion provide, are driven to concerns of less
importance than that of their own identity and their love
for one another.

Broner's work strives to demonstrate the process of
security in self identity and provides examples of the
consequences of not doing so. Love for the human community
is Broner's answer to the painful reality of a stifled self
identity. Love is the surest way to heal the enmity between

us: as men and women, Jews and Christians, blacks and

 

w Schneider 512.

26
whites, mother and daughter. "When we read Broner, we
discover not just what it feels like to be a woman, but what

it feels like to be a human being.""1

 

“ French XV.

FAYE MOSKOWITZ: BREAKING FREE

As Broner, Faye Moskowitz also stresses the idea of
"connection" for participation in the process of assembling
self identity. Moskowitz, however, explores the importance
of communicative connections. Communication, to Moskowitz,
requires openness to others' ideas and beliefs, and the
evaluation of these for oneself. "[If] I have learned
anything," she states, "it is that we all change constantly
from student to teacher and back again.""2 This is a
process of constant seeking of meaning in life, of pursuit
of self identity. Without communicating, we stifle our
identities, the author warns.

Moskowitz sounds this warning in her fictional short
story collection Whoever Finds Thie: I Love You (1988). The
stories tell of the tragic consequences of restricted ties
of communication. The story characters are Jewish girls and
women whose identities are stifled by Orthodox Judaism and
sexist society; women who find themselves limited by
conformity to stereotypical roles. In her fiction,
Moskowitz makes one aware of this problem and offers
communication as the solution. Through the exchange of
ideas and beliefs one asserts meaning in life. Out of such
an intense personal involvement in the process of assembling

self identity, effective self definition emerges.

 

('2 Moskowitz, Faye. A Leak in the Heart. Talee From A
Woman's Life. Boston: David R. Godine, 1987. 124.

27

28

The reader recognizes Moskowitz's personal experiences,
as she tells them in her collection of autobiographical
short stories A Leak in the Heart. Tales From A Woman'e
Life (1985). As the daughter of Russian Orthodox Jewish
immigrants, she draws upon the tension between broad social
experience and the boundaries placed on her by traditional
Jewish values while growing up in a small American town: the
writer finds value in both aspects of her experience,
humanitarian values and values of political and educational
opportunity. Thus, she provides her reader with a framework

for the active pursuit of self identity.

Autobiographical Theme: Reconciliation of Traditional Jewish
and MOdern American values

Faye Moskowitz grew up in Jackson, a small Michigan
city, during the 1930s and '40s. Her parents and
grandmother were not assimilated to American culture.
Maturing in a family with traditional Jewish customs and
values on the one hand, and in American society on the
other, Moskowitz grew up in the tension between her family's
Jewish heritage and American culture. The daily
confrontations Moskowitz encountered between Old and New
World customs and values, shaped her development.

As a girl, Moskowitz dealt with the discomfort of being
Jewish in a predominately non-Jewish community by denying
her Jewishness. She did not want to be different. Looking

at her "blond-haired, goyish" friends who went on vacation

29

every summer when she had to stay at home, Moskowitz was
"sure" that she had been "exchanged at birth" and her
parents were really worldly Americans."3

Another example of the tension Moskowitz grew up with
is the embarrassment she felt when in company with her
unassimilated grandmother. Walking through the streets of
the small Jackson community toward a store, Moskowitz was
very embarrassed by her grandmother's appearance and manner:
Bobbe wore an apron over her dress instead of the "flowered
silk dress" and "soft, stylish hat" of American women; she
did not speak the "quiet" English but "loud" Yiddish in
everybody's hearing range: she refused to accept the price a
salesperson offered her for thread and tried to bargain like
she used to in the Old Country: and most embarrassing for
Faye, her grandmother went "to the bathroom in the middle of
the street--in broad daylight." Faye put her "head down and
walk[ed] away."“

Moskowitz's self-consciousness about her differences
from her American classmates and friends also made her
recognize her Jewishness. Because of her "un-American" dark
hair and because she couldn't afford to buy expensive angora

sweaters at a time when they were a "must-have," Moskowitz

embraced her Jewish heritage by joining the Zionist movement

 

a Moskowitz, Leek 8.

“ Moskowitz, Leek 3-5.

30
and preparing herself "for life on a Kibbutz."“

Often Moskowitz appreciated her Jewish heritage; she
enjoyed the Jewish community. On Passover, which has
remained her favorite Jewish holiday, she felt close to her
Jewish friends. "Breaking matzo together," Moskowitz
remembers, "gave us a sense of community...[and] griping
about our restricted diet truly bonded us.""°6

In short, Moskowitz was caught in a continuous
confrontation between her traditional Jewish heritage and
American culture. She felt, and was legitimately, a part of
both. Since her childhood, she has assembled self identity
from both sides of her environment. Her distinction between
Yiddish and English is representative of her experience:
Yiddish represents her Judaic roots in the Old World and
English signifies her experiences in the New World. Thus
Moskowitz not only found a connection between the languages
but bridged the gap between her roots and experience-~she
successfully captured meaning out of the interaction between
her conflicting cultural contexts:

There is beauty enough and ugliness enough and love

enough and hate enough for any one of us to select from

and shape our own absolutely personal combinations.

But this shaping must be a conscious thing: a reaching

back and forward for those details that create pattern

and form and motif in life. To see living as
connection is to bevel the rough edges, miter the

corners, blur the divisions for that time becomes a

chain of always accessible segments, not fragments, of
knowledge and experience.

 

6 Moskowitz, Leak 32.

‘“ Moskowitz, Leak 15-6.

 

31

O
I believe in...here, then, nowz and forever in the
connecting chains that set us free.

Moskowitz is able to understand her own growth so
clearly only today, as a woman who is actively involved in
the process of assembling her self identity. She did not
have this insight when she married right out of high school
and had four children. Then, her life expectations were
conformed to society's, defining a woman's "proper place" in
the home. "Like many young women in my high school," she
explains, "a diamond engagement ring to flash during senior
year, the promise of babies and a little home in the
suburbs, were expectation enough for me.""°8

But contrary to all expectations, Moskowitz felt more
lonely and bored than ever, when she met another woman
"trapped" in the same situation. They communicated their
ideas and found something in common and worth working for.
Together they became politically active, electing a highway
commissioner and organizing meetings in the "subdivision for
the state legislature." Applying American cultural
possibilities to her own needs, Moskowitz's activism was a
first step toward the realization of her abilities and
formation of a self. "[R]isk is no excuse for inaction nor
custom a definition of boundaries," the writer explains."’9

Significantly she refers to this period as her "first life."

 

‘7 74.

Li;

Moskowitz,

a MOskowitz, Leak 81.

49

 

7f

Moskowitz, Lea 114.

 

32
She recalls:
My husband and I found we had to take turns discussing
our day. Sometimes we never got to his turn at all.
Crazily, the more I did, the more I found time and
energy for. The children grew before our eyes, and I
did, too. For ten years I worked in politics; I call
that decade "my first life."50
Moskowitz began her "second life" when her family moved
to Washington, D.C. and she started a college education all
the way through to a PhD in American literature. Afterward
she took "the position of middle-school director in a small
private school" (her "third life") where she still
teaches.51
At fifty-two, I feel younger than I did back in our
little tract house when I tried to sleep the hours
away. Each morning I arise with a sense of
anticipation that the day confirms. I don't know how
many more lives are left to me, but surely there will
be others, and whatever they are, I will try to be open
to them. 52
Today Moskowitz attributes her growth to her
"teachers." She considers herself "the sum of their feeling
and doing."”’ Among them were her mother, and her husband's
mother and grandmother. Communicating their knowledge and
experience, Moskowitz was able to overcome the boundaries
her "foremothers" had found themselves in, imposed on them
by Orthodox Judaic traditions and American assimilationist

pressures: the former granting women significance in

 

50

55‘
x:

Moskowitz, a 83.

 

3‘
oo
01

m Moskowitz, Lea

52

 

Moskowitz, Leak 85.

” Moskowitz, Leak 120.

33
economic matters yet limiting their status to non-existence
in religious matters, the latter idealizing women's
passivity in all matters but the caretaking of children and
home. Moskowitz sought meaning for herself out of her
foremothers' knowledge and experiences, and thus learned to
feel secure in her own identity and to express herself--as
her two book publications show.

Moskowitz's mother was the homemaker whose burden to
feed her husband, children, parents, and herself in a time
when the family income was very limited, was invaluable for
survival and the holding together of the family. Yet she
was full with optimism and communicated opportunities of the
Promised Land--opportunities she never had.

No, my mother would not consider us poor. Wasn't this

the Promised Land? In spite of everything, she would

make certain the promise was kept. She perceived

America as a land where both men and women were capable

of unlimited goals. Barriers were everywhere for her,

yet she always found a way, if not through them, then
around them.

Her belief in the "unlimited goals" of the "Promised
Land" did not mean full assimilation or denial of
Jewishness to Moskowitz's mother--the most important lesson
the daughter learned. The mother insisted that her children
be proud of their Jewish heritage. Today Moskowitz
remembers with humor the pain she felt as a child:

...[Mother] doggedly insisted that I be proud of my

religion in a little town where to profess my Judaism

was to mark myself different from everybody else. At a
time in my life when I would have sold my soul in

 

“ Moskowitz, Leak 66.

34

exchange for being 'Piscopalian like my friend Eileen,

my mother coaxed me into carrying a box of matzo to

school so I could give my classmates an explanation of

Passover.

Moskowitz followed the lessons of her mother's belief
in the good deed, the mitzvah. As a child, she watched her
mother giving money to pious male Jewish scholars from the
little the family itself had. She offered kosher meals and
a bed for the night, usually the daughter's. "‘You're doing
a mitzvah,'" her mother explained. Later, when Moskowitz
has her own home, she and her husband take in peace marchers
for the night. And she says: "Ikey [the peace marchers] may
not realize they stand at the head of a symbolic queue that
began for me with an old man who carried a prayer book in
his satche1—-but I do."“

Today Moskowitz continues another Jewish tradition and
passes it on to her daughter: the Pushke Lady, collecting
money for a good cause. She remembers the Pushke Lady
"sitting in a chair safely out of the draft, shaking her

canister under our noses. During her time in the Zionist

movement, Moskowitz herself "stood on a street corner

"58

holding a canister. Later she collected money for the

United Way campaign, UNICEF, the Democrats, and the March of

 

” Moskowitz, Leak 66-7.

% Moskowitz, Leek 119.
5’ Moskowitz, leak 116.

