Jewish History (2005) 19: 29–48

c Springer 2005


Race and the construction of Jewish identity in French and American Jewish fiction of the 1920s ∗ NADIA MALINOVICH Universit´e de Versailles, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France Abstract. In both the United States and France, Jewish fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force separating Jews from mainstream society irrespective of their desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards race-thinking. The notion that there are intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews’ status as fully privileged co-citizens. Yet a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community, which their official status as a purely “religious” group normally held them back from expressing openly. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses the dual desire of French and American Jews for acceptance and distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different “racial” background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.

In both the United States and France, and irrespective of their conscious desire for integration, Jewish fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity, a unity they described as a nonrational, uncontrollable force that separated Jews from mainstream society. Discourse of this kind, which reflected a broad shift in how the language of race was used in the Western World, was part of a larger questioning of long-held assumptions about the possibility, as well as the desirability, of integration and acculturation on the part of French and American Jews. No longer the vague term of the first half of the nineteenth century that referred to different national or ethnic types, by the late nineteenth century “race” had become increasingly couched in the language of science, and this was especially so as anthropologists and social scientists began to study the physiognomy of different groups in order to establish distinctions between them. “The notion that races existed and were fundamentally different from one another,” John Efron notes, “was an integral part of modern European culture.”1 ∗ I would like to thank Hasia Diner, Laura Lee Downs and Bonnie S. Anderson for reading and commenting on previous versions of this article.

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For Jews, this brand of “race-thinking” was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, allegedly intractable biological or physical differences between groups, a principal tenet of racial thought, threatened the universalist, progressive mentalit´e of the Enlightenment, which portrayed Jews as fully privileged co-citizens. At the same time, there was something satisfying for Jews in adopting a racialized self-understanding. It provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community that they often felt, but which their official status as a purely “religious” group so often held them back from openly expressing. This tension between adopting or rejecting racial thought is particularly evident in French and American Jewish theme literature of the post World War I years. Some writers present young Jews from traditional and/or immigrant families who attempt, and fail, to flee their Jewishness and assimilate.2 Other characters have all but forgotten the fact of their Jewish birth only to confront rejection, which, in turn, leads them to Jewish renewal. In both nations, Jewish writers most commonly employ the trope of the failed intermarriage to explore these themes,3 using the dilemmas faced by Jews who choose to marry “outside the fold” to portray anxiety. French and American Jewish authors wrote against contrasting backdrops. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, Jews occupied a historically unique “outsider” status, whereas the United States’ history of religious, national, and ethnic diversity made the Jews’ place within American society much less exceptional. Furthermore, the United States’ history of black slavery and persecution of African Americans meant that it was these latter, rather than the Jews, who functioned as the primary “other” against which “normative” American society defined itself. Nonetheless, French and American Jews shared important historical experiences in the modern era. They both gained civic equality as part of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and both France and the United States – certainly in comparison to other Western states – facilitated Jewish integration and acculturation over the course of the next century. During this period, most French and American Jews took the desirability of integration for granted as a positive good. Having obtained equal citizenship, they strove to adapt to the dominant culture and prove their worth as loyal and productive citizens. By the early twentieth century, however, both French and American Jews faced new challenges that made the existing model of Jewish identity inadequate. On the one hand, Jewish communal survival became an issue for French and American Jews in the late nineteenth century,

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as social boundaries between Jews and gentiles began to break down and Jews expanded into a wide variety of professions. Although these developments generated hope, they also raised the fear of communal disintegration.4 On the other hand, the rise of political anti-Semitism, an influx of “ethnically visible” immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the birth of the Zionist movement brought new attention to the persistence of Jewish group distinctiveness and lead many, both Jews and non-Jews, to question the assumption that Jews in the modern era were inevitably following a path of progressively greater integration and acculturation. These shifts went hand in hand with changes in how both French and American Jews used the language of race. As Lisa Moses Leff’s essay illustrates, race-thinking provided French Jews in the early and mid-nineteenth century with a language for defending Jewish difference that squared with progressive thinking of the day: the Jews, like the Celts, the Gauls, and Franks, Jewish intellectuals argued, had their own distinctive racial traits, and it was the coming together of these diverse racial characteristics that comprised the strength of the French nation. Similarly in the United States, where positive references to the Jewish or Hebrew race were at least as common in popular discourse as negative ones until the end of the nineteenth century, the language of race offered American Jews an emotionally satisfying way to talk about their contributions to the broader culture and society.5 By the early twentieth century, however, the advent of modern “race science” meant that a racial-self description no longer functioned as an unproblematic way to simultaneously defend Jewish difference and promote integration. Whereas in mid-nineteenth century France, race-thinking was associated with a discourse that placed positive value on the idea of the French nation as comprised of a variety of different racial groups, by the early twentieth century French people had largely come to think of themselves as a racially unified national/ethnic group.6 This shift meant that Jews occupied a new status as a “Semitic” people living among a nation of “Aryans.” During this same period in the United States, where the black/white dichotomy was all-important, Americans began to define whiteness in increasingly rigid, exclusive terms that called into question the Jews’ status as “a white race” and thus, their privileged place within the American racial hierarchy.7 These developments made American and French Jews ambivalent about how to express their bonds of community. Faced with an essentialist discourse that posited them as racial outsiders, Jews began to use the language of race, not to further the project of integration,

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but rather to express their sense of being a people apart. Importantly, however, neither French nor American Jews were comfortable with a radical retreat into particularism. In both nations, they identified strongly with the broader culture and society, and continued to think of themselves as an integral part of it. Hence, adapting a racialized selfunderstanding was tied both to feelings of pride in their heritage and a sense of alienation and loss. Often, Jews came to see themselves as eternal outsiders, desperately seeking integration but unable to achieve it. In both France and the United States, Jewish theme fiction of the 1920s provides an important window into this tension between the desires for distinctiveness and acceptance.

