PART THREE—
RETHINKING THE FEMININE SUBJECT: LABOR HISTORY

Chapter Five—
"Such a Lady":
Class-Consciousness and Cultural Practice in Jewish Women's Autobiography

"Slum Dwellers," Not "Sturdy Pioneers": The Anti-Semitic Context of Jewish American Autobiography

In the audience sat a Wisconsin farmer who followed the recital [of the Battle with the Slum] with keen interest.  . . . It turned out that he and his sister had borne a hand in the attack.  . . . Soon after he had come west and taken homestead land; but  . . .  after fifty years his interest in his brothers in the great city was as keen as ever, his sympathies as quick. He had driven twenty miles across the frozen prairie to hear my story. It is his kind who win such battles, and a few of them go a long way .
Jacob A. Riis, The Battle with the Slum

However hard one may work, he can only exercise the gifts with which nature has endowed him. . . . The thrifty, hard-working and intelligent American or Teutonic farmer is able to economize and purchase his own small farm and compete successfully. . . . But the backward, thriftless, and unintelligent races succeed best when employed in gangs on large estates. The cotton and sugar fields of the South with their negro workers have their counterpart in the plantations of Hawaii with their Chinese and Japanese, and in the newly developed sugar-beet fields of Nebraska, Colorado, and California, with their Russians,

Bohemians, Japanese, and Mexicans.  . . . The Jewish immigrant, particularly, is unfitted for the life of a pioneer.  . . . The factory system, with its discipline and regular hours, is distasteful to the Jew's individualism. He prefers the sweatshop, with its going and coming .
John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America

Bleak American names, New England names frosty as a winter morning, written out in Yiddish, becoming strange, un-New-Englandish things, smacking somehow of witches' numerals .
Pauline Leader, And No Birds Sing

Whether anti-Semitic or sympathetic, early twentieth-century representations of Jewish life in America resonate with the same doubtfulness about the possibility of domesticating Jewish "strangeness." In John Commons's smug catalogue of American types, Jews—like Mexicans, like blacks, like everyone whose darkness or smallness or less-than-Teutonic bone structure betrays origins outside the pale of Bismarckian settlement—are clearly "unfit" to be pioneers, a people who by nature prefer the close atmosphere of the sweatshop to the open expanse of homes on the range.^[1] And if reformer Jacob Riis is more hopeful about the prospect of cleaning up the slum, his identification of the Crèvecourian farmer with the savior of Hester Street (why not its own peddlers and cobblers, knife sharpeners and garment workers, after all?), and his admission that "there is yet an element of doubt about the Jew as a colonist" suggest that the Danish immigrant also subscribes to a theory of racial development that identifies assimilation of the Jew as little short of miraculous, a distinctively American alchemy.^[2]

In fact, Riis's attention to the squalor of the slums, their absence of light and air, their dirty streets, their teeming populations, situates his championing of the Jews within a long-standing tradition of liberalism in America, a tradition that has been as preoccupied with the healthy birth rates of "blighted" communities as with the degraded quality of their living standards. Like Jefferson's focus on black/white population ratios in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) or California senator Barbara Boxer's appeal to the National Guard to beat back the "floods" of undocumented workers from Mexico over two centuries later, Riis's urgent call for the annihilation of the slum is predicated not only upon the misery its people

endure but on nervousness over the sheer numbers of ethnic "others" living there. Although his work demonstrates genuine sympathy, its rhetoric worries over what is unassimilable in the immigrant condition: the absence of light signifies darkness (a darkness not to be relieved, despite roomier housing, until Jewish children cease running away from "Santa Claus as from a 'bogey man'" and begin "embracing" the "spirit of the Christian Church" [436–37]); the filthy streets denote a sexual and moral excessiveness (Italians are more "manageable" and "inclined to cleanliness" [101]); the press of people living over and alongside one another signal an intimacy that threatens to overwhelm the onlooker. "A little while longer," Riis begins his famous Battle with the Slum, "and we should hardly have escaped being dragged down with him" (2).

Yet if even the apologist for "Jew-town" (364) sees the slum as "the enemy of the home" (7), what of Jewish representations of the ghetto? Where immigrants from Mexico generally insist in print on their mexicanidad, the autobiographical literature of the Jewish grine (greenhorns) appears to dispense with Passover traditions and bar-mitzvah celebrations as quickly as with Yiddish. Sociologist Manuel Gamio's The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story gives us portraits of immigrants who respond to racism by denying the impress of American manners and mores and reaffirming their ties with Mexico: "I can't adapt myself to certain customs of this country. To tell the truth I am even opposed to its tendencies of dominion and of power. It wouldn't bother me much to attack it hard," one woman interviewed by Gamio insists.^[3] Not all such critiques of American life rehearse Soledad Sandoval's shift from indifference to hostility with such alacrity, but many people interviewed are equally quick to acknowledge injustice at the hands of "gringo thieves" (167) and few immigrants claim any substantial benefit from life on this side of the border.

Like the contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric that targets Mexicans, the discursive context within which early twentieth-century Jewish autobiographers were forced to insert themselves was equally hostile to their "alien" presence upon the American scene. In historian Moses Rischin's account of the lower East Side, populist and literary formulations of Jewish Americans sound the same note: "A 'Hebrew Conquest,' mused Henry James, 'swarming Israel,' echoed Herbert Casson, 'the Great Jewish Invasion,' insisted Burton J. Hendrick."^[4] As with racist language more generally, anti-Semitism does not discriminate in terms of class distinctions or

regional differences, preferring instead to define its objects en masse. "The prevailing stereotype of the Jew, foreign, mysterious, associated with trade and a world financial cabal," Rischin notes, "embraced counting house and sweatshop. Fifth Avenue mansion and Rivington Street slum" (259). Even Riis falls back on a familiar litany of racist slurs in his apology for the slum dwellers:

Their very coming was to escape from their last inhuman captivity in a Christian state. They lied, they were greedy, they were charged with bad faith. . . . One might have pointed out that they had been trained to lie, for their safety; had been forbidden to work at trades, to own land; had been taught for a thousand years, with the scourge and the stake, that only gold could buy them freedom from torture. But what was the use? The charges were true. The Jew was—he still is—a problem of our slum. (192)

Framed as the apotheosis of the American farmer with his love for the soil, the Jewish "problem" is in Riis's account urban, a culture of crowds, (klezmer) bands, kosher butcher shops, fake auction stores, and synagogues (214). While some early twentieth-century Mexicano autobiography indicts Anglo-American hostility to immigrant culture, however, most Jewish testimonies at the turn of the century stress the wrenching nature of geographical dislocation only to end by insisting (despite and to spite the non-Jewish fixation with what is unalterable in the Jewish character) on its transformative power. Notwithstanding condescension on the part of the goyim, Jewish texts seem reluctant to stand upon their own difference. Instead, their narratives sacrifice the integrity of long-standing cultural practice with the zealousness of the converted, embracing the New World as the cradle of personal and collective renaissance. "I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over," Mary Antin asserts in The Promised Land, a text that was to become the standard for early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant autobiography.^[5]

Sheer distance from the homeland accounts in part for this response: Mexicanos can, if at personal risk, cross and recross from este lado al otro; Jews from Eastern Europe were irreversibly cut off from their countries of origin. A more vexed relation to "home" also underlies the readiness with which many Jewish immigrants undertook to make themselves Americans. Emma Goldman's insightful appraisal of immigrant consciousness resonates here: "They were Jews who had suffered much," she indicates

of a group of Russian settlers; "some of them had even been in pogroms. Life in the new country, they said, was hard; they were all still possessed by nostalgia for their home that had never been a home."^[6] Across space and time, Jewish citizenship in Europe was never more than partial and always tentative: from Spain to the Ukraine, from the Inquisition through the pogroms, as European economies faltered people's rights were suspended, then, with the onset of civil conflicts, abrogated entirely. Given this historically continuous deracination, economic and psychic when it was not geographic (the Dreyfus Affair was one reminder to bourgeois Jewish subjects that their personae as French nationals was no more than a disguise), the Statue of Liberty's emblazoned call to full participation in American life must have appeared a welcome release.

If in casting off their European garments Jews could begin to recover from the effects of centuries of estrangement, their relatively high chance of passing underscores the willingness of Jewish American authors to bracket the "ethnic" portion of their doubled identity. Given this tendency to efface Jewish culture, John Common's uncompromising anti-Semitism, despite its dismissiveness, usefully supplies a historical context many Jewish autobiographers gloss over or leave out altogether. The University of Wisconsin economics professor's disparaging commentary also calls attention to the complicated relation between class and culture played out in the personal narratives of Jewish immigrants—both those who romanticized their climb out of the ghetto and those who chose instead to relive their struggles in the garment factories of the East Side.

Louis Levine begins his 1924 history of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union by investing Emma Lazarus's "tired and huddled masses" with the dignity socialism accords the world's workers: in his refiguring of the greenhorns, the Jewish rank and file become the new American heroes as "the sweatshop worker is transformed into an industrial citizen who begins a new and constructive struggle for the democratization of his work-shop and for the Americanization of his home."^[7] In its curious conflation of class-consciousness and cultural accommodation, Levine's formulation reiterates the discursive gestures of much Jewish American autobiography. The question of ethnicity reverberates in the work of such writers, even—or, more precisely, all the more—when it is explicitly disparaged as irrelevant or figured as an anachronism. Analyzing the variety of textual moves such books display by reading the historically

troubled relation between acculturation and ethnicity back into them reveals not only how representation is informed by cultural practice but how it is formed by the pressures of American anti-Semitism upon it. Once again, Commons provides a cogent restatement of this relation, one in which Jewishness becomes inextricably linked with its negation: "That which makes the Jew a peculiar people is not altogether the purity of his blood, but persecution" (93). Despite protestations to the contrary or summary dismissal of its unimportance, then, anti-Semitism serves as the narrative pivot of Jewish American autobiography.

Because it uses the language of class to address the issue of culture, Levine's formulation provides a way of glossing the problematic representation of ethnic identity in immigrant narrative. Like Chicanos, Jewish Americans have historically been a working-class people. If czarist decree promised only poverty to the Jews of the Pale, the path their immigrant descendants walked to sweatshop and factory was hardly a smooth one. To demonstrate Jewish class-consciousness, labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris quotes a lullaby popular in immigrant households at the turn of the century: "When my little baby's grown / You'll soon see which is which. / Like the rest of us, you'll know / The difference between poor and rich. / The largest mansions, finest homes / The poor man builds them on the hill. / But do you know who'll live in them? / Why of course the rich man will!" As the title of Anzia Yezierska's 1925 novel Breadgivers suggests, Jewish life in both the fictional renderings and the autobiographical accounts of immigrant authors is commonly described as a series of struggles for bread.^[8]

If the language of class speaks for the practice of culture, then what at first appears to be an inability to address the question of ethnicity begins to look more like a problem of translation. Across a wide range of personal narratives from the turn of the century through the 1960s, cultural affiliations remain present but unspoken, mapped by proxy as class ties. Consider the autobiographies of Rose Pesotta (1944) and Rose Schneiderman (1967), for instance, whose records of labor organizing, with their studied inattention to American Jewish identity, seem to favor assimilation.^[9] Yet while Judaism as religious ritual is invoked only sparingly in both books and experience of anti-Semitism in America is articulated even less often,^[10] Pesotta's and Schneiderman's determination to maintain a working-class consciousness despite the discursive pressures pushing the immigrant to reiterate the rags-to-riches American success story bespeaks a secular Jew-

ish cultural practice. Because of the preponderance of Jewish labor leaders in Russia and the influence of the Bund on radical politics there, to agitate for labor reform at the turn of the century was inevitably to be associated with the progressive sector of Jewish thought and culture. In the unstable political atmosphere of the Pale, labor organizing became a form of filial piety, a secular translation of the previous generation's religious rituals. When she recollects the zeal with which her radical Russian parents maintained their political commitments in California, American-born Shura Eastman illustrates how class substituted for culture and the extent to which this equation was driven by anti-Semitism: "Our parents believed in politics. They came from orthodox religious backgrounds in the Old Country, but they were totally disillusioned with a God that would allow pogroms and sweatshops. So they replaced religion with socialism. It was a total commitment to socialism, just like their parents had followed religion back in the shtetl ."^[11]