” Moskowitz, Leak 117.

35
Dimes on Roosevelt's birthday.”' She took her daughter with
her to Alabama to meet the Freedom marchers, and notes: "I
didn't tell my daughter the trip was a mitzvah or even that
it was part of her pushke training, but she knows it now."60
Relating her experiences from the Jewish tradition to issues
concerning humanity in general, Moskowitz writes:

Fund-raising is computerized now: we're not quick to

let strangers into our homes, and no one seems to be

marching very much, but the Pushke Lady in me still
believes the knippl makes a difference. The world
grows larger and more complex, yet hunger and pain have
not lost their simplicity or directness. Besides, the

way things are, I need to store up all the mitzvahs I

can get.

Before her babies were born, Moskowitz lived with her
husband's mother and grandmother. With the grandmother,
Bobbe Frieda, she developed a strong bond. They were like
"sisters." Unable to sleep one night, Moskowitz and Bobbe
talked. Until that night, the younger had perceived of the
older as a stubborn person, anchored in the Old World and
ignorant of the American way. When Bobbe unpacked her
wedding gown and wig, relics from the Old Country, Moskowitz
began to feel closer to her. Comprehending the older
woman's experience, Moskowitz recalls, "I had the strangest
feeling touching the crumbling hair that if I stretched my

fingers far enough I could touch, too, the tender young

bride who must have cried so bitterly when the women came to

 

”' Moskowitz, Leak 118.

w Moskowitz, Leak 118.

 

a Moskowitz, Leak 119.

 

36
shear her heavy hair."62 She found similarities between her
and the grandmother. "Like me, she had gone to live with
her ehyiger (mother-in-law), at first. I wanted to ask her
if, like me, she had ever wondered just who she was in a
household that wasn't really hers."63

Through communication, Moskowitz and Bobbe Frieda grew
closer. With this growth of closeness, Moskowitz respected
Bobbe Frieda more. As she thought of the old woman's life,
she suddenly realized that "from identity crisis...[Bobbe]
didn't suffer."“’ To the contrary, Bobbe was not at all
stubborn and ignorant, but a powerful woman who had sought
meaning for herself out of what she was doing and felt
confident. Upon her arrival at her husband's house,
Moskowitz had intended to reorganize her mother-in-law's
household. Her attempts failed. That night Moskowitz
learned that the grandmother had recognized them as a simple
" arr' hkeit" (foolishness) all along. Moskowitz was not
upset, instead acknowledged her own stubbornness and
ignorance. She had learned to respect the old woman and
felt of her "power deposed." The two women spent the rest
of the night "giggling like schoolgirls."65

In short, actively pursuing her identity, Moskowitz

 

 

 

 

Moskowitz, Leak 46.
a Moskowitz, Leak 46.
“ Moskowitz, Leak 47.
a Moskowitz, Leak 48.

 

37
draws from both the older Jewish and newer American
traditions: humanitarian values from the one, political and
educational opportunities from the other. Thus, Moskowitz
reconciles both Jewish and American traditions. A Leak in
Lhe_flee;§ tells of Moskowitz's immigrant foremothers, and
American friends and students, who have been her teachers.
They communicate their knowledge and experiences, and thus
provide the necessary tools for the successful participation
in the process of assembling self identity: to respect
herself and others, to be open to an exchange of ideas, and
not to allow imposed limitations of society or religion
idealizing women's conformity to stereotypical roles.
Moskowitz realizes that we eLL are teachers and students at

certain times and change from one to the other constantly.‘66

Fictional Theme: Danger of Conformity

Although Moskowitz's growth through the reconciliation
of both Jewish and American traditions seems easy-going, she
by no means perceives the process of assembling self
identity as anxiety-free. To the contrary, in her second
book publication Whoever Finds This: I Leve You (1988), a
collection of fictional short stories, she characterizes
these anxieties as results of imposed limitations on women
by religion and society, idealizing conformity to

stereotypical female roles.

 

“’ Moskowitz, Leak 124.

 

38

Her fictional stories express Moskowitz's understanding
of the necessity to participate in the process of assembling
self identity through communication of ideas and beliefs.
Though these stories are fictional rather than
autobiographical, the reader of L_Leak in the Heart
recognizes Moskowitz's experiences woven into the stories.
Not only do they play in Michigan, but the main characters
are Jewish girls and women. The stories tell of its
characters' own inner selves dealing with the fear of
growing up, of love, of death, of loneliness, and most of
all of the difficulty finding security in their identities.
Moskowitz's characters represent the tragic consequences of
not actively pursuing selfhood. Again, the reader
understands the message: recognize imposed limitations on
yourself and participate in life to the fullest--seek
meaning in life through communication.

The title story tells of the young immigrant mother
Shifra who grieves over the loss of her baby daughter.
Chaya died from "a leak in the heart" and left the mother
with a hole in her life she has yet to fill. More
importantly, Shifra suffers from the ignorance of Orthodox
Judaism toward women, limiting them to passivity through
teachings of patriarchal superiority.

The resemblances between this story and Moskowitz's
experiences are striking. To the reader it appears as the
author's interpretation of her mother's dealing with a

situation she could not really cope with. Moskowitz had an

39

older sister who also died of "a leak in the heart." After
the sister's death, her parents moved out of their apartment
leaving everything behind, "food in the cupboards, sheets on
the beds, [they] had turned the key and walked out."a' The

character Shifra also wants to leave their home after their
baby's death. "‘David,'" she says to her husband, "‘I can't
look at this place. Get me out. I'll never come back here

'W“ As Moskowitz's parents moved from Detroit to

again.
Jackson, Michigan, Shifra and David move "away from Detroit
to a small town some sixty miles from their family and

"w' In the new home Moskowitz's father worked at a

friends.
junkyard; so does the character David.70 And like
Moskowitz's mother, a homemaker, preoccupying herself with
the cleaning of the house ("My mother's floors were of the
legendary variety you could eat from""), Shifra, the
homemaker, cleans constantly so the dirt will not "bury"
her.72
Shifra lives in fear instilled by patriarchal teachings

of Orthodox Judaism, idealizing men's superiority and

women's inferiority. Most of all, Shifra fears God. After

 

a' Moskowitz, Leak 54.

a: Moskowitz, Faye. ‘Whoever Finds This: I Love You. Boston:
David R. Godine, 1988. 4.

$’ Moskowitz, Whoever 5.
m Moskowitz, Whoever 5.
n Moskowitz, Whoever 31.
n

Moskowitz, Whoeve; 17.

40

her baby's death she is anxious to find out "what it was she
had done to offend God so, perhaps she could make some sense
out of what He had done to her."n Assuming she sinned when
she and her husband David made love while she was pregnant,
she blames the baby's death on herself. A week after
Chaya's death, when David wants to make love to Shifra, she
believes God is still "angry" with her and fears he will
punish her again. "Tell me," she asks David scared and
angry, "that I need another baby for the evil eye to fall
on."n Acknowledging male superiority, Shifra also fears
she sinned by becoming angry with and refusing David, who
then leaves the house. She blames herself and excuses him:
"He was a man, after all."75

Tragically, her fears stifle Shifra being herself. She
lives in her own little world, secluded from communication,
signifying her fears. The young woman is introverted, her
communication with David reduced to listening. Yet, filled
with questions about her relationship to God, Shifra holds
them back and instead entertains "endless inner
conversations, like dozens of crossed telephone lines."76
Unsurprisingly, the "world seemed shrunken for her like a

woolen dress washed in boiling water by mistake, a dress

 

Moskowitz, Whoever 5.

n Moskowitz, Whoever 10.

Moskowitz, Whoever 13.

‘% Moskowitz, Whoever 5.

41

whose shoulders refused her bowed back, into whose pockets
she could no longer plunge her balled-up fists."77

Shifra's fears are aggravated by her loneliness. Bound
to the home, she is constantly alone. Only cleaning
occupies her, cleaning to be respected in God's eyes again.
New to America, language and culture barriers do not make it
easier on her to break out of her fearful world. When a
neighbor calls on her with a plate of homemade cookies,
Shifra is too "anxious" and "suspicious" to talk to the
woman but loses her few English words and quickly shuts the
door. And she stands "for half an hour behind the door,
heart pounding, balancing the plate."78

Shifra's relationship to her husband is affected by
assimilationist pressures, confining her to the home in
accordance with the ideal of the lady. Her husband
assimilates more rapidly than she, who stays home all day.
To David, who works and has the opportunity to communicate,
Shifra feels more and more distanced. David talks
"American," only intensifying her feeling of loneliness in a
world which is already foreign to her.

...[Shifra] resented the excitement that seemed to

creep more and more frequently into his stories. She

took it as one more sign that he was diluting the

strength and purity of their grief. Scornfully, she

mocked his clumsy English. "I'm free, white and

twenty-one," he kept telling her. What did that mean?

Soon he would be speaking nothing but English, and she
would be more alone than ever. So she only pretended

 

'n Moskowitz, Whoever 7.

‘n Moskowitz, Whoever 8.

42

to listen for she did not really want to hear about his
life outside.

Tragically, there is no hope for a change to the
better. Shifra's fears and loneliness will remain because
of her passivity. She takes things for given and does not
believe in change through action. Once contemplating the
idea of running away, she quickly reconsiders, "Where can I
run...to where the black pepper grows?" Reflecting on her
argument with David, Shifra simply wonders, "Who could
change the world?"80

Shifra's passivity is instilled by Orthodox Judaism,
teaching women's obedience toward God and men. Herein lies
Moskowitz's criticism: through these teachings women are
barred from communication in the sense of questioning, i.e.
seeking meaning through an exchange of ideas and beliefs.
While Shifra's husband David goes out to work and
assimilates more and more to American culture, Shifra, bound
to the home as a result of assimilationist pressures, does
not have the opportunity to communicate and familiarize
herself with American culture and language. As a result,
she does not feel secure in her identity but constantly
fears punishment from God. Shifra, the reader understands,
will need to learn to communicate, i.e. to actively pursue
an exchange of ideas and beliefs and pursue her self

identity.

 

n Moskowitz, Leak 8.

m Moskowitz, Whoever 18.

43

The story "Irene" also deals with a young mother
trapped in her home. Unlike Shifra, Irene is familiar with
American culture and the world outside her home is not
foreign to her. stifled by the effects of society's
idealization of female domesticity, she is unable to
assemble a positive self image. The assumption of
traditional female roles is unfulfilling to Irene.