Towards a racial self-image: the evolution of Jewish theme fiction in the early twentieth century In both the United States and France, the First World War marked a shift in the development of Jewish literature. American memoirs, poetry, and fiction dealing with the Jewish experience prior to the War often presented an idealized view of potential Jewish assimilation. Mary Antin’s celebrated 1912 memoir contrasted Jewish oppression and persecution in Russia with “the promised land of America.” For Elias Tobenkin, who described the successful Americanization of a RussianJewish immigrant in his 1916 novel Witte Arrives, America was, quite simply, a land of opportunity and promise. There was a thematic shift in American Jewish fiction in the years just before the War, however, marked by the appearance, in 1917, of Abraham Cahen’s The Rise of David Levinsky and Sidney Nyburg’s The Chosen People. With their focus on the dilemmas posed by assimilation and acculturation, these novels reflect a rising skepticism about the melting pot ideal in American society.8 In France during the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, a small circle of Jewish writers and intellectuals including, most importantly, Andr´e Spire, Edmond Fleg, and Jean-Richard Bloch, began exploring themes such the critique of assimilation, anti-Semitism, and Jewish nationalism in their essays and fiction.9 Yet it was only after the War that a significant body of Jewish theme-fiction was published in France. Dozens of novels, poems, plays, collections of folklore, and short stories explored different aspects of Jewish life, including integration and acculturation. The following discussion of the writings of Lily JeanJaval, Josu´e J´ehouda, Leo Pold`es, and Albert Cohen will provide an in-depth look at how French Jewish authors of the day approached these themes.10

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In France and the United States, Jewish writers were questioning the inevitability and desirability of Jewish integration. In both countries, one important theme in Jewish fiction of this era is the idea that successful outward Jewish adaptation to the dominant society did not preclude Jews retaining an inner, distinguishing “semitic” or “oriental” essence. This kind of essentialized understanding of Jewish difference provoked mixed emotions. Some authors created characters who after trying to deny or ignore their Jewish heritage, ultimately come to “rediscover” their Jewishness and take pride in their difference. Others, by contrast, presented Jewish characters tragically condemned to be outsiders, whose desire for integration is thwarted by the Jew’s inescapable “racial” heritage.

Jewish fiction’s positive solution: drawing strength from difference A common theme in Jewish fiction of the 1920s is that of the Jew who embarks on a path of assimilation, but ultimately draws strength from a renewed sense of connection with his or her Jewish heritage. The French-born Jewish novelist Lily Jean-Javal’s (1882–1958) twopart saga, No´emi and L’inqui`ete (The Anxious One) exemplifies this theme.11 Jean-Javal , the author of numerous books for children, often lectured for Jewish youth groups in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. She also published several articles in the Jewish press describing her 1930 trip to Palestine. In No´emi and L’inqui`ete, Jean-Javal tells the story of No´emi Vald`es, a young woman from a wealthy Jewish family in Bayonne. Disenchanted with her family’s materialistic values and the limited options open to her, No´emi sets out for Paris to nurse the poor, despite her family’s wishes. She draws great satisfaction from her work, but integrating into the hierarchical structure of the hospital proves difficult. Jean-Javal suggests that this is inevitable given the Jew’s inherent abhorrence for submitting to authority: because she comes from “a stiff-necked people,” No´emi explains to her Catholic friend Th´er`ese, it is impossible for her to follow the orders of her superiors, and thus she has little choice but to resign and leave.12 Yet No´emi soon comes to view this quality as virtue, not a weakness. She returns to Bayonne, marries a fellow Jew, and founds a summer camp for disadvantaged Parisian children. Novelist Josu´e J´ehouda (1892–1966) explored a similar theme of revolt and return in his two-part saga, La Trag´edie d’Isra¨el.13 J´ehouda was born into a Hassidic family in the Ukraine and traveled extensively