By contrast with Eastman and other first- and second-generation American Jews who speak in Kenneth Kann's oral history of Petaluma, accounts of the transition from the Old World to the New published before the First World War more often invent American selves by renouncing Jewish culture. In books like these, the Americanization of the self is overtly framed as a story of class rise. Even when they deny working-class affiliations, however, assimilationist restagings of Jewish American identity, like those that celebrate labor struggles, remain resolutely class-conscious.^[12]

"I Can Never Forget": The Mixed Message of Assimilationist Narrative

"The husband sweats from early morning till late at night, stitching his life away for every penny he earns. And she is such a lady, when she goes to the market, she don't bargain herself to get things cheaper like the rest of us. She takes it wrapped up, don't even look at the change. Just like a Gentile."
Anzia Yezierska, "Wild Winter Love"

Critics often rehearse conventional distinctions between Old World and New when they describe early twentieth-century narratives that focus on the transition from the Russian Pale to the streets of New York's lower

East Side: orthodoxy versus apostasy, slavery versus freedom, poverty versus the chance to accumulate riches. The facile generalizations this kind of bipolar figuring encourages deny what is in many narratives a very nuanced depiction of the tensions between cultural practice and Americanization. And, too often, early twentieth-century autobiographies that celebrate assimilation have been summarily dismissed as a critical embarrassment. Yet a close analysis may uncover ideological equivocation in even the most determinedly bright recollections of successful conversion: Mary Antin's The Promised Land and Elizabeth Stern's My Mother and I, for instance.^[13]

In her wide-reaching historical study of Jewish women, Susan Glenn provides a much-needed complication of the relation between what is often called Americanization in these reminiscences and more contemporary definitions of assimilation by suggesting that

Jews were neither the "uprooted," culturally dislocated immigrants portrayed by Oscar Handlin and other historians writing in the 1950's nor the stubborn traditionalists romanticized by more recent studies of immigrant and labor historians. . . . We should think of the cultural negotiations that took place among eastern European Jews in the decades after 1880 as part of a trans-Atlantic phenomenon, a process that began in the Old World but accelerated and took on new dimensions for immigrants in the U.S.^[14]

The 1972 findings of the Pittsburgh section of the National Council of Jewish Women underwrite Glenn's revision of traditional Jewish historians. Suggesting that a desire to be identified as American is not mutually exclusive with the need to maintain a sense of Jewish identity, the authors decided that "only one or two [of the people interviewed] tended toward the 'melting pot' or 'assimilation' theories of adjustment. Most expressed their strong identification with the Jewish people and their desire to continue that identification in either religious or cultural terms."^[15]

Ethnicity is not only class-contingent but is laden with gendered values as well. For women, as Glenn suggests, "modernity meant breaking down traditional negative female stereotypes and expanding the feminine presence and voice beyond the customary spheres of home and market-place."^[16] From the 1917 publication of Elizabeth Stern's My Mother and I through the 1958 printing of Rose Pesotta's Days of Our Lives, the autobiographies of Jewish women clearly challenge Old World constructions

of femininity: in a wide range of reminiscences, the promised land looks particularly promising for the girl who wishes to become a scholar. Despite their formal differences, women's narratives describe Jewish ethnicity in Russia in surprisingly uniform terms, depicting Judaism as an experience not only of external racial oppression (the devastation of the pogroms, for instance, is a literary constant) but of gender discrimination within the family as well.^[17]

Although texts by immigrant women that are incompatible ideologically and rhetorically nevertheless share a tendency to describe the move to America as a feminist defiance of masculine privilege, their descriptions of the relations between gender and culture in the immigrant once she is established as "American" are far from uniform. Masculine representations of cultural practice in the New World tend to look for ways to reclaim a patriarchy made servile through unceasing economic pressure; even goyim like Riis celebrate the reinstatement of the "priest and patriarch" in their descriptions of household rituals, descriptions which use gendered values to invoke class oppression. In "Lost Children" a feminized street seller invokes "the Sabbath blessing upon his house and all it harbored," dissipating through prayer "every trace of the timid, shrinking peddler" and restoring himself to his rightful place as familial "head."^[18] A similarly gendered iconography operates in "The Slipper-Maker's Fast," where a shoemaker's struggle to maintain tradition has as its aim the need to obliterate not so much a religious "bondage" as a sexual one: "To-morrow was the feast  . . . the first Yom Kippur since they had come together again . . . the feast when, priest and patriarch of his own house, he might forget his bondage and be free" (28–29).

If men's recollections maintain the integrity of religious/cultural authority in order to invest it with a value gendered masculine, women's texts are more likely to decouple Judaism as religious practice from Judaism as cultural articulation in order to open a space for feminine authority. This divorce between a religious authority that speaks in the name of the Father's law and a feminized cultural practice conflates femininity and maternity, however, so that writing, cooking, and storytelling become specifically motherly arts.

The often vexed relation between feminine culture and masculine law in the texts of Jewish American women is evoked succinctly in Pauline Leader's And No Birds Sing .^[19] Like assimilationist texts more generally,

Leader's autobiography wields the image of the New America in a polemic against the masculine feudalism of Russia. The Old World "was a world for men," but, Leader suggests, the New one will be different: "Are all men like my father? I wonder. Not American men, I am sure. American men are different. It is only Jews who let their wives work in ice-cold markets, who let their wives lift sides of beef until they rupture themselves" (62). In this very troubled account of upward rise, the Old World division of labor in which wives work while husbands read the Torah is symptomatic of the pathology of Jewishness itself, a working-class culture which must be cast off in order for women, in particular, to get ahead. Where Riis's "The Slipper-Maker's Fast" sympathizes, if condescendingly, with a head of household who is devoid of authority in the world outside the home, Leader's representation of Jewish American domestic life casts the father as a tyrant whose only reason for existing is to obliterate her independent spirit, a strength of will she has inherited from her mother. Envious of her clumsy attempts at poetry writing, an art he had himself attempted before the demands of a growing family foreclosed the possibility, he now tried "to break my will as his had been broken. But he could not. For I had [my mother] in me as well as him. I had her endurance that would persist, that would not admit failure" (137).

Acknowledging that the literary tendencies she inherits are a paternal legacy does not prevent Leader from condemning masculine tyranny. Her autobiography is perhaps most excoriating in its fraught depiction of the relation between mother and daughter, however. In the United States, it is ultimately the maternal figure who must be denied because as a worker she is most steeped in the associations of Jewish culture. While Leader as autobiographer demands readerly sympathy for this progenitor whose poverty and unceasing toil are the measure of a constricted life, her own response as a character mimes the condescension of the Americans who despise this woman, "so much more clever" than they, for her lack of "fine clothes" (173) and her inability to play the lady: "'I hate you,' I cried. 'I hate you. I wish you were dead. I never have anything like other girls. They laugh at me. The way my coat stinks of the market. They hold their noses when I come near them. . . . Damned dirty Jews.' I turned on my mother with their cry. 'Damned Jews!' I said" (18).

Mary Antin provides another working out of the relation between cultural loss, class rise, and the gendered metaphors often used to express

these changes. In The Promised Land, whose tide clearly identifies the book as a narrative of assimilation, Antin explicitly documents the sexism of Russian Jewish practice, quoting a common prayer that begins, "I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female" (33) and scorning matrimony as a process that objectifies women with a terrifying economy: as a bride, her mother has "submitted to being weighed, measured, and appraised before her face" (56).

But references to the difficulties women endure at the hands of patriarchal institutions drop out of the autobiography when it begins to describe Antin's life in America; substituted in their place is an affirmation of upward mobility. Just as narratives by blacks written during the latter part of the nineteenth century and Mexicano literature post-1848 often signal the assumption of bourgeois status via feminine characters whose physical and social marks of "refinement"—blue eyes, light skin, golden hair, and, of course, an immobilizing chastity—approximate whiteness,^[20] so turn-of-the-century Jewish texts like Antin's chart their subjects' class rise and their distance from ethnic culture by celebrating the American "lady" as icon of Anglo-American middle-class culture. Like more recent academic success stories (Richard Rodriguez's 1982 Hunger of Memory, for instance),^[21] the tale of the education of Mary Antin teaches readers as much about cultural endeavors and class maneuvering as it does about scholarly activity. If the author of The Promised Land indicts the charity of her Beacon Hill friends as bloodless in comparison with the heartfelt aid of her Dover Street neighbors, she nevertheless devotes her time, if not her sympathies, to the Brahmins.

I would suggest that the ambivalence Antin demonstrates concerning the values of labor and leisure is the outcome of the text's very conflicted sense of ethnic identity. As she dramatically announces in her preface, her narrative will provide an example of the melting-pot plot: "I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over" (xix). Critics of the autobiography often position Antin as "sure she achieves" her goal of becoming "wholly assimilated,"^[22] but the phrases that follow this apparently confident assertion of (Anglo) American identity suggest otherwise. In fact, her clean break with tradition is made possible only through a concerted—and ultimately unsuccessful—effort to deny a past she describes as a dead weight, a "heavy garment" that "clings to your limbs when you would run" (xix). Read against even more orthodox assimilationist narratives (consider the

formulation of Jewish American identity in Riis's celebrated The Battle with the Slum : "If ever there was material for citizenship, this Jew is such material. Alone of all our immigrants he comes to us without a past. He has no country to renounce, no ties to forget" [192]), Antin's ambivalent rendering of Jewish cultural memory appears hesitantly subversive. Because she calls attention to the instability of this self-imposed schism, Antin's insistence on pushing Jewish life beyond the pale of her personal narrative indicates her continuing sense of cultural identity. She attempts to resolve this cultural schism through the conventions of fictional representation and the binary logic of gender: "I can analyze my subject, I can reveal everything; for she, and not I is my real heroine" (xix). Yet such distancing only calls attention to the difficulty of self-making. Similarly, hyperbolic announcements such as "I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell" (xix) succeed merely in emphasizing the impossibility of self-denial. The transition from the observance of Yom Kippur to the celebration of Thanksgiving is not without complications.

By the concluding paragraphs of her preface Antin has come full circle, leaving readers with a distinctly clichéd trope of Jewish identity. Acknowledging her autobiographical double bind—"I can never forget, for I bear the scars. But I want to forget" (xxii)—she likens her condition to that of the estranged Russian-Jewish army conscript, "wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family; hiding the scars of his torture under his rags" (xxii).^[23] This highly colored testament to the oppressiveness of the past and the impossibility of escaping it suggests that we should rethink recent critical formulations about the book, arguments like Richard Tuerk's or Raymund Paredes's, which mistakenly equate Antin's eagerness to remake herself with a sense of ease concerning such cultural metamorphosis. Paredes asserts: "In a familiar pattern of heedless assimilation, Antin never connects her readiness to cast off her ethnic heritage to her childhood experiences of bigotry and barely questions the socializing aspects of her American education; she merely celebrates its accessibility."^[24] Yet Antin's preface employs precisely this type of the cast-off Jew to describe her own ethnicity. "It is painful to be consciously of two worlds," she acknowledges. "The wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much" (xxii). With this curiously inappropriate autobiographic gesture Antin intro-

duces her reminiscences, dramatically undercutting the ostensible purpose of her narrative by calling up a quintessentially Jewish figure, one whose masculinity allows her to flout a securely gendered identity and thus to further question the apparent impregnability of her American (dis)guise. Protestations of successful Americanization to the contrary, what we are left with in The Promised Land is a warning about the dangers of ethnic disaffiliation. As mirror image to her own cultural and sexual confusion, the figure of the estranged soldier reminds readers that the practice of forced assimilation, with its consequent disorientation, is not exclusive to Russia.