Again, the story is woven out of Moskowitz's
experiences. Irene, like the author, married out of high
school. As Moskowitz did not have more expectations out of
life than "the promise of babies and a little home in the
suburbs," the character Irene perceived babies and home as a
"solid foundation" in a "grown-up world" that was
"crumbling."81 Bored with their restrictive housewife/
mother role both author and character tried to sleep the day
away. "I remember mornings," Moskowitz writes, "when my
youngest son rocked his crib from wall to wall, leaving
mounds of cracked plaster on the floor, while I burrowed
under the covers until noon, desperately trying to pass the

"a And of her character Irene she says, "Mostly

hours away.
Irene slept, deep, dreamless sleep, awakening still tired,
not knowing where she was, not thinking she was somewhere

else, simply lost."83

 

m Moskowitz, Leak 81; Whoever 59.
82 Moskowitz, Leak 82.

a Moskowitz, Whoever 62.

44
"Lost" in the home, Irene is secluded from meaningful
communication and as a result is lonely and bored. She
spends her time smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee,
believing they "went along with marriage and maturity."86
She has a strong desire to communicate but does not get
familiar enough with other young women to exchange ideas;
they find meaning in the domestic female ideal. To her it
seems their conversations center around "waxing and
polishing." Referring to "‘my' floor" and "‘my' furniture,"
they reveal a certain "sense of proprietorship" which Irene
feels unable to match.85 The only person whose company
Irene enjoys is her housemaid Marie's. Irene often
desperately awaits Marie's arrival, for the company not the
cleaning. When Marie does not come in, Irene is
disappointed.
She was more disappointed than she cared to admit, not
only because the house, as usual, looked as if it had
been ransacked, but because she looked forward to
Marie's company. She was supposed to get out of the
house a little on the day Marie gave her: often she
found excuses to stay home, and then she followed Marie
around, carrying an ashtray, smoking cigarettes, and
gossiping about Marie's family and her own. Sometimes
Marie had time to bake an apple pie or fry some chicken
for supper. Then Irene felt especially happy. She
liked to have her house smell homey, the way a house
should .86

Moskowitz demonstrates the tragic effects of conformity

to society's idealization of female domesticity--where women

 

a Moskowitz, Whoever 60.

5 Moskowitz, Whoeve; 63.

“’ Moskowitz, Whoever 65.

45
do not find meaning in domesticity--in a scene where Irene's
mother tells her daughter "to get out of herself." Irene
remembers an image she envisions so often: "...her spirit
leaving her body, dragging along behind her, a shadow she
was forever tripping on as if it were the hem of a too-long

coat . "87

The "shadow," i.e. the ideal, Moskowitz
illustrates, does not fit Irene.

Irene forces the ideal to fit by embarking on project
after project conform to the stereotypical ideal. None of
the projects she becomes involved with have meaning to her,
Irene is not interested in what she is doing. As a result
her projects fail—-the ideal does not fit. Irene attempts
to sell cosmetics to her neighbors but never makes any
sales. "The trouble was she kept running into women as
moorless and lonely as she was. The hours she spent
chatting in their spotless homes or apartments never
resulted in any sales."88 Then Irene cans tomatoes for a
whole season. But the vegetable rots faster than she can
work. "No matter how quickly she worked, and Carl [her
husband] too, sometimes, the apartment reeked for days of
decaying tomatoes." She gets tired of canning and returns

to buying canned food.”' Irene participates in a practical

nursing course. But "the week they practiced giving him

 

a, Moskowitz, Whoever 63.

m. Moskowitz, Whoeve; 60.

89 Moskowitz, Whoever 61.

46
[the dummy] an enema, Irene stopped going to Goldberg

"“3 She buys a sewing machine planning to pay the

Trade.
installments with the money she hopes to earn from sewing.
"Unfortunately, she had no car with which to get to the free
sewing lessons in Detroit that came with the machine. The
clothes she managed to sew, following the machine's
instruction booklet, were all misshapen."91

In this story also, there is no hope for a change to
the better. Irene's communication network is limited, a
meaningful exchange of ideas and beliefs stifled. And, a
tragic expression of her state, she is convinced that
nothing "substantial" exists; the world is "crumbling."
Ever since the Second World War, Irene feared that the
existence of the atom bomb, with its power to erase life
within seconds, makes everything "unsubstantial."92

Irene desires security and meaning in life. Moskowitz
illustrates this symbolically when Irene successfully steals
the most beautiful dress from the most expensive clothing
line she can find. Both security and meaning are not given
to Irene, so she takes them. Tragically, at least for that
moment the theft provides Irene with security and meaning.

"For the moment she felt exhilarated and invulnerable,"

Moskowitz describes. "Deliberately, she slowed her pace,

 

m Moskowitz, Whoever 63.

m Moskowitz, Whoever 65.

1% Moskowitz, Whoever 62, 59.

47
even stopped at the hosiery counter to debate the relative
merits of ‘warm beige' and ‘suntan' with a clerk who wore
her glasses on a long gold chain." Just like the other
symbols signifying Irene's stifled identity, she stores the
dress in the basement along with the person she desires to
be.

Irene took off the Lanz dress in the bathroom and

dropped it in a clothes hamper. After her mother left,

she put it with the other Lanz dresses in the basement
near the wedding presents, the canned tomatoes, and the

Singer sewing machine.

Irene is a victim of society's ideal of female
domesticity. As her mother before her and her high school
friends too, Irene perceived marriage right out of high
school with babies and a nice home as the single path to
happiness. Lonely and bored, she tries to find satisfaction
in occupations conform to the stereotypical female ideal.
But to Irene this ideal simply does not have any meaning.
Unknowingly, she bares the tragic consequences of this
misperception. Irene, Moskowitz teaches, needs the
opportunity to communicate, to stimulate meaning in life
through new ideas and beliefs. But, conforming to the
ideal, Irene is secluded from communication that gives

meaning and thus from participation in the process of

assembling self identity.

 

% Moskowitz, Whoever 71-2.

48
Summary

The title story and the story "Irene" from Moskowitz's
collection Whoeve; Finds This: I Love You are two
significant examples of the author's critical ideal: women's
stifled identities resulting from Orthodox Judaism's
teachings of women's inferiority toward men and from sexist
society's ideal of female domesticity. Following the
teachings of Orthodox Judaism, Shifra learned to be passive,
does not communicate, and fearfully takes everything as
given and therefore unchangeable. Her husband David,
however, learned to be active and expresses himself in
excitement, "I'm free, white and twenty-one."94 Irene,
influenced by society's idealization of female domesticity,
does not see opportunities to engage in something else but
traditionally female trades. While her husband is at work,
Irene tries to sleep away the days and steals dresses to
find meaning in life at least for a moment. Confined to the
home and immobilized from an interaction with the "outside
world," both women have difficulties communicating to seek
meaning in their lives. Thus they are stifled from actively
participating in the process of assembling self identity.
Moskowitz's message: women have to be themselves and not
conform to religious or societal concepts that define their
identities for them. Conformity, as in these two stories,

fosters fear and insecurity. To live a life without fear

 

% Moskowitz, Whoever 8, 17.

49

and insecurity, Moskowitz teaches, we have to "break out of
the constricting circle" of conformity.95

Moskowitz herself was able to "break out": she had
"teachers" who communicated their knowledge and experiences
and she was lucky to find friends and a husband who were
open to an exchange of ideas and beliefs. Unfortunately,
the story characters Shifra and Irene do not have these
opportunities. Trapped inside their homes, it is hard for
them to find communication with nurturing companions. They
are closed off to new ideas and perceive life as given and
unchangeable or as meaningless. Instilled beliefs in
conformity to stereotypical female roles stifle
participation in the process of assembling self identity.
Moskowitz's stories demonstrate the tragic consequences of a

stifled self identity.

 

” Moskowitz, Leak 111.

TILLIE OLSEN: THE POWER OF "CIRCUMSTANCES"

As Moskowitz illustrates the need for communication in
the process of assembling self identity, Tillie Olsen's
fiction presents self identity stifled by "circumstances" of
class, ethnicity, and gender. Olsen's literature
illustrates that women, in particular, often find it
difficult to adequately express and develop their own
positive self concepts. Trapped by limitations of economic
and gender circumstances, they receive little room to grow
or develop friendships. Raising children, working in the
home or in the workplace, each add their own dimensions to
the problem of assembling self identity for women.

Olsen's thoughts and beliefs grew out of her Jewish
heritage on the one hand, and her maturing in a working-
class home on the other. Combined, they provided her with a
vision of an equal and just world for everybody. The
humanitarian ideal is expressed throughout her work: Olsen
presents the suffering of people who do not belong to the
dominant class, ethnic group, or gender. Implicitly, Olsen
criticizes capitalist patriarchal society for its disregard
of human life: she illustrates the power of circumstances
that do not allow human beings to participate in the
processes of assembling self identity: friendship and self-
exploration become stifled by economic and gender

boundaries.

50

51
Yiddish Culture and American Socialism

Tillie Olsen was born in 1912 or 1913 to immigrant
Russian Jews in Nebraska and was the second oldest child of
six. Outlining the cultural contexts in which Olsen
developed, the literary critic Elaine Neil Orr finds two
main influences on the author's beliefs and ideals: American
socialism and Yiddish culture. In the American midwest of
the 19105 and 20s, Olsen grew up in an economically
depressed environment. Her father, then a worker in a
packinghouse, together with others organized against the
management. "Thus her first memories were colored by labor
struggles, the realities of the workplace, the desire of
laborers for a job and dignity, and a growing American
socialism. "96

According to Orr, Olsen's parents' socialist ideal
rooted in their Jewish heritage. Yiddish culture, emerging
in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth century,
provided Jews with a vision to achieve a more humane world.
Until then, over centuries, Jews in Russia had waited for
the Messiah to deliver them from bondage under the Russian
Zsarist regimes. But the Yiddish ideal called for the Jews'
own participation in the realization of "greater economic
justice, learning, and human expansiveness." The spreading
of this new ideal brought about a break with the traditional

Jewish religion which was perceived as "a structure of life

 

%’ Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiriteal
Vision. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1987. 23.

52
so tied with the old constrictions." Orr explains:

Though she did not grow up in an Orthodox Jewish family

by any means...Olsen received the socialist and Yiddish

influence of her parents as a profound international
concern. She has said her parents chose what they
would keep of a Jewish identity, and it was largely the
humanism of Yiddishkeit. Socialism provided the
political lens for viewing the severe inequities of
life in Russia and later in the United States and gave
people like the Lerners a means of uniting with others
to fight aggressively for change.

