Abstract
There are many plays about the efforts of Jewish sons to free themselves from their parents, but what about the Jewish daughters? Most of the playwrights are like the parents in Feiffer’s Grown Ups, who fuss compulsively over their son and take their daughter for granted. Of course, most of the playwrights are male. The prominent women in their plays tend to be the mothers: Bessie Berger, Molly Goldberg, Kate Jerome in the Brighton Beach Trilogy. There are few dramatic equivalents to the Lower East Side fiction of Anzia Yezierska, in which young women fight to free themselves from traditional patriarchal fathers, although this theme is touched on, somewhat awkwardly, in a subplot of Rags, and it surfaces again in A Shayna Maidel by Barbara Lebow (b. 1936). The title is Yiddish for “a pretty girl.”
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Notes
Barbara Lebow, A Shayna Maidel, in Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., Making a Scene: The Contemporary Drama of Jewish Women ( Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997 ).
Wendy Wasserstein, Isn’t It Romantic (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1984, 1985): When you were, 11; Mother, you can’t, 55; Janie’s mother’s dream, 7; Marty’s father, 8–9; Toastmaster General, 18, 19; I think Jewish families, 18; I decided, 28; All I want, 49; My sister-in-law, 27; If I did that, 49; Do you really, 56; Did you teach me, 57; I believe a person... Unfortunately, Janie, 58; A spot, 60.
Jewish émigrés: Walter Shapiro, “Chronicler of Frayed Feminism,” Time, March 27, 1989, 90–92, rpt.
invented velveteen: Quoted in Sylviane Gold, “Wendy, the Wayward Wasserstein,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 1984, 30, rpt.
Jeff Chapman, Christopher Giroux, Brigham Narins, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 90 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 408.
Jeff Chapman, Christopher Giroux, Brigham Narins, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 90 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 408.
in a Jewish neighborhood: Wendy Wasserstein, Shiksa Goddess or, How I Spent My Forties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 3.
Wendy Wasserstein, The Sisters Rosensweig (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994): Aunt Pfeni, 6; a very pretty, 27; Housewife, mother, 99; So you’re the sister, 30; Rabbi Pearlstein is a great man... When did you, 31; getting into bed, 104; Rabbi Pearlstein says, 35; Pish -pish 8; a world we never 9; blow out 38; Look, Merv 57; Sometimes I look, 79; too Jewish … Sara [he says] … Why won’tyou give up 81; Is it because, 82; And I’m the only, 83; Double pish -pish, 94; TESS: … Mother, 106.
Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993): She carried the old world: 10–11; you and your children, 10.
Judaism isn’t: Quoted in Adam Mars Jones, “Tony Kushner at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain,” in Robert Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 26.
The Vanishing American Jew: Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
to historically unparalleled levels: Steven M. Cohen, “The Ambivalent American Jewish Historian,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 96 (Summer 2006): 435. See also Shapiro, A Time for Healing 231–39.
Look magazine published: Thomas B. Morgan, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Look, May 5, 1964, 42–46.
many people think: See, for instance, Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), especially 338–43;
and Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH, and London, UK: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1997), 188–96.
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© 2008 Julius Novick
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Novick, J. (2008). Jewish Daughters. In: Beyond the Golden Door. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611832_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611832_11
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