This session has been sponsored in honor of Laura Levitt.
This panel considers how representations of the past in Jewish girls' novels shape religious orientations and practices in the present. We consider the lineage and inheritance of girls’ stories, both within families and broader communities, in order to parse often unstated but deeply replicated assumptions about girls’ and women’s responsibilities as the memory bearers, sustainers, and mediators of traditional knowledge. The panel is designed to address these questions through two papers, one addressing the trope of girls reading grandmothers’ letters in popular fiction and one addressing gendered differences in Haredi historical fiction novels. The papers will be followed by a response from Dr. Jodi Eichler-Levine to bring together ideas about American Jewish children’s literature, community, and memory. By looking to girls’ literature, we see specific examples in which these traditional roles are not only conveyed, but also possibly subverted by treating girls as textual authorities and purveyors of communal knowledge, or by centering them as mediators between two worlds, in a nexus of Jewish relationships across time.
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.
Haredi views of history align with Mishnaic views described by Jacob Neusner, with the past acting as "paradigms for the formation of the social order." Haredi historical fiction for teens and pre-teens establishes this link between past and present so that today's children learn about roles, limitations, and opportunities available to them through depictions of how Jewish children lived in past centuries. Protagonists of both genders engage in Jewish communal life embedded in the broader political contexts of their host countries, but the narrative built across the corpus clearly delineates between male and female engagement. Drawing on Melissa Klapper's theorizing of American Jewish girlhood, I argue that Haredi historical fiction cultivates an understanding of gendered roles where men and boys always resist the dominant culture, protecting their communities from both physical and spiritual endangerment, while women and girls maintain boundaries by engaging with and navigating between religious and secular cultures.
| Jodi Eichler-Levine | jeichlerlevine@lehigh.edu | View |