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in Central Europe and the Middle East as a young man. In the postWar years, he divided his time between Geneva and Paris and published a number of novels on Jewish themes, becoming a prominent figure in Parisian Jewish literary circles. The revolt of J´ehouda’s hero, David, is the contrary of that of No´emi. He is from a poor immigrant family and breaks away by devoting himself to material gain – until he falls ill and realizes the error of his ways. Influenced by two mystically oriented friends, Miriam and Leister, David reconnects with his Jewish heritage and marries Miriam, a pious young woman and a rabbi’s daughter. Both Jean-Javal and J´ehouda created heroes whose central problem is whether they can successfully break with their families and carve out lives for themselves unburdened of their Jewish heritage. Both David and No´emi eventually discover this is impossible. In the sanitarium, Miriam and Leister show David that turning his back on Judaism caused his illness. In this section of the novel, entitled “La Maladie est un Bonheur,” (Illness is a Godsend) J´ehouda offers an eclectic theory that views tuberculosis through the mirror of Biblical and Kabalistic wisdom. The only way to cure the disease, David’s friends explain; is “to unlock the spiritual force that is in each of us.”14 Here, J´ehouda presents his anti-rationalist critique of modern society, influenced perhaps by his Hassidic upbringing: both the quest for material gain and belief in pure science are flawed ideologies that ignore the needs of the soul, the true driving force of human existence. J´ehouda linked this spirituality to ethnic heritage. Leister tells David the story of an unfortunate Jewish doctor, also the victim of tuberculosis, whose illness grew out of his stubborn search for “universal” truth. The doctor’s “intellectual generosity,” Leister posits, in fact caused his illness: “every soul,” he explains, “must be linked to its own ethnic group, or it will remain forever ignorant of its true nature . . . it is only when a Jew becomes a Jew that he can become completely universal. Each individual must have his spiritual home.”15 Similarly, No´emi can only fulfill her “universal” dream of helping poor children by reconnecting to Jews: “Her desire to help her fellow man had not diminished,” Jean-Javal explains of No´emi’s decision to leave her charitable work in Paris, “but she felt she could only regain her strength by returning to the home of her ancestors.”16 American novelists Ludwig Lewisohn and Milton Waldman similarly explored the question of how assimilation ultimately leads to unhappiness. Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) was a prominent and controversial figure in the American literary world in the 1920s. He was born into a German Jewish family in Berlin that immigrated to South Carolina

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when he was a child. As a young man, Lewisohn severed all ties with the Jewish community, embraced Methodism, and pursued a career in English literature. However, after being denied a teaching position on the grounds that a Jew could not understand the “spirit” of the English masters, Lewisohn did an about-face and became a passionate supporter of the Zionist movement. He published a number of largely autobiographical novels in the 1920s and 1930s – including The Island Within – that sought to convince fellow Jews to reject assimilation and remain true to their own “racial-psychological” heritage.17 Milton Waldman (1895–1976), the son of Jewish immigrants from Austria-Hungary, was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied English at Yale, served in the military during World War I, and after a brief stint at a law firm, worked as a journalist, amateur historian, and finally, a literary agent. The Disinherited, which reflects his middle-class midwestern Jewish background, was his only novel. Yet in common with Lewisohn, Waldman spent time in Paris in the 1920s. Lewisohn made the city his home from the mid-1920s through the early 1930s, and his writings were widely translated into French. Waldman did graduate work at the Sorbonne in 1922–1923 and then moved permanently to London, where, for reasons about which we may only speculate, he converted to Catholicism in the 1940s. The common Parisian experience of the two authors may explain some of the similarities between their novels and French Jewish theme literature of the same era. Lewisohn’s 1928 The Island Within 18 tells the story of Arthur Levy, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, brought up in a thoroughly assimilated household. The family does not celebrate Jewish holidays and his Jewish heritage remains a vague, little understood or explored fact of his existence. As a young man, Arthur studies medicine at Columbia University and meets Elizabeth, a modern, feminist woman and daughter of a Protestant minister. The two fall in love, marry, and have a child. On the surface, as Lewisohn portrays them, Arthur and Elizabeth are thoroughly compatible. They move in the same sophisticated New York circles, respect one another, and share similar progressive views on love and marriage. The problem of “religion” seems non-existent. Arthur had not been brought up in an observant household, and Elizabeth had rejected her Protestant upbringing. Yet almost from the beginning, subtle differences in attitudes and values begin to drive the couple apart. Arthur is at ease with Elizabeth’s feminism, but her views on marriage, the family and tradition, and a number of other factors make him uncomfortable. He soon attributes these differences to Elizabeth’s not being Jewish.

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Arthur gradually begins to seek out the company of other Jews, and the opportunity to travel to Romania as part of an American commission to investigate Jewish oppression finally provides him the opportunity he has been seeking to abandon his marriage. The marriage ends amicably, with both Arthur and Elizabeth acknowledging that incompatibility has triumphed over mutual affection. Elizabeth cannot be a Jewess, which has become vital to Arthur’s marital happiness. Lewisohn paints the failed union as inevitable: “You only did me one injustice,” Elizabeth remarks, “through ignorance of yourself. You didn’t know that you were going to resurrect the Jew in you.” “But I really didn’t even have to resurrect the Jew,” Arthur replies, “I just put away a pretense – a stubborn, hard, protective pretense. But no more.”19 Arthur’s Jewishness is ingrained. No cultural manipulation, no pursuit of adaptation can remove it. Elizabeth and Arthur separate neither for lack of love nor as a result of their diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Rather deeply rooted, racial differences between them – which they cannot control or change – make the union impossible. Waldman’s 1928 novel The Disinherited 20 similarly explores the theme of failed intermarriage and the causes and consequences of difference between Christian and Jew. Walter Michaelson, a well-established Midwestern lawyer, begins to explore his Jewish roots after twenty-two years of marriage to a gentile woman. When he attends synagogue services with a Jewish client, he feels himself strongly drawn in and begins to question the lack of importance that he has attributed to his Jewish heritage. Esther, a young Jewish woman in the process of divorcing her gentile husband, encourages him. The two become fast friends and fall in love. As with Arthur, Jewish racial identity becomes important for Walter and Esther. “With the Jews alone,” Walter surmises, “race and religion were interwoven and inseparable – it was their essential religiousness, their peculiar sense of intimacy with their Creator, which identified them as a people.” Esther answers, and Walter agrees, that “I never forget that my blood is altogether Jewish.”21 Like Arthur Levy, Walter finds that his path to Judaism leaves no place for his gentile wife: she is incapable of understanding his emotions and sharing in his journey. Walter sacrifices his relationship with Esther in an attempt to reconcile with his wife, but fails; his wife asks him to turn back the clock, to abandon the Jewish connections and interests, but he cannot. Having lost both wife and love, he sets out for Jerusalem, to “find out what it’s like to be a Jew with other Jews in a place where we all really belong.”22