The kind of ideological confusion that marks Antin's autobiography is equally characteristic of Elizabeth Stern's My Mother and I . As with other personal narratives by Jewish American women which chart movement up from poverty, the language of class mobility speaks for cultural accommodation here. Distinguished by an introduction from Theodore Roosevelt which scraps one thousand years of Jewish history as insignificant compared with the Americanizing of its author, Stern's book was clearly marketed for a readership eager for immigrant success stories.^[25] The writer presents herself with becoming humility as one of "America's foster-children" (11), an image recalling scores of photographs of Ellis Island hopefuls.

Like Antin, Stern insists early on in her narrative that "I could make myself an American," and her rehearsal of Franklinian self-authoring is equally fettered by old affiliations. As with American ethnic autobiography more generally, Stern's narrative casts the (English) word as providing the way out of the ghetto; yet language, although it acts as the medium for acculturation, is equally the means by which the writer reconnects, if only in memory, to her origins. "The mere writing of this account is a chain, slight but never to be broken," Stern asserts (11), identifying the autobiographical act as one that reconstructs ethnicity as well as disavows it. Throughout this assimilationist bildungsroman, the act of writing resonates with Jewish cultural practice as Stern's mastery of language reaffiliates her with a specifically feminine and maternal community. Its author may work to distinguish this text from her previous literary attempts: "Now I was writing only to my own mother, and only for myself." But she reminds us that she has written for others as well: having learned to write in American schools, she recalls the practice of her childhood, when, with the help of

her mother, she penned letters home on behalf of those who could not write.

Explicitly, however, My Mother and I, like The Promised Land, is an immigrant success story. As I noted earlier, in narratives of the first half of this century Jewish culture is inevitably associated with poverty: to become an "American lady" (75), as Elizabeth Stern describes her own transformation, is to figure class rise as well. Yet the success of this enterprise is itself predicated upon a gendering of culture, a sexualized mapping of ethnic identity that uses the bipolarity of gender to literalize the bicultural self. Like other assimilationist narratives by women, Stern's book mirrors Antin's image of the wandering Jewish conscript torn from home and hearth in seeing cultural change as a function of increasing distance from the maternal. Ethnicity, that is, is embodied in her mother and signified through images of writing and cooking. Given the gendered division of labor that narratives like Leader's, Stern's, and Antin's critique, however, it is not surprising that becoming "American-feminine"^[26] means learning not to work at all, means becoming a lady rather than living the life of a professional woman. This model of gender identity, like Antin's metaphor of the past as a garment that "clings to your limbs when you would run," is backward-glancing, nostalgic for nineteenth-century formulations of separate spheres rather than anticipating twentieth-century celebrations of (feminist) desire to partake in the political world.^[27]

Like Pauline Leader, Stern uses the changing power relations between mother and daughter to describe her own accommodations in the New World. If it is her mother who guides the pen of the nine-year-old letter-writer, for instance, it is this same woman who is represented as farthest from the academic and social successes of her high-school-age daughter. Marooned at home, stumbling over the English words her daughter has long since mastered, she lives vicariously through a child who provides her only grudgingly with small gifts of information. Wrenching the authority of language from this woman now depicted as powerless, Stern paints a bitter portrait of maternal isolation, a revenge fantasy sharpened by guilt and loss.^[28] Transforming one of her mother's old copper cooking pots from functional object into artifact—it now stands in the daughter's living room as art—allows the author to claim American territory for herself. As an assimilationist narrative, then, Stern's book makes cultural loss into a kind

of repatriation, a choice between her mother and the adopted "mother country" (197) of America.

The Spirit of Socialism: Class Struggle and Cultural Practice in the Garment Industry

To say that work was difficult in the garment industry is like suggesting that funding is useful in obtaining election to political office. Stitching shirtwaists during the first half of the twentieth century, like sewing designer labels onto sweaters today, was misery. Trying to make a living in factory or sweatshop occupied virtually every waking hour, exhausting the body and beating down the spirit:

Work was seasonal, which meant weeks of unemployment each year. Employees paid for their needles and a fee for electricity, and often were charged for the boxes they sat on and for coat lockers (when there were any). They paid for any damaged work and were fined if they were late. Clocks were set back so workers would not be able to calculate how much overtime they worked. Frequently their paychecks were "short," but the process of correcting "mistakes" was so complex that it discouraged them from complaining.^[29]

Those who did complain were subjected to various kinds of abuse; for the largely Jewish union organizers of New York City, hostility was often framed in the language of anti-Semitism. In his classic history of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Louis Levine notes that in order to explain the conditions in sweatshops, investigators "took the view that the sweat-shop was the result of the inferior standards introduced by the immigrants. Some even declared it a special Jewish institution explicable by the 'racial' and 'national' characteristics of its Jewish workers. An official of the State of Pennsylvania wrote that the Russian Jews 'evidently prefer filth to cleanliness.'"^[30]

Similarly, union propaganda writer Joseph Schlossberg's complaint on behalf of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America reflects the anxiety many Russian Jewish workers must have felt about the necessity of "becoming American" and the apparent impossibility of doing so, given the racist language employed in anti-union resistance. "We have shown how seriously we have taken the American institutions. We began to American-

ize. We learned eagerly all we could about this country," Schlossberg insists. But organizing efforts only resulted in the rhetorical equivalent of a quarantine on immigrant workers: "Then the cry of un-American 'cheap labor' and 'reducing the American standard of living' was changed to the cry of un-American 'wage profiteering' and 'ruining the industry.'"^[31]

When it identifies the sweatshop as a Jewish "institution" and claims that Jewish workers prefer its "going and coming," early twentieth-century anti-Semitic language recapitulates nineteenth-century racist depictions of the happy darky content to labor in the cotton fields from before dawn to after dark and the happy-go-lucky railroad worker working "all the live long day," as the song goes, "just to pass the time away." The writings of Jewish workers themselves, however, resonate with the conviction that immigrants are struggling to change the nature of work itself: in their narratives, labor organizing becomes a peculiarly Jewish métier. Schlossberg goes so far as to affirm categorically that "the early class struggles in the modern clothing industry in New York were Jewish class struggles" (6), a dramatically ethnocentric rhetorical gesture which insists on the contributions of Jewish unionists at the expense of everyone else. Clearly, however, in the eyes of many Jewish organizers—including the women who were to record their activities in the pages of their personal narratives—the union was, as California historian Douglas Monroy describes it, "a Jewish cultural institution as well as an economic organization."^[32]

Labor historians also document socialism as a secular form of Jewish practice, identifying such activism as a constant across continents. Susan Glenn describes the Bund, which "spread its message among artisans and laborers, adopting a program of revolutionary agitation and building a secret, underground Jewish workers' movement that culminated in massive strikes in the industrial centers of the Pale" as an organization, like Zionism, at once political and ethnic.^[33] Henry Tobias cites Litvak, who argues that the Central Committee of the Bund became for Jewish workers in Russia "a kind of holy of holies," the words "the organization has decided" a sort of "commandment."^[34] Rischin uses similar language to describe the (generic) sweatshop worker of the United States, who "embraced the socialist message with the piety with which he performed his devotional exercises." Calls to socialist action not only advocated class struggle but pleaded for "the protection and preservation of Jewish life."^[35] For garment workers the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU),

"with its affinity for socialism and moral reform," Ann Schofield argues, "came to represent a secular alternative both to religious orthodoxy and radical socialist politics for working class Jewish men."^[36] And not just men: by 1910, Russian Jewish women represented 55 percent of garment workers; within the ILGWU they formed an even larger majority, making up somewhere between 66 and 70 percent of the strikers.^[37]

"House-keeper" of the Union: Metaphors of Gender and Culture in Women's Labor Autobiographies

While their modes of self presentation vary, the personal narratives of such women radicals as Emma Goldman, Elizabeth Hasanovitz, and Rose Cohen all contain references to socialist literature like Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), as well as allusions to the political legacy of the Bund. Their prose, fervent with exclamations of faith in the working masses, draws upon the Yiddish zargon (polyglot tongue) of Russian socialist propaganda and the Yiddishized English of the American popular socialist press, a language and literature gilded with "scriptural invocations and preambles and the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah . . . almost Talmudic in their tortuousness."^[38] The commercial language of capitalism in advertising even took on the impassioned vocabulary of the labor organizers, banking upon the close connection between the culture of Brownsville and the fight for better working conditions. This notice, for instance, in the November 1897 Jewish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward called for consumers to attend "A Protest meeting—All are invited to gather at 81 Delancey Street. Express your protest against the present cold by purchasing good warm gloves."^[39]

Reading the writings of immigrant women like Goldman, Hasanovitz, and Cohen in relation to the language of protest—Bundist political tracts, Russian novels, and American labor propaganda, newspapers, and advertising copy—which colors Jewish life across two continents is suggestive not merely because this configuration reiterates on the level of personal narrative the historical relation between Russian socialism, Jewish resistance to czarist oppression, and American labor organizing.^[40] Linking Jewish agitation in the United States with Jewish protest in Russia offered immigrant women an opportunity not without its own literary restraints, but one that

allowed writers to present, albeit at a "slant," a model of Jewish cultural practice less exoticized and hence less self-estranging than assimilationist prototypes like those the American Immigration Library provided. The land of Jewish American "tradition" established by such texts may be spoken through the language of class struggle rather than of cultural nationalism; nevertheless, it provided Jewish women autobiographers with what may have seemed a more palatable alternative to texts like The Promised Land, which in facing the question of ethnic identity squarely, seem compelled to represent their subjects as Jews manqués, as women who, if nostalgic for the challah and gefilte fish of their childhood, are apparently successfully assimilated "Americans."

I have suggested that the stories of class rise by immigrant women, despite their vehemence in indicting paternal tyranny, tend to close by disavowing a maternal legacy. Since Jewish cultural practice is figured through the mother, such a rift between generations becomes a denial of ethnicity as well. Autobiographies by labor leaders, by contrast, are more likely to suspend criticism of familial relations as gendered systems of power in favor of rendering home as a sustaining ground, a sanctified space in which continuing forms of cultural practice become the mechanism for bridging the continents and provide the immigrant speaker with a sense of Jewish identity in the New World.

Not surprisingly, whereas in assimilationist autobiography the mother's hard work keeping kosher is vilified as demonstrating a slave mentality that prevents daughters from becoming American-feminine, autobiographers affirming a working-class consciousness take her labor as a gendered precedent for their struggles on behalf of the union.^[41] For Rose Schneiderman, for instance, as for Elizabeth Stern, culinary artifacts associated with the mother are redolent with cultural value, while acculturation is distinguished as a paternal edict.^[42] Yet where Stern transforms the Russian cooking pot into an objet d'art, Schneiderman refuses to make her maternal legacy obsolete. Like Fabiola Cabeza de Baca in her celebration of The Good Life and Cleofas Jaramillo in her insistence on The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes, Schneiderman uses cooking as a trope for cultural practice. And as in the culinary narratives of African American women, ethnic identity in All for One is, paradoxically, made richer through geographical dislocation. "I shall never forget our first Passover in the U.S.," Schneiderman recalls, invoking the conventional Jewish paradigm of Old

World racial oppression. "Everything was scrubbed shining clean and the room was filled with light from candles as well as the lamp. The table had a new white cloth and we all had new clothes which mother made. There was an abundance of food but, more important, there was a sense of safety and hope that we had never felt in Poland" (25). Just as, in Gamio's report, Elisa Silva maintains cultural stability across borderlines through the figure of her mother, who "cooks at home as if we were in Mexico" (161), Schneiderman insists on ethnic continuity; in this reminiscence, however, transposition to the United States sustains rather than deters ritual.