These humanitarian ideals, combined with Olsen's
personal experiences, lay the groundwork of her writing.
From early childhood on she experienced what she later
defines as "circumstances" restricting one's selfhood.98
Her family's economically depressed situation forced Olsen
to drop out of high school in eleventh grade and help
financially support her family. "[A]lthough, as she is
careful to remind people who today take their degrees for
granted, this means that she went further in school than

"99 She married, raised

most of the women in her generation.
four daughters in San Francisco, and worked at low-paying
jobs. Also, she became an active member of the Young
Communist League organizing unions for which she spent times

in jail . '°°

 

97 Orr 24.

‘” Olsen, Tillie. silences. 1978. NY: Delacorte P/Seymour
Lawrence, 1989.

‘” Rosenfelt, Deborah. "From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and
the Radical Tradition." Feminist Studies 7, no.3 (Fall
1981):375.

mo "Tillie Olsen." Twentieth-Centugy American Literatuze.
Ed. Harold Bloom. Vol.5. NY: Chelsea, 1987. 2925.

53
Economic "Circumstances"

Olsen's fiction reflects the ideals she inherited from
Yiddish culture and American socialism. Her work calls for
a more humane world against social injustices, inequalities
and discrimination, a world granting everybody happiness by
allowing equal opportunity to participate in the process of
assembling self identity. Olsen's early work focuses on the
limitations lower-class status thrusts upon individuals; her
later work develops especially the restrictive circumstances
of gender.

One example of Olsen's early writing is the poem "I
Want You Women Up North to Know" (1934). It contrasts the
situation of the Mexican-American women who slave in the
clothing industry with the situation of the "women up north"
who wear the product of this labor. Olsen deals with social
injustices, the differences between the rich and the poor,
and stresses these as the cause for the loss of the working
women's identity. Selma Burkom and Margaret Williams note
that the poem's "central metaphor transforms the women
themselves...into the clothing they embroider--Lkey become
the product of their labor."101

I want you women up north to see

the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill

"exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats"

vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,

gouging the wages down,

dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,

 

1m Burkom, Selma and Margaret Williams. "De-Riddling Tillie
Olsen's Writings." San Jose Studiee 2 (1976):69.

54

In blood, in wasting flesh.102

In her novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties, Olsen also
illustrates economic circumstances as stifling in the
process of assembling self identity, but emphasizes the
special situation developing for women out of these
circumstances. Olsen began writing the novel when she was
nineteen and finished it five years later (1932-37). But
she did not publish her text then. "Thought long since lost
or destroyed" she found the manuscript in 1973. "It is all
the old manuscripts--no rewriting, no new writing."103

Yonnondio is the story of the Holbrook family
struggling to find a decent life when moving from a Wyoming
coal-mining town to a tenant farm in South Dakota and
further on to a hog—slaughtering factory in some unnamed
city. Their situation does not improve. Nevertheless, the
major character, Anna, learns to find meaning in life and
feel secure in her identity. But this is a hard and slow
process, stifled by the family's financial circumstances.

In Yonnondio, the critic Annette McElhiney states, "Olsen

allows us to see the major character triumph over life

 

'02 Olsen, Tillie. "I Want You Women Up North To Know."
Pertisan Review (1934):4. (Published under the name of Tillie
Lerner.) Rpt. in Feminist Studiee 7, no.3 (Fall 1981):367.
I quoted from Eeminiet Studiee.

"3 Olsen, Tillie. "A Note About This Book." Yonnondio: From
the Thirties. 1974. NY: Delacorte P/Seymour Lawrence, 1989.

55
despite the restraints which it has imposed upon her."w‘
Developing the process Anna goes through, the critic
marks the different stages: Anna's depression, her sickness,
her recovery and simultaneous attempts to "understand the
difference between ‘existing' and ‘living,'" and her final
understanding. The strengthening force for Anna is her

"105

innate "zest for life. Early in the novel, McElhiney

points out, Olsen describes Anna's strong character and will

06

to live life.1 Elias Caldwell, a dying old man, explains

 

to Anna's daughter Mazie:
Mazie, live, don't exist. Learn from your mother, who
has had everything to grind out life and yet has kept
life. Alive, felt what's real, known what's real.
People can live their whole life not knowing.10
Financial circumstances, however, continue to make life
hard on the Holbrooks. Pregnant with her fourth child, Anna
falls into lethargy. She lets "things be" and retreats into
a dreamworld, thumbing "over the pages of a catalogue."108
Anna exists, not lives.109

The birth of the baby Bess, of the new life, provides

Anna with renewed strength: she comes out of her lethargy

 

1“’ McElhiney, Annette Bennington. "Alternative Responses to
Life in Tillie Olsen's Work." Frontiers 2, no.1 (1977):86.

”5 McElhiney 86-9 .
1“’ McElhiney 86.

1”, Olsen, Yonnondio 37.

10° Olsen, Yonnondio 40.
‘09 McElhiney 87.

56
and again struggles to give her family all the care she can
under the circumstances. Unable to make a living in the
country, the family moves to the city slums where Jim
Holbrook works in a meat-packing factory; their financial
and spiritual situation does not improve--it gets worse.
They live in a filthy, broken down area where a "fog of
stink smothers down over it all--so solid so impenetrable,
no other smell lives beside it."110 .Again Anna becomes
pregnant, and again, as McElhiney describes, "moves back
into that somnambulant state which is psychologically, if
not entirely, like the physical chaos of death."111 One day
Mazie finds her mother at home:

In the dirty light of dusk her mother sat motionless,

her eyes large and feverish, the baby at her breast

asleep. The lifeless hair hung in two black braids,
framing her like a coffin, and above a spiral of fire
foamed, reflected the open damper.

When Anna has a miscarriage, Olsen also uses death to
describe the scene: "The blood on the kitchen floor, the two
lifeless braids of hair framing her face like a corpse, the
wall like darkness behind."113 For days Anna stays in bed,
"numb." When she has gained enough strength, Anna has the

remaining fetal tissue taken from her womb.

In the clinic Anna saw posters warning mothers of

 

1w Olsen, Yonnondio 47.

1" McElhiney 87.

1n Olsen, Yoegondio 71. McElhiney also cites this example.

1“ Olsen, Yonnondio 75.

57
germs. Her desire to provide for her family the best life
possible under their circumstances, drives Anna to clean
their home--but she is still too weak. Moreover, Anna
realizes that her family's well-being is intricately bound
to their economic circumstances and not to her efforts.
Knowing their financial situation will not change, she feels
helpless.

[Anna stood] swaying in the middle of the floor,

twisting and twisting the rompers in soundless anguish.

It was that she felt so worn, so helpless: that it

loomed gigantic beyond her, impossible ever to achieve,

beyond, beyond any effort or doing of hers: that task
of making a better life for her children to which her
being was bound.

Slowly Anna grows physically stronger, and more and
more the reader is aware of Anna's change from a merely
"existing" to a "living" woman. During her illness Anna
realized that her happiness would come from spreading love.
Tragically, only when Anna was ill, had she the time to seek
meaning in her life. "And a separation," Olsen describes,
"a distance-~something broken and new and tremulous--had
been born in her, lying by herself those long unaccustomed
hours free of task."115

Thus, Olsen points to those circumstances that impose
on people's lives and their identities. Again consumed by

housework, Anna discovers she must take the necessary time

to "understand the difference between ‘existing' and

 

1“ Olsen, Yonnondio 88.

1” Olsen, Yonnondio 93.

58
‘living.'" One day she and the children cross the
boundaries of the slum to find dandelion greens.
Overwhelmed by the peacefulness surrounding them, Anna
forgets her "mother look," the "mother alertness...in her
bounded body," instead sings and strokes Mazie.
The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie into
happiness and intactness and selfness. Soft wove the
bliss round hurt and fear and want and shame--healing,
transforming. Up from the grasses, from the earth,
from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent life
streamed and seeded. The air and self shone boundless.
Absently, her mother stroked; stroked unfolding,
wingedness, boundlessness.
Here, Anna understands the difference between "existing" and
"living." She "has come to terms with herself and her

1" Through seeking meaning in

life," remarks McElhiney.
life, Anna recognizes that her "being is bound" to spreading
love. Only then will she feel secure in her identity.

This newly found security in her identity fills Anna
with strength and spirit for life, despite its hardships.
From this point on, the novel describes scenes where the
children and their parents laugh. Anna has become the
comforting source for her family. In the final chapter,
Olsen illustrates Anna's strength and spirit: Baby Bess
pushes fruit jars from the table. "Centuries of human drive
work in her: human ecstasy of achievement; satisfaction

deeper and more fundamental than sex. I can do. I use m

powers; I! I!" The family unites in the kitchen laughing

 

1“ Olsen, Yonnondio 102.

1" McElhiney 88.

59

at Bess. "Heat misery, rash misery transcended."118
McElhiney interprets this scene in relation to what Elias
Caldwell told Mazie early in the novel, "She [Anna] has had
everything to grind out life and yet has kept life." The
critic concludes:

Anna knows what is real: work, sweat, heat,

disappointment, and failure--and also challenge,

achievement, joy, and love. She also knows that she

can achieve, both as an individual, and as a wife and

mother. She is not chafing against the misery of her

life: she is hopeful and strong with her self-

knowledge.119

Yonnondio shows that security in self identity leads to
a rewarding life. Yet, the process to reach it, Olsen also
demonstrates, does not only depend on one's self but on
certain circumstances. As a woman of the working class,
Anna is wrapped up by the tasks as mother and homemaker, and
can not afford time for herself. Only when she is sick, has
she time to think about life and her role in it. Thus, the

circumstances of being a working-class woman, stifle

participation in the process of assembling self identity.

Gender "Circumstances"
After writing Yonnondio, Olsen is silent for more than
twenty years. Caught herself by circumstances of class and
gender, she works at low-paying jobs as laundress, waitress

and secretary, and fulfills the non-paying task of homemaker

 

1m Olsen, Yonnondio 132.

1” McElhiney 89.

6O

1m Her work leaves her no

and mother raising four daughters.
time nor gives her the energy for fulfillment of her desire
to write.

[The] simplest circumstances for creation did not

exist. Nevertheless writing, the hope of it, was "the

air breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all." In
that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched
reading, beginnings of writing, and always "the secret
rootlets of reconnaissance."

In such snatches of time I wrote what I did in
those years, but there came a time when this triple
life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of
daily realities became too much distraction for the
writing. I lost craziness of endurance.

