Writing: Fiction
Suburbanization in the United States
Jews migrated in large numbers to newly constructed suburbs after World War II and the end of restrictive covenants that had excluded them. During the day, suburbs were largely female spaces where married Jewish women cared for their children and private homes, while volunteering for Jewish and civic activities. Jewish daughters raised in suburbs enjoyed middle-class comforts but also experienced pressures to conform to American gentile ideals of beauty.
Jacqueline Susann
Author and actress Jacqueline Susann made history as the first author to have three consecutive New York Times bestsellers, starting with her famous 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls. She is credited with drastically changing book promotion and marketing, using television and print advertising to promote her novels rather than relying on reviews.
Rachel Swirsky
Eva Szekely
Born in Budapest, Eva Szekely was forced to stop swimming during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. However, she returned to the sport after the war and went on to win thirty-two national individual swimming titles and eleven national team titles. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, she set a new Olympic record in the 200-meter breaststroke.
Meredith Tax
Sydney Taylor
Sydney Taylor as the author of the beloved All-of-a-Kind Family chapter book series, about five memorable and distinctive sisters growing up in a warm and loving Jewish household in early twentieth-century New York.
Yemima Tchernovitz-Avidar
Mina Tomkiewicz
Mina Tomkiewicz was a Polish author who wrote two books based on her personal experience growing up in Warsaw, Poland, and her deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Malka Heifetz Tussman
Malka Heifetz Tussman introduced into Yiddish poetry one of the most rigid verse forms, the triolet, and mastered another, the sonnet corona. A teacher of Yiddish language and literature in the Midwest and the West, Tussman was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish poetry in Tel Aviv in 1981.
I had time to notice that it was pasted full of newspaper clippings in a foreign language - before something very unusual happened.
Twenty-First Century Jewish Literature by Women in the US
Twenty-first-century Jewish women’s writing in the United States is wide-ranging in genre and topic. In this body of literature, we can find insightful and nuanced stories of contemporary American life as well as fiction that delves into lost or forgotten Jewish histories. From a female Spinoza to a female golem, a strong feminist ethic is pervasive in these writings.
Liudmila Ulitskaia
Liudmila Ulitskaia is one of Russia’s most famous and celebrated modern writers, known for her voice of moral authority and dissidence against a politically repressive Russian state. Her contemporary realist prose and fiction combines traditional plot and narrative techniques with candid treatment of conventionally taboo subjects such as sexuality, politics, and disease.
Ellen Umansky
Anna Strunsky Walling
Anna Strunsky Walling was a Russian-born author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She produced several novels and memoirs and was involved in a number of political organizations, including the Socialist Labor Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and her husband helped found.
Sadie Rose Weilerstein
An award-winning children’s author and the creator of the beloved Jewish story-book hero K’tonton, Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s stories for Jewish children in English heralded the beginning of a new genre. Weilerstein published the first version of The Adventures of K’tonton in 1935, and by 1964 she had published eleven books.
Jennifer Weiner
Cora Wilburn
Cora Wilburn was one of the most prolific American Jewish women writers of her time. Much of her work appeared in secular and Spiritualist publications, but during her final decades she published poetry in Jewish publications. Her autobiographical novel, Cosella Wayne, published serially in 1860, is the first coming-of-age novel to depict Jews in the United States.
Thyra Samter Winslow
Short story writer, novelist, and screenwriter Thyra Samter Winslow was well known for her stories and articles published in The Smart Set, American Mercury, and The New Yorker. Her writing frequently dealt with themes of small-town life, assimilation, and complicated images of women in unhappy marriages.
Adele Wiseman
Adele Wiseman was one of Canada’s most highly regarded writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She is best known for The Sacrifice (1956) and Crackpot (1974), her two groundbreaking novels that explore Jewish life in Canada. Both are set in Winnipeg’s insular North End, reveal her interest in characters who challenge normative behavior, and affirm Wiseman’s belief in community.
Emma Wolf
Author of five novels and numerous short stories, Emma Wolf was a pioneering Jewish American writer whose works were widely read and discussed within and outside the American Jewish community.
Martha Wolfenstein
Martha Wolfenstein is a forgotten figure in American Jewish literature today, but near the end of her life, she was hailed by Israel Zangwill and other critics as “the best Jewish sketch writer in America.” Before her death at age thirty-six, she wrote with charm, learning and a distinctive woman's perspective.
Writers in Victorian England
Spurred to publish initially as a response to the concerted campaigning of Christian conversionists, women writers were the first Anglo-Jews to produce literature on Jewish themes in England. By the end of the nineteenth century, literature by Jewish women had expanded to encompass not only works defensive of the dignity and rights of Anglo-Jewry, but also satirical novels critical of the community’s materialism and marriage practices.
Anzia Yezierska
Essayist, novelist, writer, and literary critic Anzia Yezierska turned the frustrations and indignities she suffered in New York’s tenements into novels and short stories that depicted the strenuous working lives of Jewish immigrants. Her novels, short stories, and autobiographical writing vividly depict both the literal hunger of poverty and the metaphoric hunger for security, education, companionship, home, and meaning that Jewish immigrants sought in America at the turn of the century.
Helen Yglesias
At the age of 54, Helen Yglesias dedicated herself to becoming a writer. Her works focus on the lives and concerns of Jewish women in New York. Her most notable books include Sweetsir and The Girls.
Yiddish Literature in the United States
Writers of a broad range of texts—passionate and erotic lyrical verse, social realist fiction, affecting descriptions of immigrant life, nostalgic paeans to their Eastern European homes, dirges to those murdered in the Holocaust—Yiddish women writers were modernists and traditionalists, romantics and realists, prose writers and poets. They represent no single school or line of development, but rather the range of women’s voices contained in Yiddish literature.
Yiddish: Women's Participation in Eastern European Yiddish Press (1862-1903)
The development of the Yiddish press allowed Jewish women to move from the domestic into the public sphere and to be part of public discussion about communities’ affairs, to acquire knowledge of other Jewish towns and world events, and to express themselves publicly in their own language understood by all. They wrote letters to the editor, stories and articles, and opinion pieces and practical instructions.
