The Shiksa Question

...At a party some weeks ago, for example, I chatted with a young Jewish friend, whom I shall call Sid, while a Gentile friend stood by...

...painful a subject?—they are beginning to react...

...I have heard Jewish women accused of practically every crime under the sun short of genocide, and perhaps even that...

...fictitious and actual characters have escaped the experience of slum-dwelling, and instead come of lower middle-class Jewish communities, in many cases pleasant in their self-containment: if not quite gilded ghettos, comfortable ones...

...The "elders" in the passage above must refer to Nathan's father and his surrogate, Judge Wapter, for his mother, in this book, is no more than an intercessor, no more than a kind of suburban Virgin Mary...

...Roth's Jewish protagonists from Goodbye, Columbus to The Professor of Desire and The Ghost Writer have come from working-class or lower middle class neighborhoods, and have risen in the world in typical American-Jewish ways, i.e...

...Oh, marry me, Anne Frank, exonerate me before my outraged elders of this idiotic indictment...

...We hear the very distant but distinct rumble of the Abraham-Isaac situation while listening to this gentle chiropodist...

...I could do no more than presume, because I could not bring myself to pick up the book, but instead regarded it from afar with a mixture of amusement, consternation, and rage...

...Heedless of Jewish feeling...

...She also has an inner life we get to know about, which is more than one can say of any female character in Malamud...

...Who dare to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank...

...As a Jew and a woman, I can say without qualification that the kind of misogyny that hurts me most, confuses me most profoundly, and cuts most directly into my self-respect is that which emanates from Jewish men and is aimed specifically at Jewish women...

...All right, so she's not Jewish, but she is human, and that is more than one can say for any female character in Bellow...

...As a misogynistic character named Baumgarten in The Professor of Desire notes of Chekhov, and as I note of Bellow, Malamud et al, "Why isn't he ever implicated in the shit...

...the man in question may be, like my uncles, one who came to this country at an age tender enough not to have formed a positive identification with the parent culture and old enough to have experienced shame in the new...

...Looking at the protagonists in American-Jewish fiction, and looking around in the world, one may see that both Is not the search for the shiksa the longing for the soft-spoken, compliant, intellectually inferior servant girl...

...Of whom is such a fixation likely to take hold, and why...

...The Ghost Writer shares with major myths the uncovering of underlying psychological structures and the illumination of social ones...

...Saul Bellow's Madeleine epitomizes the type...

...In the real world, this configuration may vary somewhat in its particulars...

...It may be (and would be true to patriarchal form) that mothers in this conflict are not really that important at all...

...my cholesterol-ridden uncle recently commented that "chicken soup has killed more Jews than Hitler...

...The most articulate of these men will be quick to characterize, or caricature, Jewish women as selfish, greedy, vulgar, castrating, etc...

...They had even had the audacity to fall in love with him...

...his Jewish women may be as shrewish as a borsht-belt comedian's...

...The Roth protagonists put me in mind of my friend Sid...

...He could not, of course, understand where such a pejorative and hateful remark was coming from...

...I have heard it said that while Roth is an excellent writer, one wouldn't want to shake hands with him...

...In poetry by American-Jewish men, I have found, mothers are absent, but almost every poet in this category has written a poem about his father...

...Now, I am not, in the classic manner of Judge Wapter in The Ghost Writer, attempting to persuade Jewish writers, or any writers, to tamper with their visions...

...Roth, on the other hand, takes cognizance of a certain kind of misogyny, and being perhaps the most self-consciously Jewish of these writers, connects it with the social background affecting the sexual and psychological development of the Jew in America...

...he wishes, moreover, for his real father's acceptance, too, and this can only be won, he rightly surmises in fantasy, by a symbolic marriage—to none other than Anne Frank...

...That his second Gentile wife had just stripped him of his savings, his furniture, and his self-respect did not indicate to him that the women of one ethnic group do not have exclusive claim to the qualities which he fears...

...My Gentile friend looked stunned...

...When I asked Sid if he felt endangered and if his current safety was due to carrying a knife or some such weapon, he asked if I meant he kept a Jewish woman with him at all times...

...she is seen as demanding some reciprocity—whether sexual or matrimonial...

...He, on the contrary, had only been out for a good time...

...What I am trying to say is that open hostility towards the mother, or a Jewish woman who may be her surrogate, is perhaps an easier stance in American culture than one which admits of certain kinds of feelings towards the father...

...I know of an Israeli who was lectured on his promiscuity by his Gentile girlfriend...

