Matrilineal Dissent

Challenging the mid-century patriarchal narrative of literary lineage. 

MIDWAY THROUGH Anya Ulinich’s 2014 graphic novel, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, the eponymous protagonist—who, like Ulinich herself, is an American novelist and Soviet émigré—dreams that she is sitting beside Philip Roth on a bus. Lena’s gushy fangirl response (“Oh my god, Philip Roth, is this really you? … Listen, I love your books! You and I are so much alike!”) meets with hostility from the famous Jewish American writer. “You’re nothing like me!” Roth replies. “First, you’re a woman, and not even a pretty one! Second, you’re an immigrant!” Ulinich’s visual rendering of the characters suggests that, indeed, the two authors are different: an aged and scraggy Roth is drawn with rough, sketch-like strokes, while Lena appears in a vivid contrast of black and white, as if drawn in permanent marker. Lena quickly retaliates by announcing that she “hated [Roth’s 2007 novel] Exit Ghost so much [she] threw it in a subway trash can!” Before Roth himself exits the text—for soon we turn the page  and the dream is over—he tells Lena, “Don’t read me, Finkle. Read Malamud. Read ‘The Magic Barrel’.”

This reference to Bernard Malamud’s magical realist fable featuring rabbinical student Leo Finkle circles back to the title of Ulinich’s graphic novel. In the end, Lena does not need Roth’s guidance. This dream Roth is her Roth, and Lena, like Ulinich, has already laid claim to the magic barrel, emptying it of the one-dimensional images of women that pervade Jewish American men’s fiction of the so-called golden age and repurposing it as a container for agentic self-representations.

Ulinich is one of many contemporary Jewish American women writers who position their work as an intertextual response to male-dominated, masculinist literary traditions and imagine a space in which Jewish women’s texts, voices, and experiences are made central to literary history. We see such allusive gestures in a number of twenty-first-century novels by Jewish women, including Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (2003), Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love (2005), Dara Horn’s The World to Come (2006), Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink (2017), Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019), and, most recently, Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed (2021).

From E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (1985) and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997) to Anna Solomon’s The Book of V (2020) and Liana Finck’s Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her familiar biblical stories from fresh, female perspectives.

We see similar moves, too, in pop-cultural texts. In the 2017 “American B***h” episode of Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” for example, the protagonist, Hannah Horvath, embraces and then casts aside a signed copy of When She Was Good (1967), Philip Roth’s sole attempt to narrate a novel from a female character’s point of view. The book is gifted to Hannah during a coercive encounter with a fictional male author facing allegations of sexual misconduct from undergraduate women. At the climax of the episode, Hannah rejects, albeit ambivalently, the dubious gift of a masculinist literary tradition alongside the freighted desire for male approbation and sponsorship, which, she realizes, would come at the price of her own exploitation and the betrayal of her feminist ideals.

The very act of pushing literary patriarchs aside in an effort to center women has the unintended consequence of reifying cultural reverence for the canonical male luminaries of Jewish American literature. The subversion narrative runs the risk of positioning women’s writings as derivative and ancillary, suggesting that the only way to achieve recognition is through men—their books, their institutions, their aesthetics. The love-hate relationship with misogynistic patriarchs replays time and again, perhaps most predictably in debates about Philip Roth. To cite a recent example, the 2021 virtual panel “Rethinking American Jewish Literary Studies in the #MeToo Era (or: Enough with Philip Roth).”

AS SEVERAL ESSAYS in Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History collection make clear, the misconception that Jewish women writers are secondary to the towering male figures of Jewish literary history is reinforced by a particular breakthrough narrative.

This narrative revolves around a “golden age” of Jewish American literature, and especially fiction, in which second-generation Ashkenazi writers—almost all men, plus one or two token women—burst onto the literary scene in the post-World War II period and redefined what it meant to be Jewish, American, and Jewish American.

This inaccurate version of Jewish literary history, which places Ashkenazi men at the center, has exerted tremendous power and influence, holding sway not just in scholarship but even in much of contemporary Jewish women’s literary culture. Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel registers the danger of this hegemonic narrative when Roth’s dismissiveness forces Ulinich’s protagonist into alternating positions of fawning supplication and explosive rebellion.

Part of the project of recognizing literature outside of the golden handcuffs of institutional value entails challenging, too, the story of Jewishness in America that undergirds the breakthrough narrative. While establishing a canon built on literary celebrity has had political utility for Jewish studies as a field, the valorization of white Jewish cis-het male authors in the postwar period tends to reinforce a narrative of assimilation and secularization in which immigrants and religious observance are relegated to a nostalgic past. This process of canonization elides, for example, the extensive body of literature by Soviet and Mizrahi immigrant women writers as well as by Orthodox women and those grounded in spiritual and devotional traditions. When literary historians advance a teleological narrative of American Jewishness that moves from immigration to assimilation and then to a contemporary moment of triumphant diversification and inclusion, they reinforce the idea that a flourishing world of letters was made possible only by the coherence and solidity of a white, upwardly mobile, patriarchal Jewish identity to which we are all indebted.

By diving back into Jewish women’s literary history and foregrounding innovative literary contributions in the contemporary moment, we find a wealth of authors and frameworks that not only challenge but sometimes operate beyond the confines of masculinist institutions. 

A version of this history appears in Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History edited by Annie Atura Bushnell, Lori Harrison-Kahan, and Ashley Walters (Wayne State University Press, 2024)

ART: HOLLY BERGER MARKHOFF

WWW.HOLLYMARKHOFF.COM