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The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century

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The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Jessica Kirzane Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Jessica Kirzane All rights reserved 2 ABSTRACT The Melting Plot: Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century Jessica Kirzane This dissertation argues that interethnic romance narratives reflect and express central religious, political, racial, and gendered identities and agendas of Jewish American literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Chapter One shows that fin-de-siècle Reform Jewish women authors employed interethnic romance narratives to express a belief in America as exceptional as a place of religious and gender egalitarianism. Chapter Two turns to journalist and fiction writer Abraham Cahan, who wrote interethnic romance narratives to weigh the balance between idealism and pragmatism, socialist universalist values and the principles of Jewish nationalism in determining the character of Jewishness in America. Chapter Three demonstrates that Jewish American women’s popular fictions of interethnic romance in the 1920s employed interethnic romance plots to show women’s independence and mobility in light of early feminism and to express the limitations of feminist discourse when it ran counter to their ethnic identities. Chapter Four describes how narratives of interethnic romance written by Yiddish writers I. I. Shvarts, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and David Ignatov employ tropes of interethnic romance together with geographical border crossings into non-immigrant or non- Jewish spaces, co-locating physical dislocation and disorientation and intimate interpersonal desire and unease. Together, these studies demonstrate the significance of interethnic romance in the American Jewish collective imaginary in this period and reveal the flexibility and longevity of this central theme in American Jewish discourse. Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 The Question of Jewish Assimilability in Early Twentieth Century America ..................... 9 Jewish Interethnic Romance in American Popular Culture ............................................... 16 Interethnic Romance in Ethnic American Literatures in the Early Twentieth Century ..... 22 Interethnic Romance in Jewish American Fiction: Existing Scholarship .......................... 28 Description of Chapters ...................................................................................................... 31 Chapter One: American Egalitarianism and Women’s Empowerment: Interfaith Romance in Late Nineteenth Century Jewish American Women’s Fiction ........................................... 39 Intermarriage and American Exceptionalism ..................................................................... 43 Adeline Cohnfeldt Lust’s A Tent of Grace ........................................................................... 49 Rosa Sonneschein’s “A Modern Miracle” ............................................................................ 55 Female Optimism, Male Pessimism: The Romance and Tragedy of Intermarriage .......... 63 Emma Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal ............................................................................. 64 Friedrich Kolbenheyer’s “Jewish Blood” ............................................................................. 71 Theological Implications and the Role of Women ............................................................. 84 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter Two: Abraham Cahan and Interethnic Romance: Between Idealism and Pragmatism .................................................................................................................................. 94 Idealism and its Failures in Cahan’s Fiction of Interethnic Romance ............................... 99 Radical Egalitarian Politics and Interethnic Romance ..................................................... 109 Interethnic Romance as a Threat to Jewish Community .................................................. 113 Conversion: The Hypocrisies and Possibilities of a Secular Jewish Community ............ 124 Intermarriage as a Site for Immigrant Jewish Americans’ Displacement and Uncertainty .......................................................................................................................................... 130 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 139 Chapter Three: Laying Claim to the Self: Interethnic Romance and Early Feminist Discourse .................................................................................................................................... 142 i Interethnic Romance as Adolescent Rebellion in Marian Spitzer’s Fiction .................... 145 Interethnic Love as a Path to Creative and Professional Self-Expression in the Work of Rose Gollup Cohen and Leah Morton .............................................................................. 156 Intermarriage and Class Politics in the Writings of Rose Pastor Stokes and Anzia Yezierska .......................................................................................................................... 171 Rebelling Against the Melting Plot: Maintaining Jewish Identity in Leah Morton, Anzia Yezierska, and Edna Ferber’s Narratives of Interethnic Romance .................................. 189 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 207 Chapter Four: Mapping Modern American Yiddish Narratives of Interethnic Romance 214 Beyond the City: Intermarriage and the Possibility of Jewish Belonging in non-Jewish Spaces ............................................................................................................................... 219 From the Country to the City: Interethnic Romance Transplanted .................................. 232 Interethnic Romance and the City .................................................................................... 247 Country as City, and City as Country ............................................................................... 253 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 264 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 266 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 273 Primary Sources ............................................................................................................... 273 Literary Texts ......................................................................................................................... 273 Reviews, Newspaper Articles, and Obituaries ................................................................... 276 Secondary Sources ........................................................................................................... 277 ii Acknowledgments In this current political climate, in which politicians claim “I alone” can accomplish great deeds, writing an acknowledgments section feels like a radical act. It is a declaration of humility, an assertion of the truth that no actor exists alone, that nothing, even the sometimes lonely and isolating work of dissertation writing, can be done without colleagues, institutions, and a support network. This dissertation was made possible with funding from the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, in the form of the Irene C. Fromer Fellowship in Jewish Studies as well as other generous support. These two institutions have served as intellectual homes and I benefited from conversation groups and seminars that shaped the way I think and gave me the skills I needed to complete this project. I am grateful to William Dellinger, Peggy Quisenberry, Sheridan Gayer, Dana Kresel, and Annela Levitov who provided administrative support as well as much-needed encouragement. This work also benefitted from a research grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to many individuals for generously supporting and encouraging this project. Gabriel Finder, Vanessa Ochs, James Loeffler, Caroline Rody, and Lisa Woolfork set me on this path of scholarship as an eager undergraduate. Sarah Ponichtera, Adi Mehalel, Agi Legutko, Yuri Vedenyapin, Jordan Schuster, Roni Henig, Yitzchak Lewis, Saul Zaritt, Stefanie Halpern, and Feygi Zylberman shared this journey with me as fellow graduate students and I learned from their efforts, celebrated their successes, and commiserated with the challenges of the long and sometimes arduous journey that is graduate school. Saul iii Zaritt, Caroline Luce, Sunny Yudkoff, Hasia Diner, Laura Levitt, Josh Lambert, David Katzman, and Cheryl Lester offered guidance, support and suggestions that improved this work. Naama Rokem, Naomi Seidman, Sarah Imhoff, and Annalise Glauz-Tadrank served as
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