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All of these novels present the reader with protagonists whose “return” to their Jewish roots somehow proceeds from a process of inner discovery: while outwardly adapting to gentile society, they ultimately come to appreciate that happiness demands acknowledging one’s heritage. Yet few Jewish authors of the day presented this process of Jewish “discovery” as simply a matter of the soul nagging its owner to recognize the Jew within. Rather, the “push” of anti-Semitism, or rejection from the outside, significantly furthers the process.

Anti-Semitism and Jewish alienation While ideological anti-Semitic campaigns and social restrictions against Jews made their appearance in the United States as early as the midnineteenth century, the post-World War I years saw an important increase in anti-Jewish prejudice. The passage of immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924 that favored immigrants of “Anglo-Saxon” origins helped foster a hostile environment for American Jewry as a whole. The end of the era of mass, unrestricted immigration coincided with widespread loss of faith in the ideal of the “melting pot.” Instead of on “boiling down” differences, historian Lawrence Levine notes, the emphasis had changed to boiling them “out” in order to preserve the country’s AngloSaxon character.23 This desire for conformity also influenced attitudes and policies towards the non-immigrant Jewish community. During this period housing and professional discrimination, as well as quotas limiting Jewish students at the university became widespread.24 An atmosphere of mounting social discrimination is in the foreground of both The Island Within and The Disinherited. Elizabeth and Arthur’s inability to be happy together, Lewisohn suggests, goes beyond their differences in background to the surrounding society’s constantly making Arthur feel an outsider. During his student days at Columbia, he realizes that most Jews, including him, are ashamed of their past: the Anglo past is generally understood to be the American past, and it is with this past that one must identify in order truly to be American. This “fact” comes strongly home to Arthur when his gentile friend Dawson suggests that in condemning France’s decision to ally with Russia, Arthur was “arguing as a Jew, not as an American.”25 Concern about Jewish suffering in Eastern Europe, a sense of connectedness with that part of the world, his friend’s comments make clear, are not “American” in the same way as the Dawson English past. “The Dawsons didn’t only want the Levys to be loyal to their common present,” Arthur realizes, “the Dawsons wanted the Levys to give up

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imaginatively the Levy past and adopt the Dawson past.”26 Lewisohn further develops this theme of discrimination through the character of Arthur’s sister Hazel. Though married to a Jew, when Hazel moves to Boston with her husband, she refuses all social association with Jews. She chooses to live in a gentile neighborhood and is resolute not to bring up her children as Jews: “She had so shattering and crushing and tragic a Jewish inferiority complex,” Arthur reflects, that she could not sustain her life physically at all without nursing a strong sense of superiority to someone, without despising someone. And the only people whom she dared to despise were her own. Jewish to the core by every instinct, Hazel lives in misery, loneliness, and dread, and she clung to life and sanity on these tragic terms by despising all that she yearned for, all that she needed.27 For Arthur, Hazel’s denial of her Jewishness is pathological, a rejection of her nature that – as for David in La Trag´edie d’Isra¨el and No´emi in Lily Jean-Javal’s novels – can only lead to unhappiness. Importantly, however, Hazel’s choice not to live as Jew leads her to misery first and foremost because her gentile neighbors reject her pretensions: no one in her neighborhood will associate with her, and when Arthur pays the couple a visit, “the more and more intense anti-Jewish feeling in Boston” dominates the discussion. Anti-Semitism also sparks Walter’s “return” to Judaism in The Disinherited. The novel opens as he learns that anti-Jewish quotas have barred his secretary’s brother from admission to the university. Almost simultaneously, he is confronted with hostility from gentile law colleagues opposed to taking on the case of Lebsky, a Jewish bridge contractor accused of corruption. Walter is doubly shocked, first, by the prejudice of the university president against too many “undesirable foreigners” on campus, and, second, by the slander of Lebsky in the press, coupled with his colleagues’ assumption of Lebsky’s guilt. Waldman contrasts this bigotry with the more tolerant mood of the progressive era. When Walter first confronts anti-Semitism early on in the novel, he reflects that: he had been living in the ivory tower which his father’s fine proud liberalism had erected for him. He had previously heard rumblings which indicated that its fair walls were beginning to crack, but the last two days had given him personally the first concrete evidence of the fact.28 Like Lewisohn’s Hazel and Arthur, Walter despairs of the liberal tradition of his parents’ generation, which he fears is fast disappearing.

