Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish WomenWriters by Diane LichtensteinReview by: Victoria AaronsLegacy, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1994), pp. 78-80Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679118 .

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Legacy

So conscious of the reality of the

war?Yankees raid her family home, too?DeCaradeuc did not easily join in the social life that, despite the war, continued for young women of her

class and age. She attended parties and

dances but with mixed feelings:

"[W]hen I do go out, I feel lonely in company, I'm so slow, I can't flirt or

affect, or be witty or amusing, or in

fact, anything like anybody else" (71). She was devastated by the South's de

feat: "The young men sent a buggy here for me, instead of hanging their

disgraced heads over their paroles, or

rallying on to trans. Miss., they remain

to dance & be merry over the death

of their country, shame! shame!?of

course, I sent their buggy back to

them empty!" (76). The depression and bitterness Pau

line DeCaradeuc suffered during the war lifted when she met and then mar

ried Guerard Heyward, a returned

Confederate soldier (and great-grand son of one of the signers of the Dec

laration of Independence). Unlike

Nelly's marriage to Lawrence Lewis, theirs was apparently a lasting love sto

ry, so much so that Pauline abruptly ended her journal the day that Guer

ard unexpectedly died: "Finis. March

5th, 1888." Before that time, however, she had written not only about her

marriage but also about her children

(five of her nine children lived to

adulthood). Like Nelly Lewis, she was

a devoted, loving, conscientious moth

er, concerned about her children's

health and futures. But there is a light ness, a joy, in her writing about the

children that often is missing in

Lewis's. At one point, she even writes a

comic poem, in baby talk from one

child's point of view.

These two complementary books

expand our appreciation of the experi ences of nineteenth-century Southern

women. Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis

and Pauline DeCaradeuc Heyward were, in many ways, ordinary women, prod ucts of their times and place; but they were also, as ordinary women so often

are, fascinating and admirable individu

als as well. They were intelligent, tal

ented women who obviously enjoyed

writing?who, had they been born at a

later time, may well have become writ ers by vocation. But they were not at

all diminished by the roles they chose or accepted. They led full, rewarding, valuable lives.

Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American

Jewish Women Writers. By Diane Lichtenstein. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1992. 176 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Victoria Aarons, Trinity University

". . . their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long

ago." ?Grace Paley, "Faith in the Afternoon"

In Writing Their Nations, Diane Lich

tenstein makes claims for a self-defin ing tradition of nineteenth-century

American Jewish women writers, a lit

LEGACY, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994. Copyright ? 1994 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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Victoria Aarons

erary tradition that speaks to their

identities as Jews, as women, and as

Americans?albeit Americans margi nalized doubly by religion and gender. These writers formed and were formed,

according to Lichtenstein, by a com

plex tradition that ultimately set the

stage for American Jewish women's

writing in the twentieth century. In demonstrating the specific char

acter of this tradition, Lichtenstein lo cates such "forgotten" writers both

within the general context of nine

teenth-century American literature and

within the more restrictive context of

marginalized writers. She makes this

distinction, ultimately, to argue for a

revaluation and fusion of the accepted

categories for these writers, for "while all of the writers discussed here could fit into already established canons, of

American literature, Jewish literature,

Jewish American literature, women's

literature, etc., we do them a disser vice if we do not first see them within their own tradition" (5), a tradition

marked by dual loyalties and identities. It is the double nature of the impulses and preoccupations of these nineteenth

century American Jewish women writ ers that interests Lichtenstein and that directs the unfolding of her argument.

Essentially Lichtenstein argues that the perception of dual identities, as

Jewish women and as assimilated or as

similating Americans, gave rise to dou ble loyalties that, as revealed through their writing, "expressed their desire to protect both their American and

Jewish identities. ... to explore, justi

fy, and demonstrate the premise that dual national loyalties were possible" (8).

