Edna Ferber, Jewish American Writer: Who Knew?

Abstract

To write about Edna Ferber’s treatment of Jewish American women in her fiction is to write about Edna Ferber herself. A nonpracticing Jew, Ferber was ferociously Jewish politically, socially, morally, and spiritually, yet virulently anti-Zionist. Her only Jewish novel, Fanny Herself, written in 1917, is highly autobiographical and provides the spiritual underpinning for Ferber’s first autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure (1939), and to a lesser extent, for her second, A Kind of Magic (1963). While Ferber largely rejected Judaism in terms of religion, she felt keenly the history of the Jewish people, particularly their centuries of suffering and persecution, to which she attributed her own success as a writer.