But not all of Schneiderman's culinary metaphors describe the process of cultural translation so smoothly. The relation between Old World traditions and life in the New World requires compromise, adjustment, and negotiation. The family's samovar, for instance, is sacrificed to the cultural confusion of the passage from Russia to the United States. Yet one like it provides a later substitute, suggesting that ethnic continuity can be maintained despite resettlement:

In all the confusion of landing, Mother forgot some of our baggage, and our linens and bedding and the precious samovar disappeared forever. We were so happy at being together that we weren't as depressed over our loss as we probably should have been. But somehow tea never tasted as good to me again until, many years later, we used to make it in a samovar at the Women's Trade Union League. (24)

Schneiderman's anti-assimilationist parable cautions against a too easy dismissal of cultural value ("we weren't as depressed over our loss as we probably should have been") at the same time as it emphasizes the damage such loss inflicts upon the self ("tea never tasted as good to me again"). It refuses as well the seductions of elegy; cultural continuity may be difficult to maintain across borders, but, given a little flexibility, it is not impossible.

Rose Pesotta's recollection of her organizing work for the ILGWU uses a similarly gendered vocabulary of cooking terms to represent cultural practice. In Bread upon the Waters she frames union labor as a series of domestic tasks. Styling herself as the "house-keeper" (345) of the ILGWU allows the only female member of the union's executive board to take on an authority gendered masculine. This apparently idiosyncratic appellation is less dissonant with the language of labor activism than late twentieth-century readers might think, since women's organizing work, as a number

of feminist labor historians have noted, has consistently taken place in areas where a feminine presence appears "natural." At the turn of the century male unionists often discouraged women from entering the work force; fearing competition for jobs, the men censured women's wage labor as a betrayal of the principle of separate spheres. Their "contributions to the home and their duties as mothers were so valuable that women ought not to be in the labor force at all," many argued.^[43] Such judgments shaped both the fields of action for women workers and the ways they talked about their work. Historian Françoise Basch notes that beginning in 1901 and for the first six or seven years of the American Socialist party's existence, native-born women "worked in auxiliaries and ladies' branches of the party and left the leadership to the men. Reaching out from their female spheres, the Pillars of the Home, for example, organized charity sales, bazaars, choirs, and other fund-raising membership events."^[44]

Middle-class gendering of the division between public and private life drove a wedge between "women" and "work" that made it impossible to include Anglo-American working-class women in conventional discussions about labor. At first glance, Jewish immigrants, whose "cultural tradition and the exigencies of poverty . . . in no way forbade, and even encouraged, economic activity on the part of [Jewish] women,"^[45] enjoyed a less fraught relation to work and, at least in the Jewish press, greater visibility as workers. As Schofield suggests, women's public activity in the labor movement "met with cultural and community approval rather than censure. . . . The working woman was a 'central figure' in Jewish community and popular literature. For inexperienced teenagers, the reference points of the Bund and the consumer riots guided their actions, while politicized women in their neighborhoods provided role models and leaders."^[46]

But did standing behind the counter of the family grocery store carry the same political weight as standing in front of the union podium? With the advantage of hindsight, Schofield reads the contributions of ILGWU women back into the labor movement, but the rhetorical patterns of the leaders themselves suggest that their public activities on behalf of the union were not without conflict. In fact, gendered arguments in the narratives of women like Rose Schneiderman and Rose Pesotta seem curiously muted. As with the hesitance to name anti-Semitism, such silence can be read to reveal self-censorship rather than the absence of patriarchal disapproval. In none of the recollections I have read have I seen more than

quick swipes at masculine arrogance. But neither have I seen more than passing glances at the activities, let alone the accomplishments, of male labor organizers. If, in deference to the cause of workers, the women active in the ILGWU restricted their criticism of masculine coworkers to the pages of their letters and diaries, they also limited their praise of these men in their more public accounts of labor struggles.

Like the "articulate silences" King-kok Cheung's study of Asian-American writing appraises,^[47] the refusal of Jewish women organizers to discuss their male coworkers is, then, a conscious strategy of omission which speaks to the almost exclusively masculine focus of contemporary accounts of union organizing.^[48] Despite the fact that the ILGWU rank and file were two-thirds female, for instance, not a single woman's name is mentioned in the minutes of congresses before 1909.^[49] Small wonder that in their autobiographical recountings female organizers redress such slights and omissions by not bothering to address them at all. Elizabeth Hasanovitz describes her growing friendship with union coworker Clara in loving detail, yet masculine organizers are absent from One of Them, and even her fiancé is relegated to the margins of the autobiography.^[50] Rose Schneiderman records her debts and difficulties with the women of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and eulogizes dozens of other women who worked alongside her in the ILGWU. Yet so rare is her mention of masculine organizers that, were you to read this autobiography as the definitive history of the ILGWU, you would assume that the rank and file and the union's directors were all women. On the exceptional occasions where men are acknowledged, their contributions are ironized: "His name was Samuel Shore, and he was bright, young, and had done some volunteer tradeunion work in Philadelphia. He and I worked together. I must say he wasn't too energetic but he was a very handsome young man and a good speaker. Although he was a bit pompous and inclined to promise everything in the world, the girls liked him and believed in him" (105). In addition, Schneiderman scathingly indicts champions of the sexual double standard:

When the senator said that he was against suffrage for women because he was afraid that if women had the vote they would lose their feminine qualities, I pointed out to him, not too gently I hope, that women were working in the foundries, stripped to the waist because of the heat, but he said nothing about their losing their charm. Nor had he mentioned the women in laun-

dries who stood for 13 and 14 hours a day in terrible heat and steam with their hands in hot starch. I asked him if he thought they would lose more of their beauty and charm by putting a ballot in the ballot box than standing around all day in foundries or laundries. (120–21)

Like other narratives of labor by women organizers, Pesotta's Bread upon the Waters critiques the masculine fraternity of executive board members and elected officials by celebrating the achievements of the feminine rank and file. In Puerto Rico, "as in our union in the States," she recalls of a 1933 organizing trip, "I found women taking the lead" (107). In the context of a long history of sexed union labor, however, the decision to represent her own participation in the ILGWU as a "house-keeper" is a conciliatory rather than inflammatory rhetorical strategy, one designed, not to redress masculine authority by ironizing "modesty," but instead to include her in the tradition of the union's feminine rank and file by a form of self-address that negotiates the blurred boundaries between family, home, and workplace so as to conform with the gendered divisions between them.

But staging her union work as maternal labor does reauthorize culture. As in Schneiderman's recollection of the WTUL, in Pesotta's narrative organizing activity speaks to ethnic practice as well as to class action. The meals she prepares for striking workers encourage collective bargaining by focusing on community traditions, because they are depicted using a series of culture-specific catalogues of edibles that signal Pesotta's attentiveness not only to gender but to racial difference. Ann Schofield documents Pesotta's careful attention to cooking:

Through all these campaigns a central motif was food. In Montreal she served cookies and hot chocolate to picketers and, as she writes, "went out of my way to get delicacies for lunch, starting with shrimp cocktail and ending with chocolate layer cake and ice cream" (260). In Seattle the choices were Scandinavian "edibles," and in Cleveland, where Rose herself gained ten pounds, soups, goulash, and homemade sausage were served to strikers in the Hungarian Social Hall.^[51]

Pesotta's descriptions of ethnicity and labor neither conflate the two nor make them mutually exclusive, but, rather, represent them as interdependent; it is by recognizing cultural difference that the organizer is able to

unite the ILGWU membership in a common struggle for better working conditions.

Dignifying labor by respecting and reproducing race-consciousness is not only an outsider's strategy for obtaining the esteem and cooperation of a non-Jewish rank and file, however. As a narrative device, attention to the culture of work provides Pesotta with a means of ethnic self-identification that will sustain the entire autobiographical project. The analogy with which she begins Bread upon the Waters makes her account of organizing work structurally contingent upon her childhood experience of racial oppression as a Jew; as with other immigrant texts, ethnicity is expressed in terms of the speaker's relationship with her mother. Pesotta begins by narrating her flight to Los Angeles, where her task is to revitalize the strike energies of divided garment workers. But after an introductory paragraph about her departure from Newark, the autobiography changes form. The following paragraph begins with an italicized heading reading "September 17, 1933," leading readers to anticipate receiving ILGWU history in diary form. Yet what follows on the next few pages is actually not the memories of a particular day in 1933, but a rehearsal of her previous work on behalf of the garment union.

Pesotta directs our attention to the immediacy of the diary in order to introduce a chronologically more distant but emotionally more resonant set of memories. En route to California, as it were, the text suddenly changes direction. From the recollection of her mother's "sad face at the airport gate," Pesotta flashes back "across time and space" to remember this scene as the repetition of another: "Derazhnia, my home-town in the Ukraine, in the dismal railway station there, on the day I left for America" (4). Although they span twenty years, the memories that follow this dramatic jump-cut to childhood are all framed in the present tense: "Now I am a child again in Derazhnia," the writer begins (4); similarly, introducing a late-night discussion of pogroms and repression: "Our family is seated at the Sabbath dinner table" (6); finally, on her passage to the United States: "I see myself leaving Antwerp, a friendly city, in the rain" (10). By contrast, the return to the relatively more immediate past of the plane flight to Los Angeles, with which Pesotta closes the chapter, is framed in the past tense. Titling this first chapter "Flight to the West," Pesotta provides readers with an even more explicit parallel between her individual struggles as a union organizer in the United States and her people's struggles

against czarist policy in Russia. The second, literal plane flight to Los Angeles recalls her first flight to the West, through the Ukraine and Poland, around the German border, past the port city of Antwerp, over the ocean to New York. These rhetorical and syntactical inflections privilege the earlier memories of Jewish life in Russia; later chapters do not refer explicitly to Jewish identity, yet their structural dependency on the Russian section suggests a thematic connection as well.

Even Emma Goldman's willfully iconoclastic Living My Life gestures toward cultural community, if we read the narrative with attention to its discursive as well as historical contexts. Alice Wexler documents Goldman's resistance to speaking in her native tongue, that "jargon without syntax, conjugation, or declension," according to Commons (94): "Although Jewish immigrants were beginning to swell the urban working class, and Yiddish-speaking anarchists now outnumbered the old German émigré revolutionists, Goldman as late as 1906 addressed Jewish audiences in German, insisting that she did not speak 'jargon.' Not until 1908 did she begin lecturing in Yiddish."^[52] Given the scorn of some native speakers for any "dialect" that diverges from the English of the Cabots and the Lodges, we need not read such hesitation as a pure function of ethnic self-denial or class-consciousness, however. At other instances, indeed, Goldman calls attention to herself as a Jew. She responds to Johann Most's jealous description of Alexander Berkman as "'that arrogant Russian Jew'. . . . I, too, was a Russian Jew. Was he, Most, the anarchist, an anti-Semite?" (72–73). Or consider the relation between Goldman's awareness of the pressures tending on the one hand to affirm identity and on the other to revise it, as this tension is played out in the following description of a colleague. Once again an immigrant text provides us with a gendered reading of culture:

Zhitlovsky had come to America with Babushka. A Socialist Revolutionist, he was also an ardent Judaist. He never tired urging upon me that as a Jewish daughter I should devote myself to the cause of the Jews. I would say to him that I had been told the same thing before. A young scientist I had met in Chicago . . . had pleaded with me to take up the Jewish cause. I repeated to Zhitlovsky what I had related to the other: that at the age of eight I used to dream of becoming a Judith and visioned myself in the act of cutting off Holofernes' head to avenge the wrongs of my people. But since I had become aware that social injustice is not confined to my own race, I had decided that there were too many heads for one Judith to cut off. (370)

"My own race": for Goldman, as for Antin and Stern, Schneiderman and Pesotta, cultural fidelity is epitomized by the faithfulness of the good daughter. If the passage reflects the carefully cultivated amusement of someone on the defensive, Goldman's praise of her own nonpartisan political efforts reinforces the reader's sense that this response is also an escape from a gendered form of cultural work.

