Although idiosyncratic in its selections and lax in its distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, this omnibus of stories, essays and poetry hums with vitality as it explores "what the modern world has made of the Jewish woman, and what the Jewish woman has made of modernity." Hannah Arendt maps the inner and outer landscapes of 18th-century Berlin salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen, whose deathbed words allegedly were: "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life--having been born a Jewess--this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Bernice Rubens depicts how the precarious position of the Jewish community in Czarist Russia subverts the love life of one daughter of Zion, and Nora Glickman examines the Jewish white slave trade as depicted in Latin American writings. Roberta Kalechofsky details the abuses of vivisection, Cynthia Ozick sends up a man whose "masculine" poems are actually the creations of his elderly auntie, and Fran Katz's bored suburban mother yearns to leap across the generation gap to embrace her hip, activist daughter. Emma Goldman ponders the role of women in the Spanish Civil War, and Peggy Parnass, who evaded concentration camp, recalls a lost childhood spent with 12 different foster families. The editors previously assembled South African Jewish Voices.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"There is grittiness and honesty to these writings that cannot be ignored." -- Times Outlook
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