Finally, in the late 1950s Olsen was awarded a grant
allowing her the necessary time to write. Ever since she
has received several awards and honorary degrees, and has
taught at many colleges, among them Amherst College and
Stanford University. Her experiences during her years of
silence as well as humanitarian ideals inherited from her
socialist Jewish heritage, served Olsen as groundwork for
her more recent writings, consisting of four short stories
now collected in Tell Me A Riddle (1961). In these stories
restrictive circumstances of class still play an important
role. Stronger than in the novel, however, they emphasize
the interplay with circumstances of gender. In the story "0
Yes," Olsen develops the theme further by adding

circumstances of race as another factor stifling selfhood.

The stories tell about female characters, mothers and

 

1"" Bloom 2925.

1a Olsen, silences 19-20.

61
daughters, the burdens they carry as results of their low-
class status, their gender or race. Olsen's stress on
"circumstances" of gender is an indication of her own
restrictive experience. The stories "I Stand Here Ironing"
and the title story are autobiographical in that they
describe women who are silenced by the circumstances of
class and gender leaving them no time for participation in
the process of assembling their self identities.

"I Stand Here Ironing" goes one step further and
demonstrates the tragic consequences of circumstances on
children. A nameless mother tries to justify why her
daughter Emily, compared to her four siblings, is
introverted and pessimistic about the future. The answer to
this riddle "moves tormented back and forth with the
Louise Bernikow writes, "Back and forth, like the
iron, the mother's mind moves, love and despair, blame and

'“3 Becoming a mother at nineteen and then

resignation.
deserted by her husband, living in the depression, working
at low-paid jobs during the day, doing housework at night,
having to put her daughter into a convalescent home for some
time, rearing four children in a second marriage-~all this

seems to be reason enough. Yet, the critic Rose Yalow Kamel

finds, the mother recognizes it is not. And she also knows

 

‘22 Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me A Riddle. 1961. NY: Delacorte
P/Seymour Lawrence, 1989. 1.

123
46.

Bernikow, Louise. Amoeg Women. NY: Harmony Books, 1980.

62

that she will never solve the riddle.”‘

I will never total it all. I will never come in to
say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father
left me before she was a year old. I had to work her
first six years when there was work, or I sent her home
and to his relatives. There were years she had care
she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking
in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and
curly hair and dimple, she was slow where glibness was
prized. She was a child 9f anxious, not proud love.
We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of
easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted
mother. There were the other children pushing up,
demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was
not. There were years she did not let me touch her.
She kept too much in herself.125

Growing up in a hostile world, seeking her mother's
love and attention, Emily has never learned to feel secure
in her identity. Instead, she stays frightened and silent.
Only on stage, as a comedian at school performances, does
Emily speak out. This, however, Kamel remarks, is another's

1%. The girl has not been given the

role, not her own.
opportunity to grow into her self. Thus, Emily sees no
prospect for the future but believes that in a few years
everybody will be "atom-dead."

The mother acknowledges that "her wisdom came too late"
to help her daughter, but also that Emily "is a child of her

"n7

age, Of depression, Of war, of fear. Financial and

political circumstances did not allow the daughter to learn

 

1% Kamel 92.
‘5 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 12.
12‘ Kamel 92 .

‘3' Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 12.

63
to seek meaning in life and thus participate in the process
of assembling self identity. Realizing her daughter's
problem, yet unable to help her, the mother can only pray:
Only help her to know--help make it so there is cause

for her to know--that she is more than this dress on
the ironing board, helpless before the iron.

Eva, the grandmother in "Tell Me A Riddle," has lived
her life as the all-giving and all-loving mother and wife.
She recognized that for the most part of her life she has

my Not only

lived "between" and "for" but "not with people.‘
her seven children but also her husband Max demanded full
attention and could not stand her doing something just for
herself: a young wife alone at night nursing the baby, she
"would try to stay awake for the only time there was to
read." Her husband would come in late and tell her, "put
the book away, don't read, don't read."130 The children
grown up and gone now, he wants to sell the house and move
into an Old People's home, the Haven, where he can be near
his friends, and let others care for him and his wife. But
Eva wants her peace in their Old home. "Never again to be

forced to move to the rhythms Of others."131

Until her cancer surgery, Eva had only wanted peace.

 

123 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 12.

‘3’ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 76.

1” Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 67.

1“ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 68.

64

But after it, McElhiney states, "she begins to review,

" 132

evaluate, and attempt to renew her life. She is anxious

to hear everything. Before, she used to shut her hearing
aid Off: Eva shut out life. Now she attempts to comprehend
every little detail, "How the petals are, fold on fold, and

"133

the gladioli color. The autumn air. Eva lives life:

 

consciously breathes, smells, sees--participates.

Eva further expresses her desire to live life by
rejecting possible restrictions thrust on selfhood by
religion and custom. As McElhiney points out, she voices
the importance of "an awareness of life, and teaching others
to be aware Of the same."84

When her son-in-law, a Rabbi, appears, Eva is angry and
wants him to leave. She tells her family to change her
status on the hospital list regarding her religion and race.
"Tell them to write: Race, human: Religion, none."135
McElhiney explains, "No crutches for Eva now, she intends to
walk through the rest of her life without them."136

Eva is also upset when her daughter Hannah lights the

candles of benediction. She realizes, "Not for pleasure she

 

137' McElhiney 81 .

‘33 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 79.

1“’ McElhiney 82.

‘3’ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle so.

13‘ McElhiney 8 1 .

65

'fly' But Hannah explains

[Hannah] does it. For emptiness.
that she does it for her children, to give them a sense of

their heritage. This upsets Eva even more who believes in
the importance to value life:

Heritage. How have we come from our savage past, how

no longer to be savages--this to teach. To look back

and learn what humanizes--this to teach. Learned books

in the house, will humankind live or die, and she gives

to her boys--superstition.1

At the same time, Eva realizes that she herself was
unable to teach her children awareness of life. Olsen,
again, makes the circumstances of a lower class
housewife/mother responsible. "Heritage! But when did I
have time to teach? Of Hannah I asked only hands to
help."139

When it is clear that Eva will soon die, all but her
learn about it. Max takes her on a round of family visits
for one last time. Eva does not enjoy the forced visits.
She cannot stand being with her family. TOO many memories
come back about her life lived "for" and "between" others
with hardships and pain, constantly absorbed by the problem
of feeding and raising her children with so little money.
NO, all Eva desires is solitude, time to think about life
and her role in it.

Surely that was not all, surely there was more. Still

the springs, the springs were in her seeking.
Somewhere an Older power that beat for life. Somewhere

 

‘37 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 81.
I” Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 81.
B9 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 81.

66
coherence, transport, meaning. If they would but leave
her in the air now stilled of clamor, in the reconciled
solitude, to journey on.1
Unable to endure the constant confrontation with her
past, Eva wants to return home and have her peace. But
nobody allows her to find it: Max forces her to stay "for

'fl“ Her children burden

the fear of the future raced in him.
her with their memories and needs.
Later, finding out about her illness, Eva finds peace
only in death--not at home, but in a Los Angeles apartment
for the elderly. Slowly she retreats into her self. "She,
who in her life had spoken but seldom and then only when
necessary (never having learned the easy, social uses of

words) how in dying, spoke incessantly."1"2

Eva speaks Of
her life fifty years ago in Russia, and Of Lisa, a Russian
revolutionary who taught her to read. "To her [Lisa], life
was holy, knowledge was holy, and she taught me to read.
They hung her." And Eva realizes, "Everything that happens
one must try to understand why.""’3
When her children come to visit, Eva "tries to

understand" herself as a mother. "Pay me back Mother, pay

me Leek to; all you Loek fgom me," guiltily she imagines her
Oldest daughter's thoughts, for whom she never had time but

 

rm Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 84.

1“ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 85.
*“ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 103.

'“ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 103.

67

asked only help Of in caring for the younger siblings.144

And she "tries to understand" her role in the general
society, and is shocked by the easiness with which humans

destroy other lives.

Eyen in peality (swallow) life's lack of it
Slaveships deathtrains clubs eeenough

The bell summon wha; enables

78,000 in one minute (whisper Of a scream) 78,000

human beings we'll destroy ourselves?

Eva seeks a solution to the problem why human beings
kill each other. As McElhiney points out, "the nearer Eva
gets to death, the more she seems to understand.""’5 She

understands that we have to value every life.

NO pan one except through others
Strong pith the not veg in the now

Dogma dead war dead one gounpry

Lifit high banner Of reason (tatter of an orator's
voice)

justice freedom lig t

Humankind life worthy capacities

§eeks (blur of shudder) belong human being“6

 

Seeking meaning in life, Eva not only pursues her own
identity, but inspires Max to ask similar questions. He
remembers his own revolutionary past in Russia with regret

for what their lives lost in America:

...that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of

 

moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible
witk the grasp of the past, with all that fpeed,
ennobled

 

1“’ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 107. Original emphasis.
1“ McElhiney 84.
1“’ Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 109, 110. Original emphasis.

1", Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 113. Original emphasis.

68
And his thoughts wander to Eva, picturing her life in the
past and the present. Admiring his wife for her enduring
belief in life despite all the throwbacks, Max asks: "Still
you believed?""°8
Eva provokes Max's "awareness Of life, of others, and

'149 Max learns

of questioning one's relationship to both.‘
that despite the hardships Eva has had to put up with
throughout her life, her belief in life is not broken. Her
belief motivates her to "review and evaluate" life. Thus,
Eva pursues her self identity and dies in peace. Eva's
granddaughter Jeannie tells Max:
Grandaddy, Grandaddy don't cry. She is not there, she
promised me. On the last day, she said she would go
back to when she first heard music, a little girl on
the road of the village where she was born. She
promised me. It is a wedding and they dance, while the
flutes so joyous and vibrant tremble in the air. Leave
her there, Grandaddy, it is all right. She promised

me. 15Come back, come back and help her poor body to
die.

Summary
This selection of works by Tillie Olsen demonstrates
the power of circumstances of class and gender on selfhood.
Living in economic poverty stifles participation in the
process of assembling self identity for the Mexican-American

women in Olsen's poem, for the novel character Anna, and the

 

"’8 Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 113-14.

1” McElhiney 85.

15° Olsen, Tell Me A Riddle 115-16.

69
short story characters Emily and Eva. As mothers of low-
income families the characters Anna and Eva carry an extra
burden: they feel guilty and unable to provide necessities
for their children, like a good meal, for example.

