Just Like Grandma Did: Reading and Writing as Religious Memory Work in Jewish Girls’ Fiction

A common trope in Jewish middle grade and young adult novels portrays a Jewish girl who discovers and reads her grandmothers’ letters. She becomes a careful reader, creative writer, and thorough researcher, and her impressive findings heal and enrich her family. I argue that this subgenre of Jewish girls’ fiction depicts a specific, gendered Jewish coming-of-age praxis wherein tween and teen protagonists scaffold their own stories through the narratives of their grandparents’ generation. Relying on Robert Orsi’s discussion of family hagiography and Diana Taylor’s performance theory, I view girls’ reading and writing—both within the novels, and as encouraged by the novels—as an embodied form of lived religion and cultural performance. The specifically gendered emphasis on Jewish girls as preservers of family memory also conspicuously parallels Jewish communal memory work prevalent in women’s contemporary Jewish American literature.