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By contrast to The Island Within and The Disinherited, the 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements 29 by Anzia Yezierska (1880?–1970) tells the story of a poor immigrant Jewish woman who falls in love with the wealthy Protestant benefactor of the settlement house where she works.Yezierska, who was born in the Russian Pale and immigrated to New York’s Lower East Side as a child, published numerous novels and short stories focused on Jewish immigrant life in the 1920s and early 1930s. Salome of the Tenements, her first full-length novel, was based loosely on two failed Jewish-Gentile romances that drew public attention: Yezierska’s own brief relationship with the educator John Dewey and her fellow Jewish immigrant friend Rose Pastor’s marriage to the millionaire philanthropist Graham Stokes, which ended in divorce.30 As a working class Russian Jew trying to fit into upper-class AngloSaxon society, Yezierska’s heroine Sonya Vrunsky encounters problems different from those the highly acculturated and well-off Walter Michaelson and Arthur Levy had to face. However, like Waldman and Lewisohn, Yezierska emphasizes the “racial” aspect of Jewish difference and suggests that irrespective of the spouses’ will, intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles is doomed. Yezierska’s story criticizes the idea that differences between Jew and gentile, immigrant and American-born, dissolve in America’s warm embrace. Initially, Sonya and her lover John Manning share this dream: “Are we not the mingling of the races? The oriental mystery and the Anglo-Saxon clarity that will pioneer a new race of men?” he asks her on their wedding day. “Races and classes and creeds, the religion of your people and my people melt like mist in our togetherness,” she replies lovingly.31 But the honeymoon is short. Sonya dreamed of a union with John as her ticket out of the slums and the parochial world of her origins, but she finds the luxurious townhouse where John takes her to live oppressive. The ubiquitous presence of his ancestors, whose portraits hang in every room, weighs heavily; she feels that he is asking her to be someone she is not. He, in turn, fails to grasp her difficulty adapting and is impatient when she cannot become the obedient wife he expects. Although Yezierska’s characters come from radically different backgrounds, she conveys a sense of inevitability surrounding the failure of the Jewish-Gentile couple that goes beyond cultural and class differences. “Tricked into matrimony by the dream that the differences between them could be overcome by love,” Yezierska writes of their union, “Sonya and Manning . . . were the Oriental and the Anglo-Saxon trying to find a common language.”32 But Sonya comes to realize that this is impossible: “As she watched him sleeping there beside her with

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his calm saint-like face, she knew that just as fire and water cannot fuse, neither could her Russian Jewish soul fuse with the stolid, the unimaginative, the invulnerable thickness of this New England Puritan.”33 Sonya and John are incapable of changing their “inner souls,” and Sonya realizes she must end the relationship. Yet like Lewisohn and Waldman, Yezierska attaches a sense of regret and sadness to her character’s realization. After leaving Manning, Sonya returns to Jacques Hollins (the former Jacky Solomon), a fellow immigrant Jew who has become a famous fashion designer. Sonya initially goes to Hollins to enlist his help in her pursuit of John Manning, convincing him to make her the dress of her dreams for free. Seduced by Sonya’s energy and charm, he is elated when her marriage fails and his romantic hopes are renewed. Yezierska’s message is clear. Sonya and Jacques Hollins’ shared background and racial affinity will enable them to build a life together based on mutual respect and understanding, which for Sonya and John Manning could not be. But this realization hurts. In the last chapter of the novel, entitled “Revelation,” Sonya encounters Manning for one last time when he comes to the home she shares with Hollins in a final attempt to win her back. In their passionate encounter, the former lovers share a brief moment of “absolute revelation.” For an instant, Yezierska explains, “they were to each other not gentleman and East Side girl – not man and woman, but human beings driven by bitter experience to one moment’s realization of life.”34 For although she knows that she and Hollins are compatible in a way that she and Manning could never be, Sonya – like Arthur and Walter – renounces her Anglo-Saxon partner with great sadness and regret. “At bottom we’re all alike, Anglo-Saxons or Jews, gentlemen or plain immigrant,”35 she concludes. Although she will always love Manning, Sonya knows that in the real world her union with him cannot endure.36 French Jewish authors also created a sense of pathos in stories focused on intermarriage. In contrast to the situation in the United States, anti-Semitism appeared to be receding in post-War France.37 The Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century had marked a highpoint of French anti-Jewish sentiment and agitation, and, in its aftermath, antiSemitism became the bastion of the anti-Republican right. In mainstream circles, sympathy for Jews began to grow.38 This sympathy and the absence of open anti-Semitism is reflected in French Jewish works of the 1920s, especially in the way they address Jewish “otherness.” In the French novels, a direct encounter with anti-Semitism rarely sparks the protagonists’ “return” to Jewishness. What they have to confront