Further, the mothers are victims of gender
circumstances: they have no time for themselves but are
consumed by their families' needs. Victims of
circumstances, Olsen's literature illustrates, are not only
the mothers themselves, but also their children: if the
mothers are not secure in their identities, they cannot be
spiritual sources for their children, as in Emily's and her
mother's case. As Olsen explains through the novel
character Anna: once Anna found meaning in life, and thus
felt secure in her identity, she became a spiritually
comforting source for her family. But the author emphasizes
once more the power Of circumstances: to reach a
recognition as Anna did, depends on the time a mother is
able to spare. Poor economic circumstances certainly stifle
the process of reaching such a recognition.

By making us aware of restrictive circumstances on
selfhood, Olsen is critical Of our capitalist patriarchal
society's structures and functions. Her critique is the
product of ideals steeped in Yiddish culture and American
socialism, ideals, in Orr's words, that provided her with "a

fundamental faith in possibility and a desire for change

70

into a more harmonious and life-affirming existence."151
Olsen envisions a humane world, equal and just. Through the
story character Eva, the author expresses her vision: we
have to consider us all as pee equal human race. We have to
value life, like Eva did, by opening up our senses to its
natural beauty and by questioning artificial circumstances.
To "try and understand" as Eva put it, to seek meaning in
life as a life-long process, helps not merely to assess
life, but also allows participation in the process Of
assembling self identity: a process necessary to live a
happy and rewarding life.

Thus, Olsen's message: we have to be responsible to
life. We must not allow circumstances to exert power on our
lives but must believe in ourselves, our abilities "to

understand." We must participate.

 

1“ Orr 76.

GRACE PALEY: BACK TO FRIENDSHIP

Like Olsen, Grace Paley grew up in a secular household.
She also emphasizes the limitations of class, ethnicity, and
gender on selfhood. While Olsen stresses the impact of the
social class system, Paley accentuates an interactive
approach: the formation of "communities" and inspiration of
"social consciousness." Through these, one exceeds
boundaries of class, ethnicity, and gender. Thus, central
to the writer's stories are forms of community: bonds
between mothers and children, friendships between women, and
relationships between women and men. Nurturing bonds are
founded on an exchange of ideas and beliefs that add meaning
to life. This exchange, Paley demonstrates, fosters
awareness and understanding of others and ultimately
inspires social consciousness. She expresses this theme in
her stories as common political action for social justice.
Thus, the idea of reaching back to friendship is crucial to
her characters' participation in the process of assembling
self identity.

Implicitly, the author criticizes society's capitalist
patriarchal strife for power, neglecting and destructing
human life. She sets women and children as an opposing pole
to this negligence and destruction, as regenerators of life:
in her stories, they form communities and inspire social
consciousness. Paley recognizes, and in this sense appeals

to the reader to realize, that we all are equal human beings

71

72
and deserve to be valued as such, without the categorizing
boundaries of class, gender, or ethnicity.

Paley formed her beliefs in community and social
consciousness already as a child, growing up in a Jewish
environment. Ever since she has valued and applied these
beliefs in her life as mother, wife and friend, and as
activist in both the women's and peace movements. The
experiences she gained, the stories she found in her life

and around her, weave into Paley's fictional collections of

 

short stories The Little Disturbances of Man (1959),
Epormous Changee At the Last Minute (1960), and Later the
Seme Day (1985). Paley's message: community and social
consciousness add meaning to life. Security in self
identity, she demonstrates, depends on values of community

and social consciousness as well as individual effort.

"Community" and "Social Consciousness"

Grace Paley was born in 1922 in the Bronx as the
daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Although raised in a
secular household, her Jewish heritage has had great impact
on Paley's beliefs. The Jewish neighborhood, a grandmother
who attended religious ceremonies in the synagogue, and a
father who was not religious but introduced his daughter to

the Old Testament, established a sense of Jewish identity

73
from early childhood on.152

Paley's readings of the Old Testament were especially
influential. They provided her with a sense of "common
history" and formed, for her, the meaning Of being Jewish:
"to have social consciousness."153 The Old Testament book of
Exodus, stories of the Jews in Egyptian exile, for example,
she interpreted as a reminder that Jews were once
"strangers"--outsiders. She also took it as a lesson for
Jews "to behave decently" toward the stranger. When Paley
saw injustice, she felt "outraged" and wanted to end it.
Her Jewish sense of community and social consciousness made
Paley proud of her heritage.“‘

Today Paley still identifies being Jewish with
community and social consciousness. In New York City, her
first home, she is around Jews always, "in a continuous
Jewish community." She never feels the urge to attend
services; Jews are around her always. In Vermont, her
second home, however, there are only a few Jews. There
Paley attends services. For her this has a "communitarian

reason:" "My going comes from a very simple longing to see

my own people...and to be with them at a very profound point

 

1”: Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie and Irene Klepfisz. "An
Interview With Grace Paley." The Tgibe of Dina. .A,Jewisk
Women's Anthology. VT: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1986. 289-90.

‘53 Kaye/Kantrowitz 29o.

1“’ Kaye/Kantrowitz 290.

74

in their year, in their life, in their thinking."155
Paley's Jewish heritage has had a more significant impact on
her than any American educational institution. When she was
seventeen, she dropped out of Hunter College; Paley had
other priorities.

I would go to school but I could never get up to the

classroom. I could sometimes get to the first floor,

but I couldn't get into the classroom. I would meet

someone, and talk to them, and that would be it. You

know, a conversation anyplace stopped me from doing

anything...1

"Conversation" in the form of storytelling has been
most influential on Paley--as listener and as teller. To
her it constitutes a form of community. She used to listen
to the stories her parents (especially father) and relatives
told when she was a child. Later she listened to her
neighbors, friends, and children. Everybody tells stories,
she says. "...I think that storytelling and people telling
stories to other people and the experience of paying
attention and listening in some way relate to that former
loss of a community."157

Paley forms community by telling stories about everyday
issues, common things we all can relate to. The storyteller

explains:

[Everydayness] that's what interests me. When I am
asked--Is she a heroine?--I'm not really interested in

 

1” Kaye/Kantrowitz 290, 291.

1“’ Gelfant, Blanche. "Grace Paley: Fragment For A Portrait
in Collage." New England Review 3 (1980):287.

19' "A Symposium On Fiction." Shenandoah 27, no.2 (1976):29.

75

that. I'm not interested in that extraordinary person

to that extent, except to the degree that all these

people are extraordinary to me. But how daily life is

lived is a mystery to me. You write about what's a

mystery to you. What is it like? Why do people do

this? Every day, get up in the morning...58

Paley's emphasis on daily life raises social
consciousness by increasing awareness of our common concerns
and finding beauty in these--what to have for dinner, who
watches the kids while the parents work, how to buy toys for
the children if there is hardly enough money for shoes. In
this sense Paley's writing is political: if men and women,
blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles all share a sense of
having something in common, we are closer to eliminating
injustices. Paley's stories contribute to a dialogue

between people and to the realization that we all are more

alike than different: we are the human community.

Themes and Characters

Grace Paley's central themes are motherhood and
womanbonding--forms of feminine community. Her special
concern for women and children grew out of her own
experiences. At nineteen she married and had two children.
Paley's children are a source for her writings. They are
represented in her stories' characters. But also a lot of
their friends and mothers are.

I still can't forget how much I learned about human

 

we Lidoff, Joan. "Clearing Her Throat: An Interview With
Grace Paley." Shenandoah 32, no.3 (1981):12-3.

76

life being not just with my own kids, but with other

women and their children. I can never repay the debt

that I have to the community of women with whom I

raised my kids. I owe them a lot, and they owe me. I

mean, we began in those days friendships that lasted

for thirty years.

Paley did not write stories until she was about thirty-
three. "Upset" and "concerned" about the relationships-~or
rather non-relationships--between women and children and
men, Paley "became terribly interested in the life Of women

n. "160 Her

and children, how they were living apart from me
interest was accompanied by a "sudden consciousness" for the
problems Of her female friends, a realization that she was
"a part of this bunch of women," that their "lives were
common and important."161 Today Paley considers herself a
feminist writer, an identity which clearly emerged out Of
her experiences. "I'm a feminist and a writer. Whatever is
in here comes from the facts of my life. To leave them out
would be false."162

Paley's descriptions of a bond between mothers and
children and between women express the author's belief in
community and concern with raising social consciousness.
Major characters are single and married mothers who are

immigrants, blacks, whites, Jewish or gentile. No matter

who they are or where they come from, they all form a

 

‘59 Gelfant 288.
“’° Lidoff 6.
‘61 Lidoff 6-7.

'62 Lidoff 23 .

77
nurturing bond with their children and each other--they
exceed class and ethnic boundaries and form a community.
These communities are founded on an exchange of ideas
and beliefs with each other. The story characters find
meaning in life through this exchange and thus feel secure
in their identities. Paley emphasizes the reaching of this
feeling of security in identity as a life-long process. In
the stories, the critic Blanche Gelfant notes, this process
is described as "change."“9 Open to an exchange of ideas
and beliefs, Paley's characters constantly find new meanings
in life and may change their entire identities.
Paley's work develops a comprehensive picture of the
process of change and self identity. Gelfant remarks:
[The] sense of the value Of life-~of every individual
life, and of life as a process, described in the
stories as change--may be exactly what we mean by
faith: and Paley's heroine, who pops in and out of her
stories, growing Older and treasuring both past and
future, is well-named.
Faith is the most outstanding character among several cast
characters, reappearing in each Of Paley's books, that
Offers insight into the process of change and the assembling
Of self identity. As her name suggests, Faith is the
confident believer in life; she asserts life while forming
communities and allowing others to inspire her social

consciousness as well as inspire it herself in others.

Thus, the character Faith is Paley's voice. As Eve Merriam

 

“’3 Gelfant 279 .

1““ Gelfant 279.

78
in her review of Later the Same Day notes, "I think it is
not presuming overmuch to read Faith as a possible Grace,
and I find it felicitous that both names have an evocative

generic as well as an individual assignment."165

Bonds Between Mother and Child

"A Subject of Childhood" is one of Paley's early
stories. Faith is a young mother, her two sons Richard and
Tonto are small. Despite the hardships raising the children
by herself, Faith finds meaning in life in bond with her
sons and identifies herself as a mother. When her lover
Clifford engages in a wrestling match with the boys and
"loses," he cannot admit his defeat. In this scene Paley
illustrates the tension present between masculine values of
dominance and feminine values of survival. Clifford attacks
Faith's mother-identity, accusing her of having "corrupted"
the children's "instincts," of being a "stinking mother."
Faith angrily replies:

For I have raised these kids, with one hand typing

behind my back to earn a living. I have raised them

all alone without a father to identify themselves with

in the bathroom like all the other little boys in the

playground. Laugh. I was forced by inclement

management into a yellow-dog contract with Bohemia,

such as it survives...Meanwhile I have serviced Richard

and Tonto, taught them to keep clean and hold an open
heart on the subjects of childhood...I said, "Stinking?