Toward the close of the autobiography, Goldman reaffirms her ethnic affiliation with studied offhandedness. A Zionist doctor and poet asks her to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and she replies: "We confessed that we had not been aware of the approach of the Jewish New Year, but we were Jews enough to want to spend the holiday with him" (841). The irreverence Goldman displays toward the high holy days is put to even better use in a comic anecdote about the over(ac)culturated:

I met a young anarchist, Stefan Grossmann, who was remarkably well informed about the life of the city. He had many traits I disliked: his efforts to hide his origin in chameleon-like acceptance of every silly Gentile habit irritated me. The very first time I met Grossmann he told me that his fencing-master had admired his germanische Beine (Germanic legs). "I don't think that's much of a compliment," I replied; "now, if he had admired your Yiddish nose, that would be something to boast about." (172)

Nor are Goldman's less acerbic assessments of what she types as Jewish foibles a simple matter of internalized anti-Semitism. The anarchist's critiques of Chasidic evangelicalism, for instance, do not necessarily prove her desire to assimilate. Such willingness to critique religious practice may on the contrary signal to readers an assurance of ethnic identity, just as Sholom Aleichem's own parodies of the shtetl reaffiliate him with community life there.

Responses to American Anti-Semitism

Talk about nerve. I really think them Jew girls have it all .
Theresa Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker

Affectionate criticism can slide into a less sympathetic mockery. Because twentieth-century Jewish autobiographers were writing in the wake of a decade of heavy immigration from Eastern Europe, they are often defen-

sive in their affirmation of Jewish manners and Jewish life. Not infrequently this defensive posture turns to self-contempt, a deflecting strategy in which the language of anti-Semitism is appropriated in anticipation of its use by a less sympathetic Other.

The ideological ambivalence such mimicry produces is evident in Elizabeth Hasanovitz's autobiography One of Them, whose choice of title pronouns demonstrates the shifting ground on which the author stands as stranger and estranged, at once in solidarity with a community oppressed in Russia and repressed in the United States, yet wishing to keep herself at a measured distance from "them." Reminiscent of more uncompromisingly assimilationist narratives, Hasanovitz represents Jewish ethnicity in the Old Country straightforwardly. There, to be a Jew was quite clearly to live as an outcast: "Members of the human family, people with brains and ambition, we were not citizens; we were children of the cursed Pale, with our rights limited, the districts in which we could live and the trades and professions we could follow, all prescribed for us" (8). The status of those children of the Pale who migrated to the Promised Land, however, is far less defined. Hasanovitz is quick to criticize those overeager to assimilate: "The children are not taught that the traditional customs and old-fashioned ways of their parents may be just as valuable as their modern American ones. In their ignorance everything not American is repellent to them" (82). But she is more hesitant in defining just which "American" ideas might be worth adopting. The working-class subject she defends in the following lines, for instance, envies the advantages the more acculturated flaunt: "They deemed that she lacked culture and refinement because in the public schools they had received false ideas of externals. Their understanding of Americanism was limited to speaking English, wearing high pompadours and powdering their noses" (42–43).

She does not develop such resentment into a critique of the ideological pressures the public schools exert upon apt students, however, but instead redirects it at the cultural ingenue, the greenhorn, and the sweatshop boss. In one passage, she exploits the same anti-Semitism she indicted in the too-hastily-converted to express working-class solidarity. Recalling a time when she was looking for a job, she describes a potential employer with merciless caricature: "We waited for a long time, until, at last, His Majesty the Employer came out, a very unsympathetic-looking fellow with a long

curved nose and still more unattractive voice. 'Vot you vant, girls?' he asked in dry broken English" (62).

Other writers avoid this self-reflexive antipathy only to displace it elsewhere. Theresa Malkiel uses an Anglo-American narrator to sing the praises of Jewish workers in her fictionalized Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker . If, as Françoise Basch notes in her Introduction to the novel, this strategy acts as a form of "antiracist pedagogy" (65) by speaking obliquely against anti-Semitism, it is also celebratory at the expense of others:

The Italian girls are like a lot of wild ducks let loose. I ain't a bit surprised that our bosses are so anxious to replace us girls by Italians—they're good workers and bad thinkers—just what suits the bosses, but it is pretty hard on us. To tell the truth, I don't know as these simple souls can be blamed much—their thinking machines were never set in working order. (141)

More common than this explicit racism is an equation of labor agitation with Jewish struggle so complete that it writes out the contributions and conflicts of other workers. The Russian Jewish immigrant women who organized for the ILGWU frequently complained about the insensitivity the wealthy WASP women of the WTUL demonstrated toward Jewish workers. "They don't understand the differences between Jewish girls and gentiles," Pauline Newman wrote to Rose Schneiderman. As Basch notes, "The 'allies' could not speak Yiddish and would schedule events on Jewish holidays, even on Yom Kippur" (27). Overcorrecting for such cultural indifference, the narratives of Jewish women frequently represent both the rank and file and the organizers of the ILGWU as a united front, working in perfect harmony and accord.

In this rewriting of union history as working-class romance, much is ignored: complaints that holding meetings in Yiddish prevented non-Jewish workers from participating, disenchantment on the West Coast with an organization singularly uninterested in Mexicano community outreach, anger in New York over the refusal of ILGWU locals to permit the few black women in the garment industry from becoming members. The autobiographies of union organizers write cultural difference as a phenomenon that involves only Jew and gentile; discussion of any other racial conflict is quickly suppressed. Thus in All for One —published in 1967, at the height of the civil rights struggles—Rose Schneiderman raises the issue of black-

white race relations only twice, dispatching what she calls "the colored question" with a readiness that raises more questions than her quick closure addresses:

The first year the outgoing students recommended that Negro women be admitted to the school. When the question came up before the Board of Directors there was much discussion about it but we voted to admit two Negro women each year. Sometimes, the women recommended from the south did not meet our educational requirements but we took them anyway. The first two were Southerners. They made good records and were much liked by all the students, even the white Southerners. And that settled the colored question at the Bryn Mawr Summer School. (144)

Schneiderman's other mention of integration is even briefer, reducing the complicated tangle of segregation politics to a few concise sentences:

The highlight of the course was always a weekend trip to Washington. There were usually several Negro girls in the class and it was impossible to get a hotel to take both groups in. Nor could they eat in the same restaurants. Finally, after several years, the whole group went to an interracial hotel which had just been established by Negroes. (159)

Published some two decades earlier, Rose Pesotta's autobiography Bread upon the Waters offers a more complex account of the relation between class-consciousness and cultural difference. Organizing workers is made contingent upon an awareness of and respect for community traditions. Pesotta's attention to the ways strikers maintain unity through cultural practice suggests that her organizing technique was to affirm cultural ties as an analogy for class affiliations. Nevertheless, the autobiography hardly offers a sustained cultural critique. As Joan Jensen affirms, the published account, which "carefully defends the ILGWU leadership," represents Pesotta's organizing work in a fashion distinctly at odds with the frustration she voiced in her correspondence and unpublished diary over the lack of consideration accorded her by an overwhelmingly male union leadership and the sometimes muted, sometimes explicit anti-Semitism of a non-Jewish rank and file.^[53]

While anti-Semitism in the Promised Land is as rarely chronicled in personal narrative affirming labor as in autobiography that works to efface it, antipathy toward the "real Americans" (those robust farmer-pioneers who metaphorically pledge allegiance to the flag every time they put hoe

to ground) and criticism of their hostility toward immigrant workers surfaces in the private correspondence not only of ILGWU organizers but also of those who, like Elizabeth Stem, are trying to pass as middle-class. If resentment toward the native-born is hard to find in Pesotta's Bread upon the Waters, disgust with shiksa workers sounds loud and clear in her private communications. Labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris documents such complaints by quoting portions of a letter Pesotta wrote to David Dubinsky, in which she speaks of Anglo-American workers in Seattle as those "100% American white daughters of the sturdy pioneers. They are all members of bridge clubs, card clubs, lodges, etc. Class consciousness is as remote from their thoughts as any idea that smacks with radicalism."^[54] Whether it is justified or not, the open contempt of this account and the frankness with which it identifies racial difference as a serious impediment to sustained class-based alliance provide us with a different gloss on the organizing efforts of immigrants like Schneiderman and Pesotta, and a way of reading ethnic identity back into autobiographical accounts that appear to efface it. Perhaps most important, it demonstrates how the "quick fix" provided by the suturing over of long-standing cultural differences in assimilationist narrative and labor autobiography conflates ethnicity and immigration in American life and letters.

Finally, and in contrast to such explicit acknowledgment of conflict, cultural contact remains in Bread upon the Waters a sanitized arrangement. Framed as a historical phenomenon rather than a political reality, exploitation based on race is distanced from the literary present of the narrative, because it is contained in a series of vignettes that offer accounts of labor conflicts in relation to national policy—but never in relation to the activities of the ILGWU. I have suggested that this kind of refusal to acknowledge the nuances of intercultural conflict stems from pressures exerted upon the labor leaders of the ILGWU as Jews. If it was designed to maintain working-class solidarity and thus implicitly affirm Jewish culture, such erasure of the interracial differences between women in the garment industry unions ends, however, by reducing the picture of class struggle, leaving us with a largely monochrome daguerreotype of feminine workingclass relationships.

Chapter Six—
"I Was There in the Front lines, Though I May Not Always Have Been Visible":
Self-Determination in the Autobiographies of Jewish Women Labor Organizers

"One Who Represents The Type": Critical Characterizations of Immigrant Autobiography

All the scenes and experiences of the past year chased through my brain: my home, Russia with its persecutions, my departure, my journey, my arrival in America, the factory in Canada where I worked first, my arrival in New York, five weeks of work in a factory in New York,—and then the nine weeks of searching for work. The memories crowded my brain and numbed me with their hopelessness .
Elizabeth Hasanovitz, One of Them: Chapters from a Passionate Autobiography

One of the difficulties in writing about the autobiographies of Russian Jewish immigrants is their susceptibility to overgeneralization: the blood and bitterness of life in the Pale, the struggle for bread in the New York tenements—such was the stuff publishers' dreams were made of in the first years of the twentieth century. For a reading public schooled in Dickensian melodrama and the sentimental fiction of Louisa May Alcott, the rec-

ollections of workers in Brownsville's garment district provided satisfying "real-life" prototypes of heroines like Little Nell and Beth March. Rose Schneiderman's description of the sweatshops where child seamstresses hunched thin-shouldered over sewing machines reads as luridly as any Dickensian rendering of London's boot-blacking factories. Similarly, the "little woman" of Rose Cohen's autobiography Out of the Shadow (1918) recalls the consumptive New England heroine of Alcott's novel:

Sister was happy in a friendship she had formed. The little girl was the oldest in a family of boys . . . and this little woman of eleven went to school, where we heard she was remarkably bright. And between times she took care of the mother and the boys and the house. She went patiently, with her back a little bent, from task to task and was always sweet and bright.^[1]

The catalogue of work and worries I have cited as an epigraph and with which Elizabeth Hasanovitz opens her recollection of life in America draws far less heavily on the sentimental novel in its efforts to enlist the reader's sympathy.^[2] But insofar as discursive pressures pushed her to style herself as the model assimilated citizen—heroine of America's romance with the melting-pot plot—her narrative, like Cohen's and Schneiderman's, rehearses the autobiographies of Russian Jewish immigrants more generally. All of these writers adapted their histories to the publishing avenues open to them: Joseph Ozier's American Immigrant Library series, such journals as the Atlantic Monthly , and the periodicals of the trade unions.

