As a reader, a writer, a woman, and a feminist, I can't seem to pass up this opportunity to weigh in on Philip Roth, who died this week at the age of 85. Not that I am a Rothian scholar -- I read only a modest fraction of his considerable oeuvre: Goodbye Columbus (maybe just the title story), Portnoy, per my reading list The Prague Orgy back in 1985 (no memory of that book whatsoever), and more memorably his two slim volumes of memoir, Patrimony and The Facts. I also devoured the post-divorce tell-all by his second wife Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll's House, where to quote the New York Times review and to put it mildly, she paints him as a "self-centered misogynist." But plenty of ink has already been spilled on the subject of Philip Roth and women, particularly Jewish women (see, for example, Philip Roth Hated Jewish Women) so I don't feel much need to add my voice to that chorus. And anyway, how can anyone possibly compete with Vivian Gornick's observation "If in Bellow misogyny was like seeping bile, in Roth it was lava pouring forth from a volcano"??? Not even gonna try.
But I did want to say that in a world where the voices of men still are the voices that are listened to, where the perspective of men still predominates, I remain more interested in the voices of women (not disinterested in the voices of men, just more interested in the voices of women). So maybe it is not exactly surprising that not long before Roth's death I was going through my overstuffed folder of reviews and clippings of books I might want to read someday and came upon a "bibliography of books by and about jewish women" -- hipster lack of capitalization theirs -- that I tore from a 1983 issue of the "radical feminist periodical" (you nailed it Wiki) Off Our Backs.
I've read a number of books from that list over the years, but on that day I was drawn to Jewish Grandmothers, edited by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur, and published by Boston's Beacon Press in 1976. According to OOB the book contains "Ten autobiographical accounts of Jewish women who came to America early in the twentieth century" with "each chapter a refutation of the stereotype."
My hunch that that no local library would have a copy of this little-known book turned out to be correct, so I ordered a used copy online, which I was in the process of reading when my phone sent me a push with the news of Roth's death. What irony -- in fact, the inside flap of the dust jacket actually refers to Alexander Portnoy himself:
These ten women, immigrants from Eastern Europe who came to America between the turn of the century and the 1920s, now give a public so long accustomed to Portnoy's complaint a chance to hear the whole story.
Back cover of Jewish Grandmothers
So thank you Fannie Shapiro, Sarah Rothman, Rose Soskin, Pearl Moscowitz, Katya Govsky, Anuta Sharrow, Mollie Linker, Beatrice Pollock, Ida Richter, and Ruth Katz for raising your voices and sharing your stories. As Rothman puts it in her very first sentence: "I was thinking, if I could only write a book, I would have so much to tell."
And while I'm at it, thank you, too, Kveller, for your article this week Ten Writers Not Named Philip Roth Capturing the Female American Jewish Experience.
So many women's voices, so much to tell.
Where to start? This is a great post and brings up so much! My mom had just gotten left for a younger woman in 1969 and subscribed to Ms. and Off our Backs as soon as they came out. I was born in 1953 and still feeling my own way awkwardly forward but these publications really struck a note. I knew I did not want to treat women the way Da treated Mom and these magazines explained to my ignorant mind why that was right.
ReplyDeleteDa was an English professor and devoted to Ezra Pound, whose voice was unrelentingly and exclusively male. That was the only voice in literature I knew growing up, the only woman writer I ever paid much attention to was Laura Ingalls Wilder, and that was not Serious Literature.
Da was if I recall correctly actually on pretty friendly terms with Saul Bellow, and maybe flew out to Chicago to meet him once. He praised Bellow's novels and pushed me to read them.
I remember getting my list of books from Deerfield in the summer of 1967, books that we were expected to have read. Mom scanned it and (while she did not say anything about how few women were on the list) did positively exclaim, "oh good, they have Pride and Prejudice. You need to read that." It did not make much impression at the time, but I came around. Little did she know that I would become a card-carrying Janeite as an adult!