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is subtle snubs and the pressure to conform. Yet this often unspoken rejection results in similar feelings of alienation and loss, as well as a renewed sense of pride and strength. In their portrayal of the dilemmas posed by assimilated American Jews, both Lewisohn and Waldman waver between two ideas: the inevitability of recognizing one’s Jewish identity, and the yearning that this should not have to be. To live as an “assimilated Jew” is inevitably a choice that leads to unhappiness and mental instability: Jewishness is something intrinsic to one’s being, a part of one’s inner self that has been passed down from generation to generation and cannot be ignored or even minimized. At one point in The Disinherited, Walter observes many undesirable traits among Jews and suggests that these are aggravated when a Jew tries to integrate directly into the surrounding society without the intermediary of the Jewish community. The Jews could, in fact, better assimilate into American society, he suggests, if they socialized more with each other: “for so the unconscious tyranny of the majority would be relaxed, and the distortions, the magnifications of peculiarities which it bred in newcomers, to that extent be obviated.”39 Arthur uses a similar argument to analyze Hazel’s “crushing Jewish inferiority complex” in The Island Within. Her refusal to associate with other Jews, he suggests, has left her psychologically unstable and capable neither of fulfilling her duties as wife and mother nor of achieving personal happiness. Assimilation is presented as a kind of mental illness that only association with other Jews can cure. Similarly, Arthur’s reconnection with his Jewish origins is not by choice. Reconnecting, he realizes, is the only way for him to live honestly and happily in the modern world. And yet there is a certain yearning in both Waldman’s and Lewisohn’s writings for a world that was different, where people were not constricted by the facts of their birth. Lewisohn hints at this nostalgia for an imagined golden age early on, when he describes the positive experience of one of Arthur’s ancestors in a German gymnasium in the 1850s: “Neither the corrosive intellectuality of the Jew,” he remarks, “nor the naive creative intuitions of the Nordic had yet been heard of. Tobias’s career at the school was a continuous triumph.”40 Lewisohn’s feelings about Jewish integration and distinctiveness were clearly conflicted: his strongly anti-assimilationist, anti-intermarriage stance, did not smother nostalgic yearning to return to a time when, as he portrayed it, the Jewish quest for acceptance met no resistance. Walter’s “return” in The Disinherited is similarly sparked by his en-

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counter with prejudice and bigotry. Walter could have easily pursued his “assimilated” lifestyle had anti-Semitism not reared its ugly head. The Disinherited ends somewhat positively: rejected by his wife and daughter, Walter is accompanied by his son to the boat for Palestine. Although he shares neither Walter’s Jewish identity nor his newfound religious feeling, he bids his father a fond farewell and promises to visit in Jerusalem. Yet in the end, Waldman’s story is tragic. Walter’s attempt to integrate his newfound Jewish identity into the American life that he has built fails: “becoming a Jew” inevitably leads to alienation from his gentile family and friends. Waldman portrays Jews and Gentiles as incompatible. Walter invites his new Jewish friends to dinner, but they mix poorly with the non-Jewish guests, and the obvious discomfort reinforces the growing rift between Walter and his wife. Walter’s marriage, as well as his entire social and professional life was predicated on being a “non-Jewish Jew.” The minute he begins to attribute importance to his Jewish heritage, this world crumbles. In French Jewish novels of the 1920s, characters often similarly attempt – and fail – to transcend their Jewish roots and blend into French society unobtrusively. In the case of No´emi and La Trag´edie d’Isra¨el, the sense of Jewish otherness ultimately stimulates strength and pride. More often, characters fail to reconnect with their Jewish heritage and are left alienated and feeling themselves nowhere at home. In all of these stories a racialized understanding of Jewishness as an inescapable, biologically rooted “fact of life” plays a critical role in shaping destinies. Albert Cohen’s 1930 novel Solal 41 illustrates this well. Cohen (1895–1981) was born in Greece and immigrated with his family to the south of France as a child. He studied law and literature in Geneva as a young man and obtained Swiss citizenship, but spent much of his time in Paris and became a prominent figure in the French Zionist movement in the 1920s. Solal, his first novel,42 tells the story of a young Greek Jew (Solal) who emigrates to Paris, obtains a position as a minister in the French government, and marries a French aristocrat. Yet as soon as he achieves success, Solal’s world begins to fall apart. He is constantly caught between his French wife Aude and his Greek family, neither of whom respects or understands the other. In the end he is left with nothing; he rejects his family and loses his fortune, his wife ultimately leaves him for her former Christian fianc´e, and Solal commits suicide. In his 1928 play L’Eternel ghetto,43 Leo Pold`es portrayed another failed Jewish-Christian union. Pold`es, a playwright whose real name was Leopold Szeszler, was perhaps best known in Parisian literary cir-

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cles in the 1920s as the director of the Club du Faubourg. This Parisian literary society often sponsored lectures and debates on Jewish topics, including “mock trials” of current Jewish theme novels and plays.44 The action of Pold`es’ L’Eternel ghetto centers on young Max, whose pious father and the “Chef des Sionistes” is in the process of planning his family’s departure for Palestine. The play begins with the dramatic revelation that Max has become a Catholic and plans to marry Catholic Jeanne. Max’s conversion makes him an anti-Jewish zealot. He formally denounces Zionism, befriends an anti-Semitic leader, and denies Jewish solidarity. Max is clearly fleeing filial responsibility and the curse of being an outsider, which in L’Eternel ghetto, as it is also in Solal, means to flee from being a Jew. For both Solal and Max, however, flight is impossible. Intermarriage solves nothing, for Jewishness is not a cultural heritage out of which one may opt. It is a physical reality transmitted ineluctably from one generation to the next. Solal and Aude come from very different backgrounds: Solal is a Greek immigrant, not a French Jew. However, Albert Cohen, like Anzia Yezierska, portrays this failed marriage as more than a product of “cultural differences.” Solal’s Jewishness functions throughout the novel as an irrational force that constantly thwarts his intellectual desire for integration. In one scene, Solal is praying in the company of visiting relatives from Greece. When Aude and her father enter the room, Solal deliberately ignores them, intensifying the swaying body motion that accompanies traditional Jewish prayer. Later, reflecting on this moment, he remarks “What demon, stronger than he, had possessed him at that moment? Now she will forever have the despicable memory of these two swaying Orientals, cringing in fear before a daughter of Europe.”45 In a showdown between father and son, Pold`es similarly put the question of the “escapability” of Jewishness on the table. “I am a Christian,” Max asserts with confidence, “just because by random chance I was born a Jew, [why] must I remain one all my life even if I am disgusted with this race that I renounce?” No matter what you do, his father David challenges him, “you will still have Jewish blood in your veins . . . look at your face. Recognize the mask on which the age-old mark of our race is inscribed.”46 In the end, the father is proven right. Catalyzed in part by the anti-Semitic remark his fianc´ee hurls at him during an argument, Max breaks the engagement and emigrates with his family to Palestine. Yet like Solal, it is Max’s own sense that bridging the gap between the French and Jewish worlds is impossible that leads him to abandon the marriage definitively. “I love you Jeanne,” he