By "national loyalties," Lichtenstein refers to the tension between the writ

ers' identification with and dedication

to a strong sense of a centuries-old his

torical commitment to a Jewish nation

and their conscious decision to live in

America, "their personal struggles to

be female citizens of both the Ameri can democracy and the ancient Jewish nation" (15). But this pull of loyalties is best represented in a metaphorical transformation of the idea of "nation."

Lichtenstein reconstructs "nation" in

terms of the defining myths and cultur

al values that shape national traditions.

To this end, Lichtenstein isolates the

two prevailing myths that these writ ers tried to reconcile in their lives and in their writing: the American True

Woman, that "white, middle-class Chris

tian model of propriety" (16); and the Jewish Mother in Israel, "who, like Deb

orah in the Old Testament . . . , was

dedicated to defending her children, the Jews" (23).

In demonstrating how the juxtaposi tion of these myths creates a tradition for nineteenth-century American Jew ish women writers, Lichtenstein frames

her analysis around the specific works of those little-known Sephardic and German Jewish women who wrote in

English, who considered themselves

assimilated Americans, and who "in

conforming to the myth of American

womanhood while also valuing and

preserving their Jewish religion and

culture, . . . forged not only original selves but a unique literary tradition as

well" (35). Beginning with Emma Laz arus and ending with Edna Ferber, Lichtenstein defines an evolving tradi tion that reveals the developing aware ness of the possibilities for women and

Jews in the dramatic years that charac

terize, foreshadow, and are finally real ized in the twentieth century.

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Legacy

Lichtenstein provides, in roughly chronological order, an analysis of the

works of an array of individual writers,

including Rebecca Gratz, Rebekah

Gumpert Hyneman, Octavia Harby Moses, Penina Moise, Jenny Kleeberg Herz, Nina Morais, Annie Nathan

Meyer, Emma Wolf, Sophia Heller

Goldsmith, Mary M. Cohen, Leah Har

by, Josephine Lazarus, Adah Isaacs

Menken, and Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. In doing so, Lichtenstein does not limit

herself to a single genre, but examines

diverse forms of expression?poetry, criticism, fiction?all contributing to a

compelling analysis of audience and

theme.

While the conclusion of Writing Their Nations provides far less of an

historicized, structural closure than one might be led to expect, one sus

pects that Lichtenstein intentionally leaves such issues as intermarriage, anti-semitism, domesticity, self-definition, and identity (those issues confronting

women as Jews still) unresolved. She does so, I suspect, in order to intimate the continual tension between conti

nuity and change in American Jewish letters, the ability to imagine and to re

fashion ourselves as women and Jews.

The Essential Margaret Fuller. Edited by Jeffrey Steele. New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 1992. 470 pp. $50.00/$l6.00 paper.

Reviewed by Sanford E. Marovitz, Kent State University

Among a community of extraordinary individualists living around Boston

during the second quarter of the last

century, Margaret Fuller is probably the most difficult to fathom. The eldest

child of a demanding and exacting at

torney, Fuller was educated as a son

rather than a daughter, and her young mind was so attuned to intellectual en

deavors that she rapidly grasped all she

undertook. When not engaged in her

studies, she read for pleasure and en

joyed her mother's garden, where she

identified with the sweetness and

beauty of the flowers. The intensity of

her studies, however, generated con

stant strain, which led to headaches,

nightmares, sleeplessness, fever, and

other symptoms of psychological dis tress that would remain with her in

maturity. When her father died in

1835, Fuller at twenty-five accepted the responsibility of providing for her

family.

Despite her intellectual genius, Ful ler was initially directed, as a woman in the 1830s, into such cultural activ

ities as teaching children, editing The Dial, and leading formal conversations for women in the Boston area. When she agreed to write for Horace Greel

ey's Tribune and moved to New York late in 1844, she became one of the first women to hold a regular, paid po sition on a newspaper staff.

As a Tribune correspondent, Fuller

LEGACY, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994. Copyright ? 1994 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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