Both the pointed intertextuality of Cohen's autobiography (which explicitly acknowledges a debt to Little Women and David Copperfield ) and the focus on cultural accommodation in immigrant narratives more generally make an aesthetic virtue out of historical necessity. In the eyes of many anxious natives, literary resemblance to blue-blooded American novelists like Alcott helped to domesticate the "exotic" people squeezing their way through the gates of Ellis Island by fictionalizing their narratives out of existence—or, at the very least, by recasting their peculiar customs as anachronisms in the world of modern America, a coda to their inevitable assimilation in the melting pot of immigrant workers. The demands of a readership preoccupied with "the Great Jewish Invasion" of the first decades of the century—what Henry James called "swarming Israel"—encouraged Jewish autobiographers to characterize themselves as exemplary

"new Americans" rather than as exceptional immigrants struggling to succeed in the "Golden Land."^[3]

Curiously, many labor historians and literary critics recapitulate this typecasting, so that even as their texts are being considered as historical documents or their narrators as speaking on behalf of an unspecified working-class collective, the actual subjects of Jewish autobiography remain "not always visible." In this chapter I wish to locate those autobiographical impulses in writing by women that work against such conglomerating discursive pressures. Before analyzing more closely the strategies three labor leaders use to articulate selfhood, however, I would like to consider the ways that current critical exigencies reproduce the rhetorical pressures of the past. Just as publishing configuration urged immigrant writers to frame their histories in terms of successful assimilation, so the tendency to see people en masse for their own scholarly purposes causes critics to develop a vision of a representative working-class self which overwrites particular autobiographers' attempts at self-depiction. Consider Mexicana personal narratives such as Fabiola Cabeza de Baca's We Fed Them Cactus (1954), for instance, which is marketed on its back cover as a literary souvenir, a "piece of genuine Southwest Americana." Like We Fed Them Cactus or editorial shaping in collaborative narratives such as La Partera and Motherwit , which bend discrete memories to fit a generic frame, academic attention to Jewish narrative is often ethnographic, listening to particular lives only insofar as they serve as cultural artifact.

Regenia Gagnier suggests that her analysis of the narratives of nineteenth-century British working-class writers will develop "an alternative rhetorical strategy . . . not, as historians have, as data of varying degrees of reliability reflecting external conditions, but as texts revealing subjective identities embedded in diverse social and material circumstances."^[4] Gagnier's distinction holds for critics of American working-class texts as well; for the most part, these readers of the autobiographies of Jewish American women workers have followed the rhetorical lead of the authors, justifying such books as valuable by mining them for data on the relation between women and labor in the United States. From Moses Rischin's classic The Promised City and Melvyn Dubofsky's When Workers Organize to Philip Foner's three-volume Women and the American Labor Movement and more recent feminist revisions of the history of women workers including

Susan Estabrook Kennedy's If All We Did Was to Weep at Home and Susan Glenn's Daughters of the Shtetl ,^[5] the complicated textual patterning Jewish women writers develop to represent their lives has been glossed mimetically, cited as documentation of organizing efforts, strike protests, and working conditions but rarely considered in light of the complex relations it traces between subjectivity and rhetorical figuring.^[6]

A critic of my argument here might suggest that I am conflating two forms that should remain separate: the historical project and the literary agenda. Granting the sanctity of a traditional scholarly geography, however, does not make the problem of typecasting disappear, for critics of autobiography are as quick as students of labor history to resort to the kind of generalization that obscures rather than explains the forms immigrant autobiography takes.

Certainly the rhetoric of much personal narrative by female labor unionists directs readers to see life in political context, often justifying the story of the "One" as significant because it speaks on behalf of the "All." Theresa Malkiel's 1910 novel The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker was advertised in the Progressive Woman as providing women workers with an inspirational model of feminine political activism: "Don't fail to read this book," the insert announced. "Give it a big circulation. It shows what women can and are doing, in the industrial world."^[7] The didacticism of this literary announcement, which justifies novel reading as a form of political education, characterizes the publishing context of the Diary , first circulated in its entirety by the socialist Cooperative Press. Such an advertisement does not necessarily offer an interpretive index for situating the particular voice of its heroine in relation to its author, nor does it unconditionally define the writer's project in relation to the historical events the novel retraces, however. Moreover, as I have argued throughout this book, autobiographers are often impelled by conditions of publication to justify their self-scripting with reference to a certain representative status. In the case of Jewish labor organizers, the writer may bow to discursive pressures encouraging her to present herself as immigrant, as Jew, or as working woman in a way that creates tension with (and often masks) rhetorical gestures that develop a distinct identity. Conflating—or, rather, equating—a given discursive formation with the narratives formed by its rhetorical conditions, then, will prevent us from hearing what is distinctive about a specific voice.^[8]

Nuancing the Collaborative Model of the Female Subject: Rose Cohen's Out of the Shadow

Yet worse than poverty and as painful "as the gout or stone" is neglect. The poor man suffers most because "he is only not seen."
John Adams, Discourses on Davila

I may not have been seen but I saw it all: first as a cash girl in department stores . . . then as a machine-operator in cap factories, and finally as organizer and later president of the New York Women's Trade Union League—with time out from the latter job to organize for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to work for women's suffrage, and to serve my state as secretary of the Department of Labor and my country as the only woman on the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Act .
Rose Schneiderman, All for One

Do the masses become masses by themselves? Or are they the result of a theoretical and practical operation of "massification"? From where onward can one say of a "free" work of art that it is written for the infinite numbers which constitute the masses and not merely for a definite public stratum of society?
Trinh H. Minh-ha, "Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box"

In the preceding chapter I read a number of Jewish American women's personal narratives against their discursive contexts in order to consider how each negotiates the relation between immigrant consciousness and a distinctly Jewish American culture. In this chapter I would like to consider how such texts become a forum for self-distinction. As an overcorrection for masculinist readings that define identity within the narrow limits of traditional autobiography theory, readers of women's narratives have often advanced a collaborative model of identity that indiscriminately polarizes every feminine voice as speaking on behalf of the collective, each masculine one as insistently autonomous. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, for instance, juxtapose "representative masculine autobiographies" (Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography , Henry Adams's Education , Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself ) which

"rest upon the Western ideal of an essential and inviolable self," against women's autobiography as "relational." From Margaret Cavendish's The True Relation of My Birth and Breeding (1656) to Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), the feminine personal voice is displaced, they argue, becoming a textual space of "blurred boundaries" with virtually no relation to "traditional selfhood." This affirmation of what Susan Friedman characterizes as "the feminine capacity for empathy and identification" operates as a largely uninflected critical constant in feminist autobiography theory: as Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai put it, from Anaï's Nin's autobiographical "abnegation" to oral history, "concern with connection and collaboration emerges as a clear theme."^[9]

Given the historical neglect of working-class texts by literary scholars, it is not surprising that readers as attentive to class as to gender are occasionally overzealous in formulating models of the subject that will justify further research. Yet as critic and filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha points out, a class-inflected reading of narrative that is overly dependent on a rigid distinction between the "upper classes" and the "lower orders" does little to develop our sense of the variety and richness of working-class literature: "To oppose the masses to the elite is already to imply that those forming the masses are regarded as an aggregate of average persons condemned by their lack of personality or by their dim individualities to stay with the herd, to be docile and anonymous."^[10]

Although in countering this tendency to describe working-class autobiography en masse one must be careful to avoid overgeneralizing in the other direction, I would argue that too fixed an idea of collaboration in the texts of women autobiographers may itself be class-based; regardless of ethnicity, working-class women may be inclined to represent themselves more on the basis of what makes them distinctive from rather than similar to others. Insisting on the value of the "I," after all, compensates in some measure for an exchange economy that standardizes individual achievement as so many units of labor/time. Given that labor in the service of another more often undermines than generates self-assertion, that is, workers may turn to autobiography precisely in order to escape the anonymity of "the masses."^[11]

Consider the personal narratives of working-class Jewish women active in the labor movement. Here is a kind of autobiography that describes what appears to be a most adamantly collective history: the documentation

of joint effort on behalf of the garment unions. Ostensibly it is the union, not the self who works on its behalf, that is granted pride of place in the recollections of women like Rose Schneiderman, Elizabeth Hasanovitz, and Rose Pesotta, as a glance at the titles of Schneiderman's autobiography, All for One , and Hasanovitz's story, One of Them: Chapters in a Passionate Autobiography , makes clear. Their shared commitment to recording the achievements of the ILGWU means that such autobiographers are obligated to narrate their particular accomplishments as metonyms for the "larger struggle" of organized labor, a textual vantage point which subordinates the activities of the "I" to the history of this movement. In the labor press, sustained reference to personal impressions runs the risk of being read as intolerable self-absorption, a betrayal of the collective. Given their firsthand experience in the sweatshops (a dehumanizing "'process of grinding the faces of the poor'")^[12] and their own class-consciousness, it is not surprising to find these writers cognizant that they are "to many potential readers . . . but 'social atoms' making up the undifferentiated 'masses.' "^[13] Consider how Rose Cohen recollects the humiliations of poverty in Out of the Shadow (1918): "We were all ashamed of showing our ignorance. A girl who could not read and write would do anything to hide it. We were as much ashamed of it as we were of our poverty. Indeed, to show one was to show the other. They seemed inseparable" (251). Defensiveness about this distinction (whether real or imagined) between a self-assured reading public and the writer's own painstakingly cultivated literary authority, then, defines an autobiographical subject hesitant to distinguish herself further from others.

Yet a close look at these books finds in every case a series of narrative interventions of the autobiographical self which cannot be justified as furthering the story of union organizing that stands as their apparent subject. Reminiscences of relations with parents and siblings, remarks on the pleasures and difficulties of travel, and reflections on philosophical and metaphysical problems demonstrate a tension between, on the one hand, the status of the autobiographer as privileged because of her part in the life of the union, and, on the other hand, the need to identify the singular achievements of the self as noteworthy in their own right. The ambiguity of this land of self-representation, a tension which, I would argue, is not successfully resolved in the reminiscences of Emma Goldman, Rose Schneidennan, Elizabeth Hasanovitz, and others, suggests that both the

collaborative model of feminine self-representation privileged by much feminist autobiography theory and the class-contingent generalizations of labor historians are in need of further scrutiny. In fact, while their memoirs frequently invoke a collective subject, this "we" is both more various—signifying different communities in different textual instances—and more accommodating than the plural subject as defined by such critics.

In autobiographies like Rose Cohen's Out of the Shadow , for example, what looks like an indiscriminate collective "we" carries distinct inflections that vary with context. Consider her recollection of a hospital stay:

What with the long periods of idleness after each job, the months of inactivity in the hospital, the natural apathy due to the illness, the miserable conditions in the shops, I lost all taste for work, I lost my pride of independence, I lost my spirit. . . . And when I put on my wrapper I felt that I became a part of the rest of the dependents, a part of the house, a part of all that I saw about me. (259)

More enervating than the back-breaking labor of the garment industry is the enforced inactivity of the hospital, an idleness which drains her independent spirit, substituting a faceless, characterless "I." Although she is discouraged by the brutalizing conditions of the sweatshop, the writer's sense of herself rests in her work: it is pride in her labor that provides her with the authority necessary to insist upon self-distinction.

The relationship among collective subjectivity, the singular subject, and labor becomes clearer in the comparison Cohen draws between her experience as a domestic worker and her recollections of labor in the sweatshops: "'I should not like to be a servant all the time,' I thought. I looked out of the window and gradually I began to reason it out. I realized that though in the shop too I had been driven, at least there I had not been alone. I had been a worker among other workers who looked upon me as an equal and a companion" (180). Working-class community is based precisely on that recognition of the independent "I" that a class-inflected feminist scholarship denies in its celebration of the collective. Here, solidarity is produced, not by obliterating the "I" and replacing it with a communal consciousness, but by developing a respect for the individual that builds bonds among equals.