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declares, “but I am not alone. You are not alone. There is around us and between us the invisible presence of our fathers, our grandfathers and our ancestors. It weighs upon us.” “It is inscribed in our flesh and in our blood,” she sadly agrees, and, true to the theme of pathos and yearning, the lovers part.47

Conclusion The literary trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance illustrates the extent to which modern racial thinking posed a particular dilemma for French and American Jews in the 1920s. As portrayed by American and French Jewish literature of the time, a sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. Yet, more often than not, these figures are left ambivalent and regretful, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different “racial” background is not possible in the real world. Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure. As the literature which creates these representative figures alludes, the idea of being connected to other Jews by the immutable, non-rational bonds of “race” could prove emotionally satisfying. This was especially so at a time when the Jews’ capacity for integration was increasingly being questioned, whether openly or by implication, in the United States and France. At the same time, Jews in both countries remained attached to their respective national identities. They had no intention of being cast as outsiders in the literal sense of the term. The rise of Nazi Germany changed matters again. As the idea of a Jewish race became associated with Hitler’s program of annihilation, it became dangerous to point to Jewish “racial” distinctiveness. In the 1920s, however, “race” was a concept that expressed the complex nature of Jewish peoplehood and identification in the modern world.

Notes 1. John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in FinDe-Si`ecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 176. 2. In recent years, scholars of Jewish history have avoided using the term “assimilation,” which has a distinctly negative connotation, to describe the process of integration and acculturation that Western Jews experienced over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is the term, however, that Jews – including the writers discussed in this article – have normally used to describe

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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a (perceived) progressive loss of Jewish identity and community in the modern era. I noted the prevalence of this theme in my survey of French Jewish literature of the 1920s. See Nadia Malinovich, “Le R´eveil d’Isra¨el: Jewish Identity and Culture in France, 1900–1932,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000), Chapter 5. Both Jenna Joselit and Eric Goldstein note a similar development in American Jewish literature of the 1920s. See Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wans, 1994), 47–48 and Eric Goldstein, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in America, 1875–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000), 370–372. Concern about lack of religious observance and general community disaffiliation began to appear as a theme in Jewish communal discourse in both France and the United States in 1870s. See Jeffrey Haus, “The Practical Dimensions of Ideology: French Judaism, Jewish Education and State in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1997), Chapter 9 and Eric Goldstein, “ ‘Different Blood Flows in Our Veins:’ Race and Jewish Self-Definition in Late Nineteenth Century America,” American Jewish History (March 1997), 29–55. While French Jews were speaking of themselves in racial terms by the midnineteenth century, in the United States – where, in contrast with France, neither religion in general not Judaism in particular was under attack by progressive intellectuals in the early nineteenth century – it was only after 1870 that a racial self description became common. It was during this period, Eric Goldstein suggests, as American Jews were becoming both more numerous and more secular, that they first felt the need to find a self-description other than “religion.” See Goldstein, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in America, 1875–1945,” Chapter 1. On this shift, which began in the 1870s, see Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); Herman Lebovics, True France: The War Over Cultural Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). In Whiteness of a Different Color : European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), Matthew Frye Jacobson posits the mid-1920s as the high-water mark of American nativist thinking, which assumed a racial distinction between “superior” Anglo-Saxons and Nordics and “inferior” Italians, Celts, Jews, Slavs, etc. who comprised the major immigrant groups of the day. It was in the late 1920s, he argues, once the restrictive 1921 and 1924 immigration laws drastically reduced the entry of these “probationary whites” into the country, that people began to think in terms of various “white ethnic groups” who comprised a unified Caucasian race. See Jacobson, Chapters 2 and 3. On Jews and whiteness, see also, Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Michael

