Conversions and counter-narratives: Jewish American autobiographies in the twentieth century (Anzia Yezierska, Art Spiegelman, Eva Hoffman, Philip Roth).
Thesis information
Author:
Klimek, Julia.;Advisor(s):
Blanchard, Marc
Degree:
Ph.D.
School:
University of California, Davis.
Year:
2001
Full Abstract
Jewish immigrants arrived in America at the turn of the century into a culture that expected assimilation. Early immigrant writers, such as Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska, responded by publishing autobiographical writings that emphasized the excitement of becoming “American,” i.e. of leaving behind the obligations and memories of Eastern European Jewish culture. Towards the middle of the century, however, the myth of smooth assimilation was replaced with more conflicted writings. Yezierska's autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950) found little commercial success because it does not present an un-ambivalent statement of Americanization. Art Spiegelman's biography/autobiography Maus (1986–1991) and Eva Hoffman's memoir Lost in Translation (1989) claim an identity that is neither foreign nor exactly defined by sense of belonging: the son of an immigrant, Spiegelman reclaims a Jewish heritage (dominated by his father's experience of Holocaust survival); Hoffman, an immigrant herself, emphasizes the alienation that, according to her, dominates a post-modern experience. In contrast to Yezierska, both Spiegelman and Hoffman found a market for their writing that was receptive to their claims of difference. Philip Roth, who has been steadily publishing fiction and non-fiction in America since the 1950s, built his career around early criticism of his portrayal of Jewish Americans and explored the obligations and possibilities of the Jewish American writer in the twentieth century.;The dissertation compares the authors in the context of an American autobiographical tradition and the power dynamic between the minority writer and a majority audience. Each of these texts contains a narrative of assimilation, the conversion from “different” to “same,” but each author also challenges such a narrative by presenting the counter-narrative of difference, either openly (as Yezierska and Hoffman do) or as a subtext (Spiegelman and Roth). Roth, finally, shows in his American trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain) the challenges of constructing a personal narrative along the outlines provided by public and national narratives.
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