Nor does the whole turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts in Rose Schneiderman's All for One . As in Cohen's recollection of union

work, Schneiderman asserts herself through the collective struggle for union recognition. Yet even a quick glance at the epigraph that begins this section demonstrates that affiliation is not the same thing as amalgamation. To feel a part of the community of workers is not, after all, to relinquish one's belief in one's uniqueness. The value Schneiderman accords to union organizing is inextricably linked to her sense of self-worth; her statement that she worked "to serve my state" and "my country" expresses both patriotism and pride. Not surprisingly, this long cumulative sentence articulating service on behalf of others builds to a final phrase which spotlights the autobiographer's "I": she is "the only woman" to serve on the Labor Advisory Board.

"I am a Modest Woman Usually": Rose Schneiderman's All for One

Despite her insistence on individual achievement, locating this singular woman in the pages of a narrative which acts simultaneously as historical chronicle, personal record, and collective tribute to ILGWU and WTUL labor calls for an interpretive model best approximated by Schneiderman's own formulation: "I was there in the front lines, though I may not always have been visible." To read the "auto" back into an autobiography that inscribes not only the author's own reflections but the memories of many women unable to write themselves into the history of the American labor movement demands that we train our attention on what is often partially obscured.^[14] Frequently, Schneiderman is crowded out of her own narrative. The insistence that she is struggling for a goal shared by working women generally, for instance, demands an equally collective subject. When she wishes to emphasize the oppression of women, she writes the agent of change in the plural: "The fight for legislation to protect the rights of working women was only part of our job. We used the soapbox, we used the picket line, we used every means we could think to advance the labor movement among women" (7). Similarly, the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire calls for collective mourning: "From 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon we of the Women's Trade Union League marched in the procession. . . . In our grief and anger we, who were dedicated to the task of awakening the community to the plight of working women, would not remain silent" (98–99). In general, explicit censure in

All for One (be it a condemnation of the National Association of Manufacturers or an indictment of the upper-middle-class reformers of the Women's Trade Union League, women as interested in socializing immigrant woman as in making socialists of them)^[15] is leveled not by the personal "I" but in the name of a more diffuse spirit of feminine community.

Schneiderman's autobiographical "I" hardly occupies a Rousseauian center stage even when the author is not engaged in direct political commentary, however. You can find observations acknowledging the personal—brief confessions of anger at the boorish behavior of masculine colleagues (117), moments of self-doubt when exhaustion and frustration overpower the effort of positive thinking (113, 115), thumbnail descriptions of excitement at the beginning of a new job (50)—but these are quickly checked, slight gestures tossed off as if in the middle of a conversation about something more important.^[16] More sustained attention to autobiographical accomplishment is developed circuitously, framed at an angle which requires the reader to exercise peripheral vision so as not to miss it. At one point, for example, Schneiderman allows herself a (muted) expression of pride over the fact that she has saved the lives of four relatives, her own hard-earned money having been used for their passage to the United States before the onset of the Second World War. She credits this accomplishment only at a remove, however: "It will always be a mystery to me how Mother could save so much out of the allowance I gave her for our household, but she did and she brought over three nieces and a nephew, which is why they were here in America when Hitler massacred all the Jews in Khelom" (17).

Where self-references are less oblique and the "I" bolder on the page, the author prefaces them with disclaimers that use the language of feminine humility in order to advance herself without fear of censure. The collaborative nature of Schneiderman's book prevents us from identifying this hesitancy as hers alone. Yet such modesty places her autobiography squarely within a tradition of public women's personal narrative that frames feminine moral goodness as altruism and in so doing discourages its textual affirmation as inappropriately self-aggrandizing. In an essay on the autobiographies of public women, Patricia Spacks identifies this paradox particularly succinctly: "The impossibility of laying public claim to essential virtue generates a curious tension in these records. . . . Goodness is selflessness, these autobiographies suggest; and vice versa—a notion by its

nature unlikely to make for effective autobiography, since autobiographies are about selves."^[17] For Schneiderman, as for Rose Pesotta, such discursive constraints require that pride in personal accomplishments be muted and public recognition styled as accidental rather than intentional: "I had a call one day from Elmer Andrews, State Commissioner of Labor, asking me to come to see him. I had no idea what was up and no one could have been more surprised than I when he asked me if I would like to be secretary of the State Department of Labor. At first I thought he was joking" (221).

Humility aside, Schneiderman's "not so eminent me" (99) frequently finds herself among very select company. Visits to the White House and the Roosevelts' vacation home are common: "Maud and I were invited to both places many times for, according to Frances Perkins in her book The Roosevelts I Knew, Maud and I were among the people who could bring F.D.R. new and stimulating ideas after his illness" (176). More notable than the fact that this self-praise requires introduction is its implication: where cabinet members and the rich and famous have failed, the garment worker has triumphed.^[18] Perhaps the most interesting allusion to the presidential circle, however, is Schneiderman's acknowledgment of Eleanor Roosevelt: "Eleanor Roosevelt urged me to write the story of my years in the labor movement. She would have written the introduction for it, but now that she is no longer here, I do not want anyone else to substitute for her; that is why there is no introduction to my book. It will have to stand on its own merits" (preface). By invoking and then withdrawing the First Lady as her literary sponsor, Schneiderman defines a moment of unapologetic self-advancement. Clearly this memorializing statement is a tribute to Roosevelt, but by indicating that no one other than the wife of the president of the United States can effectively introduce her recollections, Schneiderman implies that her own stature is far from humble. By refusing to entertain another word on the question of the book's introduction, the terse closure of the final sentence reinforces this sense of personal command.

Like Rose Pesotta's uncompromising self-representation as an "Admiral Dewey" (96) for the ILGWU in Bread upon the Waters, Schneiderman's narrative of organizing work and union struggle suggests that the most brazenly self-assertive statements are acceptable so long as they are articulated using the language of (feminine) service. "I am a modest woman

usually but in her book Frances [Perkins] paid Maud and me a great compliment which I am going to quote, for it is about what we did for the trade-union, not for ourselves," Schneiderman assures us at one point (177); or, at the outset, "This is quite a statement coming from me because, though I find it hard to ask for things for myself, I could ask for the moon if I needed it for the [WTUL] League" (10).

By invoking a collective, Schneiderman also opens the space for herself. Styling her reminiscences as spoken on behalf of a community allows her to assert an independent "I" without being indicted as immodest. At moments, this relationship of the worker's "we" to the speaker's "I" is even structured so that the history of labor is subordinated to the struggles of the subject working on its own behalf. In the following prefatory remarks, for example, collective organizing provides the justification for self-assertion:

For more than 50 years I was part of the most exciting movement in the United States, the fight of workers for the right to organize. I was there in the front lines, though I many not always have been visible, for by no amount of stretching have I ever achieved a height of more than four and a half feet. And in the early days of the fight I never weighed more than ninety pounds. (vii)

Similarly, despite the ostensible aim of the phrase, the autobiographical moment rather than the historical record attracts attention in the following passage: "And so, with the blessings of labor and laymen the National Women's Trade Union League was born, an organization which was to be the most important influence in my life" (76).

That Schneiderman privileges the autobiographical "I" in a narrative whose ostensible aim is to record a history of union organizing suggests that we reappraise those texts that at first appear to favor historical documentation and cultural accounting over self-reflection. Granted, in their discouragement of extended references to personal experience, the forms such personal narratives take seem compromised at best; yet in a discursive context that allows immigrant women so few opportunities for self-expression, this intermittent focus on singularity is hardly surprising. Pesotta gestures to the pressures representative status—as Jewish, as female—exert upon self-representation when she compares her difficulties as the only woman on the executive board of the ILGWU with David Dubinsky's

position on the executive council of the American Federation of Labor: "There you were considered the Jew and here I am considered the Woman and at times I feel just as comfortable as you did."^[19]

One of Them : Elizabeth Hasanovitz's Autobiographical Hard Labor

Like Schneiderman, who scripts a personal history under the rubric of memorializing the "larger cause of labor," the tide of Elizabeth Hasanovitz's memoir plays on the conflict between received categories of representation and the need for self-voicing. "One of Them" signifies group identity, but with a difference. Maintaining both class allegiance and cultural identification, it suggests estrangement as well. If the title pronoun "them" invokes a working-class consciousness and indicates the author's cultural status as a Jew, the text as a whole focuses most explicitly on class. Large portions of the narrative read like a textbook chronicling the history of the garment industry: they explain the collective bargaining process, summarize union protocols, and describe the efforts of the manufacturing lobby to resist workers' organizing efforts, with little or no commentary to distinguish them as the product of an idiosyncratic "I." "The Manufacturers' Association in the dress and waist industry controlled nearly two thirds of the trade," a bodiless voice announces early in the narrative (53), continuing: "On January 18, 1913, a protocol agreement was consummated between the Manufacturers' Association and the union. It aimed to enlist both parties in an effort to improve conditions and to obtain the equalization of standards throughout the industry by peaceful and honorable means" (54).

What saves One of Them from the anonymity of the government document is the determined presence of the autobiographer herself. Moving in and out of the narrative in a fashion more clunky than graceful, Hasanovitz punctuates the historical record with meditations on the nature of her singular existence. These existential musings mime on the rhetorical level the work of the sweatshop; lapses in (textual) concentration, they interrupt the narrative like the mind wandering away from the drone of the assembly line. Note, for instance, how this solitary "I" demystifies the book's more celebratory recollections of collective struggle: "A heavy melancholy swept over me. I looked around me. What was I doing here on this roof among

all these people? I felt the roof, the people, the thick air, as a million-pound weight on me" (88). Poverty; a desire, largely unrealized, for a more expansive cultural life; the constant, mind-numbing anxiety of the struggle for bread—all her worries close in upon her in merciless imitation of the fetid, constricting air of the tenement where, late at night, she finds herself despairing of success, "too weak, too helpless against life" (33).

Such explicitly confessional moments remain the exception rather than the rule in Hasanovitz's narrative, but the pull toward autobiographical self-determination is strong in passages intended, not to dramatize the self, but, rather, to eulogize the work of the laboring masses. Over and over again, the need to assert the self distracts the writer from her focus on the representative "we" of union labor; it will suffice to consider one such moment in full. Here, a parable designed to describe the condition of working women as a group becomes an opportunity for self-expression. "She" is transmuted into "I," and the administrative anonymity of the passage is exchanged for the direct appeal of active verbal effort:

Conditions must be created so that the girl shall not be driven from the shop. The long hours, the unsanitary conditions, the small wages, the frequent slack seasons, drive the self-supporting, unprotected girl sometimes to a life of shame. . . . Eh! What an ugly, contemptible world this is! I am trying so hard to bring my family over here to save them from the Russian autocratic teeth, but I would rather see my sisters dead than see them enduring humiliations from such a debauchee as that jobber. Brr! It throws me into a fever when I think of it. (102)

Even when the collective subject is most wholeheartedly championed, narrative energy is inevitably trained on the singular experience of the "I" who is singing its praises. In the following passage Hasanovitz invokes the discourse of union leaflets and periodicals in order to argue the merits of the closed shop:

Our higher bosses raged at me, thinking that it was only I who was responsible for those demands. But I was the shop representative, and spoke not only for myself. I expressed the wish of all the workers in my shop. Still they treated me worse than the others. They tried to rid themselves of me, thinking that with me out of the way, they would accomplish their task, and at the first opportunity I was fired. But I was taken back the same day, for as soon as I took my hat ready to leave the shop, the rush, the noise of the machines,

suddenly stopped. Everything came to a standstill. Over 200 workers folded their hands, quietly protesting against the firm's action. They refused to resume work until their shop delegate returned—and I was taken back the same day. (260; emphasis added)

Ostensibly, this anecdote bears out the thesis articulated at its outset: collective struggle, not individual will, characterizes union organizing efforts. But even as Hasanovitz disparages her own singularity (my voice is important only insofar as it expresses the wishes of the community; I am merely the mouthpiece for the group), her constant invocation of the "I" ends by subverting her claims of personal insignificance. Sound and syntax counterpoint rather than compound sense here, the very words with which the author expresses individual insignificance affirming self-distinction instead. The stress on her singularity may be framed in negative terms (I am not responsible, I do not speak for myself), but the resonance of "only I" with "only for myself" plays up what is uncommon about the speaker.