 

“5 Merriam, Eve. "In Praise of Grace: The Book We've Been
Waiting A Decade to Be Read." Review of Lager the Same Day.
Ms, 13 (April 14, 1985):13.

79

I raised them lousy?"166

Clifford does not answer. Offended and hurt, Faith
throws a heavy ashtray at him which tears his earlobe.
"‘You don't say things like that to a woman,‘ I whispered.
‘You damn stupid jackass. You just don't say anything like
that to a woman. Wash yourself, you moron, you're bleeding
to death.'""57 Clifford leaves and Richard goes down to
play. Tonto refuses to join his brother, instead he insists
on sitting on Faith's lap. TO Rose Yalow Kamel this scene
represents a dialectical tension between bonding and
bondage: "The boys have sentenced Faith to years of lobbying
in stores, schools, playgrounds on their behalf. Paley's
telling images in that epiphany dramatize the bondage:
prison, stripes, bars, contrasts in brown and white, and a
vision Of Alcatraz filtered through the fingers of a
child.“58 Paley writes:

I held him so and rocked him. I cradled him. I closed

my eyes and leaned on his dark head. But the sun in

its course emerged from among the water towers of

downtown office buildings and suddenly shone white and

brown on me. Then through the short fat fingers of my

son, interred forever, like a black and white parred

king in Alcatraz, my heart lit up in stripes.16

Meaning for Faith comes from being a mother: her life

evolves around her sons. Although it has been hard raising

 

1“’ Paley, Grace. The Little Dishurbances of Man. 1959. NY:
Penguin, 1985. 139-40.

1a' Paley, Disturbances 140.

"’8 Kamel 124.

“9 Paley, Disturbances 145.

80
the boys by herself, Faith has not lost her own values. She
realizes the problem of the need for self assertion as well
as the importance Of flexibility. She raises her children
accordingly. Faith may feel "barred" by circumstances yet
her "heart lights up" through the bond with her sons. Thus,
through this mother-son bond and her self identification as

mother, Faith finds security in her identity.

In the story "Faith in a Tree" Paley describes the
mother-child bond inspired by social consciousness. Faith
and her sons are older now. Open to an exchange of ideas
and beliefs, Faith, who used to be politically passive,
becomes active to secure a better life for her community.
From a tree, Faith overlooks the playground while watching
her neighbors and friends, mothers like her, and
contemplates their ordinary lives. Here, for her, is where
meaning lies.

One God, who was King of the Jews, who unravels the

stars to this day with little hydrogen explosions. He

can look down from His Holy Headquarters and see us
all...But me, the creation Of His soft second thought,

I am sitting on the twelve—foot high strong, long, arm

of a sycamore, my feet swinging, and I can only see

Kitty, a co-worker in the mother trade-~a topnotch

craftsman.1

Later in the story some parents appear with their

children demonstrating the Vietnam War. A policeman tells

them to disperse. For three minutes they do so, and then

 

rm Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes At the Last Minute. 1974.

NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981. 77-8.

81

continue their activities on the park's boundaries, "their
posters on the carriage handles, very solemn, making friends
and enemies." Upset with his mother's and friends' failure
to join and support the demonstrators, Faith's son Richard
writes the demonstrators' slogans on the park blacktop "so
the entire Saturday walking world could see--WOULD YOU BURN
A CHILD? and under it, a little taller, the red reply, WHEN
NECESSARY." Richard's action stimulates insight for Faith
into her incomplete approach to dealing with life and raises
her social consciousness. She climbs from her tree,
determined to become politically active. "[E]vents turned
me around," Paley writes, "changing my hairdo, my job
uptown, my style of living and telling...I thought more and
more and every day about the world."171

Her new openness to alternative ideas and beliefs
allows Faith to participate in the process of assembling
self identity: she becomes more aware of "the world" and
finds meaning in her new interests. "Faith in a Tree"
exemplifies its author's emphasis on the pursuit of self
identity as a life-long process: a constant exchange of
ideas and beliefs generates the process. As Paley
illustrates in this and the previous story, a mother is not
only her children's nurturer, but the children also nurture
their mother. Thus, Paley's characters participate in the

process of assembling self identity through relationships

 

1" Paley, Enprmous 99-100.

82

that involve interaction and Openness to change.

Friendships Between WOmen

Paley describes womenbonds as Often long-lasting
friendships or as sometimes short but intensive comraderies.
Sharing the same experiences and/or fighting together for
social justice, the characters exceed boundaries of class,
age, or ethnicity. As bonds between mother and children,
womenbonds in Paley's stories exist as inspirations for
social consciousness. Again, through such an exchange Of
ideas and beliefs the characters add meaning to life and
ultimately feel secure in their identities.

In "The Long-Distance Runner" Faith, now middle—aged,
is afraid of getting Old. She realizes that soon her
children will begin their own lives. Also, her boyfriend,
Jack, is uncommitted to their relationship. Faith needs
time to think and decides to run, leaving the children, old
enough now, by themselves. "I wanted to go far and
fast...round and round the county from the sea side to the
bridges, along the old neighborhood streets a couple Of
times, before Old age and urban renewal ended them and
me."w2 'Running through the places of her childhood, Faith
hopes to recapture her life she feels she is losing. "...I

had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and

 

rn Paley, Enormous 179.

83
staring. I had decided to run."173
In her child-neighborhood, Faith finds herself
surrounded by many blacks who begin to question her. She
becomes uneasy when the peOple begin singing "Devil, Oh

,nn Faith then meets a Girl Scout, Cynthia, on the

Devil.
street and explains that she used to live in the
neighborhood. Cynthia leads Faith into "the hallway of the

”5 Faith, suddenly

whole house of my childhood.‘
uncomfortable and scared upon the confrontation with
memories, only resentfully allows the girl to lead the way
to her Old apartment.

Still downstairs, Faith lies to the girl that she can
not knock on her Old home's door because her mother is dead.
Saddened, Cynthia starts to cry and wonders what would
happen to her if her protective mother died. To calm her,
Faith answers Cynthia could live with her and her two boys.
But the thought of living with two white boys terrifies the
girl who learned that all white men are out to "jostle my
black womanhood.""'6 She screams for help. Hearing the
rescuers approach, Faith is frightened, runs up the stairs

and finds herself suddenly at the door Of her Old home.

Frantically she knocks. The door Opens and Faith meets Mrs.

 

1n Paley, Enormous 181.

1“ Paley, Engrmous 182.

"5 Paley. W 184.

T“ Paley, Enormous 187.

84
Luddy, a young mother who inhabits the old apartment
together with her four children. Hearing all the noise,
Mrs. Luddy quickly "took a hard pinching hold on [Faith's]
upper arm" and pulled her in. "Then she bolted the door
herself."177

As it turns out, Faith stays for three weeks exploring
Old emotions and her immigrant past. The shelter protects
her not only from the neighbors Faith fears, but also Offers
a retreat from her present situation: "There was a
sentimental truth that lay beside all that going and not
going. It yee my house where I'd lived long ago my family
life."178 Happy memories come into Faith's mind. She
remembers her mother, for example, who sewed beautiful
cushions and decorated the home with them.

It was the way she expressed herself, artistically, to
embroider at night or take strips of flowered cotton
and sew them across ordinary white or blue muslin in
the most delicate designs, the way women have always
used materials that live and die in hunks and tatters
to say: This is my place.

During Faith's stay, friendship between the women
grows, exceeding racial and generational boundaries.
Together with Mrs. Luddy she rises early in the morning tn:
feed the babies and change their diapers. She spends.thne

with the seven year Old Donald, engaging him in

conversations about reading and writing. Faith and.l¢rso

 

T” Paley, Enormous 188.

rm Paley, Enogmous 188-9.

Tn Paley, Ehoghous 189.

85
Luddy discuss their pasts, sharing in common that both their
husbands left them. Mrs. Luddy spends hours at the window
waiting for her husband's return, like Faith used to do.
They are trying to find meaning in their lives through the
exchange of their thoughts.

I believed she was watching and waiting for a
particular man. I wanted to discuss this with her,
talk lovingly like sisters. But before I could freely
say, Forget about that son of a bitch, he's a pig, I
did have to Offer a few solid facts about myself, my
kids, about fathers, husbands, passers-by, evening
companions, and the life of my father and mother in
this room by this exact afternoon window.

I told her for instance, that in my worst times I
had given myself one extremely simple physical
pleasure. This was cream cheese for breakfast. In
fact, I insisted on it, sometimes depriving the
children of very important articles and foods.

Girl, you don't know nothing, she said.

Then for a little while she talked gently as one
does to a person who is innocent and insane and
incorruptible because of stupidity. She had had two
such special pleasures for hard times she said. The
first, men, but they turned rotten, white women had
ruined the best, give them the idea their dicks made of
solid gold. The second pleasure she had tried was
wine. She said, I like wine. You hee to have
something just for yourself by yourself. Then she
said, But you can't raise a decent boy when you liquor-
dazed every night.1

Unwilling to bond too close with Faith and also
realizing that Faith would only reluctantly abandon the
comforting shelter, Mrs. Luddy tells her guest to leave.
"Well, don't you think your little spoiled boys crying for
you? Where's Mama? They standing in the window. Time to

go lady. This ain't Free Vacation Farm. Time we was by

 

18° Paley, Enormous 191-2.

86
ourself a little."181 Forced out of her shelter, Faith only
gradually understands that she can not live in her memories
forever. On her way home, slowly, she begins to run.

I was a little stiff because my way of life had used

only small movements, an occasional stretch to put a

knife or teapot out of reach of the babies. I ran

about ten, fifteen blocks. Then my second wind came,
which is classical, famous among runners, it's the
beginning of flying.