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Eric Goldstein, “Race and the Construction of Jewish Identity in America, 1875–1945,” above cite. For an overview of themes in American-Jewish literature in the early twentieth century, see David Fine “Attitudes Toward Acculturation in the English Fiction of the Jewish Immigrant, 1900–1917,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 6, vol. 3 (September 1973); “In the Beginning: American-Jewish Fiction, 1880– 1930,” in Lewis Fried and Louis Harap, eds., Handbook of American Jewish Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Creative Awakening: the Jewish presence in twentieth-century American literature, 1900–1940s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). See, in particular, the first volume of Andr´e Spire’s Po`emes Juifs (1908; Paris: Albin Michel, 1959) and his collection of essays Quelques Juifs (1913), reissued in 1928 as the first volume of Quelques Juifs et Demi-Juifs (Paris: Albin Michel); the first volume of Edmond Fleg’s Ecoute Isra¨el (1913; Paris Flammarion, 1954), as well as Jean-Richard Bloch, L´evy, premier livre de contes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1912; 1925) and . . . et Cie (Gallimard: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Fran¸caise, 1918; 1947). Other Jewish theme fiction of the 1920s includes, for example, the writings of folklorists Armand Lunel (L’Imagerie du Cordier (1924); Ester de Carpentras (1926); Nicolo-Peccavi, ou L’Affaire Dreyfus a ` Carpentras (1926)) and Raymond Geiger (Histoires Juives (1924); Nouvelles Histoires Juives (1925)); poet Gustave Kahn (Contes Juives (1926); Images Bibliques, po`emes (1929); Terre d’Isra¨el, contes juifs (1933)) and novelists Jacob L´evy (Les Juifs d’aujourd’hui (1925–1927), vol. 1, Les Pollaks (1925), vol. 2, Les demi-Juifs (1926), vol. 3, Les doubles Juifs (1927)) and Sarah L´evy (Oh mon goye! (1929), Ma ch`ere France! Roman (1931)). This literature is the subject of Chapter 5 of my dissertation, “Le R´eveil d’Isra¨el,” above cite. With the exception of several novels and short stories published in the 1880s and 1890s by Alsatian Jews who wrote nostalgically about the traditional Jewish world that they had grown up in and left as adults, there was almost nothing in the way of a French Jewish literature before the turn of the century. On these Alsatian Jewish writers, see Richard Cohen, “Nostalgia and Return to the Ghetto: A Cultural Phenomenon in Western and Central Europe,” in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). No´emi: roman d’une jeune fille juive en pays basque (Paris: Plon, 1925) and L’inqui`ete (Paris: Plon, 1927). Jean-Javal, No´emi, 199. La Trag´edie d’Isra¨el (Paris: Grasset, 1927–1928). Vol. 1, De P`ere en Fils (1927), vol. 2, Miriam (1928). J´ehouda, Miriam, 155. Ibid., 187. Jean-Javal, L’inqui`ete, 240. On Lewisohn, see Ralph Melnick, The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn, 2 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Ludwig Lewisohn, The Island Within (New York: Harper & Row, 1928). Ibid, 346.

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20. Milton Waldman, The Disinherited (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929). 21. Ibid., 96. 22. Ibid., 283. 23. Lawrence Levine, “Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties,” 195. 24. See John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984), Chapter 6. 25. Lewisohn, The Island Within, 165. 26. Ibid., 167. 27. Ibid., 271. 28. Waldman, The Disinherited, 39. 29. Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenemants (1923; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 30. For bibliographical information on Yezierska, see Gay Wilentz’s introduction to the 1995 edition of Salome of the Tenements, above cite and her daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen’s biography (with the assistance of Jo Ann Boydston), Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 31. Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements, 107. 32. Ibid., 132. 33. Ibid., 147. 34. Ibid., 182. 35. Ibid., 183. 36. In his article, “Longings and Renunciations: Attitudes Towards Intermarriage in Early Twentieth Century Jewish American Novels,” American Jewish History (June 2001), 215–230, Adam Sol analyzes both Yezierska and Lewisohn’s fiction in terms of their characters’ ambivalence towards intermarriage, and, more generally, the project of assimilation. 37. While there is some disagreement among historians as to the impact and importance of anti-Semitism in France in the 1930s, there is a general consensus that the 1920s was a period in which anti-Semitism was relatively insignificant. See Paula Hyman, The Jews in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1999), 145. 38. Jewish participation in the First World War further marginalized the antiSemitic movement. By fighting and dying alongside their Christian compatriots, many of whom had previously doubted Jewish patriotism, non-Jews increasingly came to feel that the Jews had proved their status as full-fledged Frenchmen. On this decrease in French anti-Semitism during and in the aftermath of World War I, see Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy (New York: Columbia University Press: 1979); Richard Millman, La question juive entre les deux guerres: ligues de droite et antis´emitism en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992) and Philippe Landau, “Les Juifs de France et la Grande Guerre 1914–1941: un patriotisme r´epublicain” (Ph.D. diss., Universit´e Paris 7, 1991). 39. Waldman, The Disinherited, 190. 40. Lewisohn, The Island Within, 51. 41. Albert Cohen, Solal (1930; re-print in Albert Cohen, Oeuvres, Paris: Gallimard, Biblioth`eque de la Pl´eiade, 1986).

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42. Cohen’s first book was a volume of poetry, Po`emes Juifs, in 1921. After publishing Solal to great critical acclaim in 1930, he went on to publish a number of plays, novels, and autobiographical writing in the 1930s and 1950s. On Cohen, see Jean Blot’s biography, Albert Cohen (Paris: Balland, 1986). 43. Leo Pold`es, L’Eternel Ghetto (Paris: Editions Radot 1928), 122. 44. For more on the Club de Faubourg, see Malinovich, “Le R´eveil d’Isra¨el,” 172– 174. 45. Cohen, Solal, 251. 46. Pold`es, L’Eternel ghetto, 44–45. 47. Ibid., 122.