The Woman Who Lost her Names: Selected Writings by American Jewish Women

THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER NAMES: SELECTED WRITINGS BY AMERICAN JEWISH WOMEN compiled and edited by Julia Wolf Mazow. Harper & Row, $10.00.

The title story of this collection is Nessa Rapoport’s, and readers of LILITH will remember it from issue #6. The other pieces range from fiction to personal reflections on raising children, on choosing to be childless (abortion and its aftermath), on reviewing a love affair with a non-Jewish man from the perspective of a Jewish lesbian feminist. There are reprints of golden oldies here— Yezierska, Tillie Olsen, Emma Goldman— and it’s nice to be able to greet them again. But the book’s real power and usefulness come from the more recent and less familiar pieces, which, although differing in overall quality, chart the direction much of Jewish women’s writing will take in the future.