Paley illustrates running as a metaphor for life--as a
process. One has to be Open to this process. Then, one is,
like Faith, a long-distance runner, moving on in life. Re-
living in her childhood home, and through the bond she ties
with Mrs. Luddy, Faith realizes that life is a process, made
up of the different stages childhood, middle age, and Old
age. "A woman inside the steamy energy of middle age runs
and runs. She finds the houses and streets where her
childhood happened. She lives in them. She learns as
though she was still a child what in the world is coming

'“8’ One has to be open to the changing circumstances

next.
of life and seek meaning in all of them--otherwise, one
loses her/himself. Self identity changes: it is a process

which Paley illustrates throughout her work.

Paley also includes death as the final process Of life.

In her story "Friends" she demonstrates this process when a

 

1m Paley, Enormous 195.

1a Paley, Enprmous 196.

183 Paley, Enormous 198.

87
life-long friend dies of cancer. Yet, Paley remains life
affirming, emphasizing the bond of friendship and love
between a group of women, and treasuring each individual
life.

Faith and her friends have come together to say goodbye
to Selena who is dying of cancer. They try to comfort her
and each other. Although she hardly has the energy, Selena
manages to pack sandwiches for her friends before they
leave--a last act of love. "[S]he actually stood, leaned
her big soft excavated body against the table to make those
sandwiches...""“ Faith and her friends find out later that
Selena died within two hours Of their departure.

The bonding between the women is the fruit of their
long sharing of life. They have known each other and cared
for one another's children from birth. They have supported
each other after failed marriages and their children left
home. On their train ride back, the friends remember their
shared experiences and the stories Selena told them, trying
to keep Selena and the bond with her alive. Kamel notes,
the women "try to voice the ineffable as they reenter the

'“5 Faith, the narrator, recalls:

quotidian.
Anyway, I always thought Selena had told us a lot. For
instance, we knew she was an orphan. There were six,
seven other children. She was the youngest. She was
forty-two years Old before someone informed her that
her mother had pep died in child-birthing her. It was

 

m4 Paley, Grace. Later the Same Day. NY: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1985. 72.

‘35 Kamel 14o .

88

some terrible sickness. And she had lived close to her

mother's body--at her breast, in fact--until she was

eight months Old Whew! said Selena. What a relief!

I'd always felt I was the one who'd killed her.186

Faith does not allow her sorrow to destroy her belief
in life. At home, her younger son Tonto scorns Faith for
being so confident in life; Tonto himself believes that
humankind, victim of patriarchal capitalists, is doomed.
"Here she goes with her goody-goodies-—everything is so
groovy wonderful far-out terrific. Next thing, you'll say
people are darling and the world is ep nice and round that
Union Carbide will never blow it up." Faith thinks:

He [Tonto] was right to call my attention to its [the

world's] suffering and danger. He was right to harass

my responsible nature. But I was right to invent for

my friends and our children a report on these private
deaths and the condition Of our lifelong attachments.

m7
Faith recognizes that every human life counts: public
deaths we can read and hear about through the media as much
as "private deaths" in a broader form usually publicly
unaccounted for. Each death is tragic. At the same time
she understands that we all will die, if through Union
Carbide, cancer or natural death, in the end only "lifelong
attachments" count. Only through these true human values,

friendship and love, will we live meaningful lives and feel

secure in our identities.

 

18‘ Paley, Late; 73.

1”, Paley, Late; 88-9.

89
Relationships Between.WOmen and Men

Although Paley emphasizes bonds between mothers and
children, and friendships between women, she does not
neglect relationships between women and men. Here, again,
Paley expresses her belief in community and social
consciousness: ideas she shaped from her Jewish identity.
The writer portrays men as allies with women in the
struggle, against daily hardships, for a decent life, a
struggle that gives meaning in life and expresses the
characters' participation in the process of assembling self
identity. The idea of women and men struggling together
clearly relates to Paley's concern with the creation of ppe
humankind who recognizes that we are all equal human beings-
-no other of Paley's stories but "Zagrowsky Tells" explains
this better.

The narrator Iz Zagrowsky, a pharmacist, watches over
his five-year-Old grandchild in the park. His story is an
answer to his neighbor Faith's question: she wonders what he
is doing with a black child, because she remembers Zagrowsky
as a racist. Answering, he tells her:

All right. A person looks at my Emanuel and says, Hey!

he's not altogether from the white race, what's going

on? I'll tell you what: life is going on. You have an

Opinion. I have an Opinion. Life don't have no

Op1nlon.

Zagrowsky learns that his grandson "isn't the first

colored child. They tell me long ago we [Jews] were mostly

 

‘88 Paley, Late; 158-9.

90
dark."189 He began to love the child, Emanuel—~and as the
reader learns, Emanuel was not only "Cissy's connection to
life" but also Zagrowsky's. Emanuel, or the Hebrew form
Immanuel, means "God is with us." Wondering one day why God
gave him a black grandchild, Zagrowsky realizes, "TO remind

am He understands

us. That's the purpose Of most things.‘
that God is with him as much as with the little black boy:
it does not matter whether the child is black or white, he
is a human being. Thus, through his grandson, Zagrowsky
that all human beings are equal-~indeed, "life has no
Opinion." Zagrowsky, though at first reluctant, open to
change, embraces his new realization that the only meaning

in life is love and friendship. With pride and love he now

identifies himself as Emanuel's grandfather.

Summary
This selection of short stories by Grace Paley provides

insight into the significance of daily human interaction:
the author finds beauty in "everydayness," and meaning in
friendship and love. She recognizes these as basic to the
survival of humanity. Implicitly, Paley criticizes life-
destructive patriarchal capitalist powers by focusing on
women and children as regenerators Of life.

In Paley's stories, women and children are reaffirming

 

189 Paley, Later 171.

190

 

Paley, Later 166.

 

91
humanity: they are forming communities and inspire social
consciousness, as, for example, Richard in "Faith in a Tree"
inspires his mother to political activism, fighting for a
better life. Or as Emanuel, the black boy, who is his white
grandfather's "connection to life." Social consciousness,
realizing our commonalities and respecting our differences-
-this, according to Paley is valuing life. Such an attitude
will lead us toward community. Basic to these ideals are an
exchange Of ideas and beliefs that give meaning in life.
Paley's stories teach that forming communities leads to

participation in the process Of assembling self identity.

CONCLUSION

Despite their various contexts of writing, the works of
Broner, Moskowitz, Olsen, and Paley provide examples of
patterns for participation in the process of assembling self
identity. E.M. Broner's literature appeals to Jewish women,
encouraging them to actively pursue their self identities to
"sustain themselves" and "survive" in sexist society and
patriarchal religion. As tools she Offers re-formed Jewish
rituals and ceremonies for Jewish women to "connect" with
their female origins and bond with other women as well as an
alternative interpretation of Old Testament writings. Thus,
Broner's work attempts to heal the hurt and repair the
damage inflicted upon Jewish women by patriarchal Judaism.

Faye Moskowitz stresses communication as a tool for the
pursuit of self identity: openness to others' ideas and
beliefs and the evaluation of these for oneself. In her
fiction, she warns of restricted ties of communication--
restricted by Orthodox Judaism and sexist society, each
limiting women to conformity and stereotypical roles of
femininity. Women, Moskowitz's literature teaches, have to
break free from religious and societal concepts that define
their identities for them, and be themselves.

Tillie Olsen's work evolves around the power of
economic and gender "circumstances" that stifle
participation in the process of assembling self identity.

She makes aware of the suffering of people who do not belong

92

93
to the dominant class or gender. Women in particular, the
author demonstrates, find it difficult to adequately express
and develop their own positive self concepts. Trapped by
the limitations of economic and gender circumstances, they
receive little room to grow or develop friendships.

Lastly, in her writing Grace Paley emphasizes daily
human interaction as a means of participation in the process
Of assembling self identity: the formation of "communities"
and inspiration Of "social consciousness." Central to the
writer's stories are forms of community: bonds between
mothers and children, friendships between women, and
relationships between women and men. These nurturing bonds
are founded on an exchange Of ideas and beliefs that give
meaning in life. This exchange fosters awareness and
understanding of others and ultimately inspires social
consciousness, expressed in Paley's stories as common
political action for social justice. The idea of reaching
back to friendship is crucial to Paley's story characters'
pursuit of self identity.

These authors' works are products of their insights as
Jewish women. Broner's feminist critique is motivated by
her growing up in a traditional Jewish household which
subordinated women under men's rule and maturation in a
society developing feminist ideas of gender equality. She
reconciles traditional Judaism and feminism by "correcting"
Jewish traditions to include women and allow them

identification with their Jewish heritage.

94

In her writing, Moskowitz draws upon the tension
between broad social experience and the boundaries placed on
her by traditional Jewish values while growing up in a small
American town: the writer finds value in both aspects of her
experience, humanitarian values and values of political and
educational Opportunity. Influential have been her
immigrant foremothers, and American friends and students who
have made her realize that we all are teachers and students
at certain times and change from one to the other
constantly.

Olsen's literature is steeped in humanitarian ideals
she inherited from Yiddish culture, in her involvement with
American socialism, and in her gender experiences during her
years of silence. Combined they provide her with the vision
of an equal and just world for everybody.

Paley's work reflects her beliefs in community and
social consciousness she formed already as a child, growing
up in a Jewish environment. Ever since she has valued and
applied them in her life as mother, wife and friend, and as
activist in both the women's and peace movements. The
experiences she gained, the stories she found in her life
and around her, weave into Paley's fictional collections of
short stories. '

Although these authors differ in the way they draw on
their Jewish heritage, they share challenging societal and
religiously structured female roles and Offering new

definitions: the writers teach self-respect, to be oneself,

95
and an active approach to life. In short, they demonstrate
the value and significance of participation in the process
Of assembling self identity.

Their new definitions of societal and religious female
roles have to be interpreted as not only relating to women
but to all humankind: their writings communicate the idea
that once one feels secure within her/his identity, they are
more "humanly responsible." Retrieving women's experience
in traditional Judaism, Broner validates and asserts women
as equals to men: she appeals to love for the human
community. Stressing openness to communication, Moskowitz
emphasizes respect for others' ideas and beliefs. Pointing
to the power of restrictive class and gender circumstances,
Olsen criticizes capitalist patriarchal society for its
disregard of all human life as equal. Accentuating daily
human interaction, Paley finds beauty in "everydayness" and
meaning in friendship and love, and recognizes these as
basic to the survival of humanity. Thus, Orr's statement on
Tillie Olsen can be applied to all Of these Jewish women
writers: "Human responsibility...is for nothing less than
the co-creation of the world. In such a vision of
possibility, all actions have ultimate potential because

they make us who we are; they give us identity and

purpose."191

 

‘” Orr 181.

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