This almost imperceptible slide away from the self-in-relation, a shift which begins with the quiet transformation of "the shop" into "my shop," ends by calling attention to itself in the dramatic description of work stoppage that closes the passage. Here, the concerted effort of the garment workers is directed toward the autobiographical subject. The actions of two hundred, that is, are framed as a struggle to reinstate the self, ending not so much in collective victory as in a supremely personal triumph: "and I was taken back the same day." Anticipating the punch line, the repetition of this phrase indicates self-promotion rather than self-denial, encouraging readers to gloss the struggle between shop owners and workers as a more personal contest of wills.

Despite an insistence on the collective self, then, narrative energy and focus in One of Them seem disproportionately directed toward the "One," toward affirming what Hasanovitz calls at the close of her book "my hard labor" (289). As in Rose Schneiderman's recollection of union work, Hasanovitz's history of the collective enables rather than discourages self-assertion, the text's attention to community allowing for the articulation of a personal voice as well. Because it exploits the language of feminine service on behalf of others ("I spoke not only for myself") the book can focus on the predicament of the "I" without fear of censure. The description of collective "struggle and hardship" (253) sets the scene for individual suc-

cess: "I was determined to have order in the shop, to get everything that was coming to the workers according to the agreement, to encourage, to show the workers the value of organization and the strength of unity" (253). In this narrative about "getting employment" and fighting to maintain it, insisting on pride in labor opens space for the working-class autobiographer to be "something else" (303) as well.

Contextualizing Emma Goldman's Living My Life

I was not hewn of one piece, like Sasha or other heroic figures. I had long realized that I was woven of many skeins, conflicting in shade and texture. To the end of my days I should be torn between the yearning for a personal life and the need of giving all to my ideal .
Emma Goldman, Living My Life

As if bound to take their cues from the force of her own personality, critics of Goldman's two-volume, 993-page memoir tend to reiterate the mixed message of the quote above: the book is narcissistic but impersonal, a self-glorifying tract that nevertheless manages to leave the reader with an indistinct impression of autobiographical identity.^[20] Critical appraisal of the autobiography as the product of a "conflicting" and complicated discursive structure accords it a privileged position not out of line with Goldman's own shrewdly romantic assessment of her life and character.^[21] Following her lead, scholarly readers have tended to position Goldman as "something of an anomaly,"^[22] her memoir as the exception to literary rules, whether of the autobiographical genre in general or, more specifically, of the personal narratives of public women.

Such a sense of distinctiveness, however, is in no small degree the product of the critical methods used to obtain it. Reading this text without sufficient regard for its historical and discursive contexts virtually guarantees that it will jump out of the literary background. If we resituate Goldman's recollection of her life as a Russian Jewish anarchist in the context of her political and cultural milieu, however, what appeared exceptional about the narrative begins to look typical.^[23] While her pointed reference to the conflict between personal life and political ideal marks her life story as a glamorously turbulent one, comparison with the personal narratives of

labor organizers Rose Schneiderman, Rose Cohen, and Elizabeth Hasanovitz indicates that what is unusual about the work's uneasy mixture of self-promotion and self-denial is simply the writer's glorification of this tension.

As in the recollections of Schneiderman and Hasanovitz, in Goldman's, too, the relationship between the histories of labor and the self is a complex one, foregrounding the story of the movement and the struggles of diverse activists at the same time as it calls attention to the particular achievements of the "I" who is recording the drama. Like Schneiderman, Goldman follows descriptions of her own speeches and their reception with biographical vignettes of others working to promote the socialist cause in the United States. Albeit framed as contingent upon the recognition of the "I," the following recollection provides a tribute to the work of a community: "Miss Lillian D. Wald, Lavinia Dock, and Miss MacDowell were among the first American women I met who felt an interest in the economic condition of the masses. They were genuinely concerned with the people of the East Side" (16). Frequent, too, are more extensive portraits of friends and coworkers: a memorial to Robert Reitzel after his death from tuberculosis ("A thinker and poet, he was not content merely to fashion beautiful words; he wanted them to be living realities, to help in awakening the masses to the possibilities of an earth freed from the shackles the privileged few had forged," [222]) and a lengthy paragraph commending the "inexhaustible energy" and "keen intellect" of William Shatoff, who "devoted his life to the enlightenment of the Russian refugees" (595).

If the combination of historical exposition and biographical cameo in Living My Life recalls the personal narratives of immigrant Jewish women labor organizers, so, too, Goldman's more self-referential rhetorical patterns mirror the oblique strategies of writers like Cohen, Schneiderman, Pesotta, and Hasanovitz. Granted, the book carries an assertively self-reflexive title, and its length does not suggest an author tentative about self-promotion. Yet even Goldman's "narcissism" is often rendered apologetically, while those memories approaching the bildungsroman are described more allusively than explicitly. Goldman most often invokes childhood scenes and emotional confessions as corollaries to political ideas, framing the personal as contingent upon the "ideal." In a particularly telling example, she conflates a Russian landscape of her youth with a description of her feelings for Alexander Berkman ("Fedya awakened in me the

mysterious yearning I used to feel in my childhood at sight of the sunset turning the Popelan meadows golden in its dying glow," [33]). Both autobiographical admissions are subordinated to an ostensible thesis that honors a political aesthetic as ultimately more compelling than the artist's apprehension of beauty: Berkman discredits the "importance of beauty in one's life" but still "stirs" Goldman more "when speaking of revolutionary ethics" than when others discourse on "bad taste" (33).

But it is the carefully offhanded acknowledgment of the book's genesis that provides the closest link to Rose Schneiderman's own characteristically humble self-advancement. Toward the close of the autobiography, Goldman devotes two full pages to a description of the autobiographical impulse that motivated it. Where Rose Schneiderman invokes the authority of Eleanor Roosevelt as literary sponsor, Goldman suggests that her own memoir is written at the behest of Theodore Dreiser. In its self-deprecatory lightheartedness, her allusion to this literary benefactor's prompting recalls Schneiderman's "surprise" when she is asked to become secretary of the State Department of Labor. To the novelist's suggestion that she write the story of her life, Goldman responds:

I told him that Howard Young had put the question first. I had not taken it very seriously and I was not surprised that I had received no word from him, though he had been back in America several months. Dreiser protested that he was greatly interested in seeing my story given to the world. He would secure a five-thousand-dollar advance from some publisher and I would hear from him very soon. (986)

The cultivated tone of amusement, the offhand dismissal of Young's proposal, and the questioning of Dreiser's own intention through the undermining verb "protested" are certainly characteristic of Goldman's irreverent, sardonic speechifying; at the same time, however, the need to authorize her own literary labor by invoking a more prominent sponsor echoes the rhetorical gestures characteristic of the personal narratives of immigrant Jewish labor leaders more generally.^[24] Despite the proprietary insistence on marking out a space for the self, the autobiographical voice of Living My Life proves far more contingent upon the demands of history and significantly more accommodating to the voices of others than the bravura of its title promises.

A historicizing anecdote may serve to illustrate. Quitting her first job is

a romantic if dangerous gesture for the young anarchist, according to Living My Life . Taking the unusual step of throwing away her meager living ("I had come to ask for a rise. . . . Mr. Garson replied that for a factory girl I had rather extravagant tastes, that all his 'hands' were well satisfied . . . that I, too, would have to manage or find work elsewhere," [17]), Goldman leaves Garson's "employ" (17), finds another job at a rival factory days later, maintains her own dignity as a worker and, years later, enjoys the opportunity to teach the sweatshop boss a lesson about working people's justice in a passage that simultaneously underscores her own distinctive achievements: "Who would have thought that the little girl in my shop would become such a grand speaker?" (352) a more humble Mr. Garson asks rhetorically. The autobiographer characterizes this action as idiosyncratic, yet historians suggest that electing to leave one job for another was in fact "a favorite tactic for self-promotion, a 'trick of the trade' as one observer noted. . . . Job-changing by women seeking higher wages was commonplace in an industry noted for a high rate of labor turnover. . . .  Low wages and an interest in finding better work were given as reasons for quitting a job by 29% of the clothing workers surveyed."^[25]

Likewise, reading Goldman's narrative with attention to its discursive contexts reveals a text that speaks of community as frequently as it does of iconoclasm. Blanche Gelfant distinguishes Goldman's strategy of "rhetorical excess" as a form of "rhetorical overdetermination" comparable only to that in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie: "Instead of selecting a single predominant discourse, Dreiser and Goldman conflated the various modes available to them, as though hoping that rhetorical excess would make their unacceptably radical social criticism seem cogent, logical and, as expressed in familiar literary conventions and clichés, acceptable."^[26]

Such a characterization is possible, however, only if we ignore Goldman's literary milieu—Yiddish newspapers, strike bulletins, union calls to action, Russian novels, the personal narratives of her Jewish contemporaries, and the journalistic pieces of her political coworkers. In fact, the Jewish anarchist's blurring of "history, journalism, philosophy, myth, melodrama, romance, apologias and confessions, and propaganda"^[27] is not so much the distinguishing characteristic of her prose as its generically defining one. Creating a literary prototype inadequately rooted in history prevents us from reading her rhetorical practices as culturally contingent, yet her vocabulary of faith as well as her impassioned tone identify her narra-

tive as a structural exemplar of the writing of Jewish immigrant activists. Readers today may wince at the purple prose of this elegy to a coworker: "Now Robert was dead, his ashes strewn over the lake. His great heart beat no more; his turbulent spirit was at rest. Life continued on its course, made more desolate without my knight, robbed of the force and beauty of his pen, the poetic splendour of his song" (222). But this paean is no more "excessive" than is Theresa Malkiel's tribute to the persuasive power of Mother Jones: "One glance into her glittering eyes, a glimpse at the noble face and outstretched arms that are anxious to embrace the whole human race, is enough to make you understand how she does it, not to say anything of the words of wisdom that flow from her lips" (115).

I have suggested that the multiplicity of rhetorical forms in the personal narratives of immigrant Jewish women—what Blanche Gelfant has singled out in Goldman's autobiography as a literary "pastiche"—can look like discursive confusion if we do not adequately historicize them. Comparing Goldman with "other radical women of her time—Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, C. P. Gilman, and Margaret Sanger, all of whom wrote autobiographies," Gelfant finds that the Jewish exception to this Anglo-American rule is exceptional ("Goldman shattered the stereotype of woman as private, selfless, and submissively conforming to social expectations she sought secretly to subvert"),^[28] hardly a surprising deduction if you define woman as excluding working-class and Jewish immigrants.

It must, however, be said that putting a writer's memoirs in context may involve working against the grain of the autobiographer's own interpretive directives. In the case of Living My Life, such a reading clearly puts pressure on Goldman's self-representation as glorious iconoclast, but it also provides us with a more nuanced picture of a subject negotiating her relationship to her community by exploiting the rhetorical forms provided by that community. Ultimately, what such representational conflicts demonstrate is that the relationship between historical exposition and autobiographical voicing in personal narratives like Goldman's is neither selfevident nor straightforward. By reevaluating what initially appears as so much discursive "noise" drowning out the autobiographical register, we may refine the entire literary score as well.