What Our Bubbes Yearned for and Achieved
Patner, Myra Mensh
BOOKS What Our Bubbes Yearned for and Achieved The World of Our Mothers by Sydney Stahl Weinberg University of North Carolina Press, 1989.325 pp. $22.95 Reviewed by Myra Mensh Patner We knew...
...It was no wonder that with rapid social change, by the turn of the century many were eager to leave shtetl life to seek respite from such repressive existences...
...Some immigrant women saw themselves as the lost generation, too old when they got here to become real Americans in language, culture and education, too poor to indulge their own dreams for themselves...
...Coming from a traditional patriarchy that denied them access to serious learning and relegated them to secondary importance, they have left us with few records of their lives...
...It was the children of this first generation who provided much of the fulfillment for their mothers...
...In The World of Our Mothers, Sydney Stahl Weinberg used the intimate lives of 46 women who came here between 1890 and 1925 to draw a composite portrait of the daily lives of that first generation...
...She found that their marriages bore striking resemblances to those of their parents in Europe, except that these young women were the first to be able to limit their family size without having to banish husbands from their beds...
...We need to be grateful, then, for this marvelous book...
...Weinberg avoids nostalgic recreation of shtetl life...
...22.95 Reviewed by Myra Mensh Patner We knew them as our old bubbes, who cooked, sewed and helled, and spoke Yiddish with our parents so the kinder shouldn't know what they were talking about...
...Weinberg explores such aspects of the immigrant generation's lives as their jobs (sexual harassment was everywhere in the sweatshop), love, marriage and family...
...And it was from their Americanized sons and daughters that they themselves learned so much about America...
...Yes, our bubbes were among the first women to have modern sex lives...
...Of course, we are still young...
...As helpers to mothers who ran small businesses to support large families while their scholar-husbands had their heads in the Talmud, often as little mothers to younger brothers and sisters in families in which 10 to 20 children were the rule, girls obtained at a young age a sense of competence, strength and self-sacrifice...
...The whole structure of Jewish life as they had known it was dissolving in America...
...Weinberg interweaves words from her subjects' oral histories with literary and sociological sources to compile a rich and complete picture of who they were and how they coped with the transition from one society to another...
...Weinberg discovered that a strong sense of continuity from one generation to another pervaded many of these women's psyches...
...Hardly did we know them as people, certainly hot as the young girls they had been when they made that painful break from families to travel—so often alone— from another country and another century to a way of life astoundingly different from the one they left...
...Myra Mensh Patner is a reporter for the Gazette newspapers in the suburban areas surrounding Washington, D.C...
...It was sometimes those same sons and daughters, so eager to be real Americans, who felt shame and even revulsion at their mothers' accents and backward ways...
...We need awakening...
...Therefore, she starts her narrative by taking us back to Eastern Europe to show what life was like for girls of the shtetl...
...Wrote Anna Kahan in her diary at age 13, "A woman has just as much desire as a man...
...It wasn't just a new language to learn...
...The grinding poverty, the fear of pogroms in which rape often happened, the denial of much of women's selfhood in a male-dominated religious society which forbade education and spiritual development for women—all are shown through the words of the women themselves...
...Hardly did we think of them as yearning young women pursuing dreams for themselves...
...But many reveled in the undreamt-of freedom they experienced here...
...Weinberg goes on to detail arrival in America and the startling new world there...
...They had brought from Europe a central value: A boy's success depended upon his education, a girl's upon her marriage...
...Many sacrified their wages, their youth and their health to provide, for others in their families, especially for brothers...
...Sadly, it was to be some of their grandsons who would transform the qualities of self-sacrifice and determination of these original ' 'Jewish mothers" into overbearing, manipulative caricatures in post-World War II books and films...
...Sexual relations were freed from the constant fear of having another mouth to feed...
...It was their sons in whom these women invested their hopes, dreams and ambitions...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