...But the consistent put-down of Jewish women, like the denigration of Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, etc...

...Freud pointed out long ago that the tenuously rooted or wandering Jew identifies the mother with the home more than most folks do, and sometimes, when 1 listen to tirades against Jewish women, I wonder if these men simply blame their mothers for having made them Jewish in the first place...

...We all know shiksa is a disparaging if sometimes affectionate term referring to a pretty, young, pliant and self-effacing Gentile woman...

...The same tissue of feelings that makes Jewish women particularly susceptible to the blandishments of Weight Watchers and the ravages of anorexia nervosa may be operative in the repudiation of Jewish women by Jewish men, those moving upward in the social scale and very often into a predominantly Gentile environment...

...one accepts Turgenev, for example, with his anti-Semitism, Yeats with his nutty religion...

...indeed, they go out with no Jewish girls at all...

...the prophet—has incurred his father's wrath through the truthfulness of his writing, which his father assumes, in the words of another Roth story, will not be "good for the Jews...

...something dishonest dwells in the much put-upon protagonists of Bellow and Malamud: the author's saintly touch...

...Some women didn't care how badly they damaged you...

...Such an initiation requires some repudiation of the parent culture—so aptly symbolized in The Ghost Writer, once again in the person of the narrator's father—and some idealization of the Gentile world, the Wasp world in particular, which is seen as representing taste and refinement...

...But I am afraid what has become clear in this age of transition is that many men, Jewish and Gentile, would like to shiksify us all, Jewish as well as non-Jewish women, and that any woman who claims equality and respect will be hated and feared as much for her intellect as for her origins...

...A semi-idyllic and sheltered Jewish childhood—such as the one depicted by Roth in The Ghost Writer—is interrupted by adolescent initiation into the world at large, meaning the Gentile world...

...when used by Gentiles or Jews...

...My uncles' notions are therefore fixed...

...Shirley Chisholm once remarked that she had been a Black and she had been a woman, and being a woman was worse...

...Such prejudice may take the form of contempt for emotional dependency or certain kinds of intellectual effort, or may lie just beneath the surface of other kinds of criticism as well...

...As with all stereotypes and paranoic fears, some translation of reality has taken place...

...I think of mothers who tried to keep their sons from being inducted into the Czar's army, or other armies of more recent times, and I begin to wonder if I am living in the same history books as my male friends...

...Sometimes the agent is sheer isolation, but more often than is commonly thought there is some actual prejudice involved...

...t I feel I have come full circle, for what this man was saying suggests something terrible about the attitude inherent in the term shiksa...

...I, too, joke about it, telling my particularly vicious friends that I will report them to the AntiDefamation League, but not really endeavoring to speak seriously with them about my feelings or theirs...

...In The Ghost Writer, moreover, the search for the loving and approving father is seen as relating not only to one's search for a place in one's community—the Jewish community in this case—but also as relating to one's choice of love object, or, more properly speaking, wife...

...perhaps Jewish women are somewhat more self-assertive, goodness knows why...

...The comment left me, as they say in the Smirnoff ads, breathless...

...Roth seems to be, in fact, the only major Jewish writer who has attempted to describe and deal with the vestigial self-hatred that drives many American-Jewish men not only to crave Gentile women of a certain type—and more of that later—but also to hate and despise Jewish women, the phenomenon I wish to attend to here...

...But again Roth is the most perceptive of writers...

...In The Victim, for example, the supportive wife is ostensibly Jewish but appears on the scene only at the end of the book...

...he is also the only author I know of who deals with the symbolism of the Jewish woman in reference to the Jewish male's relation to his community...

...I have asked other Jewish women about their experiences in this area, and although they speak about them with reticence—perhaps it is too Nikki Stiller is the author of Eve's Orphans: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval English Literature, to be published in September by The Greenwood Press...

...as Nathan informs his father, the only bloodshed in North Jersey takes place in the offices of plastic surgeons fixing the noses of Jewish girls...

...Roth's Jewish protagonists and my young friend afloat in Faulkner country are also unwilling and unable to disremem-ber their origins in lower social echelons, and their almost exclusively Jewish childhoods...

...A close friend once confessed he thought his first marriage, to the most unlikely of Wasps, was the result at least in part of the anti-Semitism he had experienced in the Army when he was a young boy out of an exclusively Jewish neighborhood and a tender Jewish family...

...It was written, I presume, by a shiksa, or someone calling herself that...

...The prejudice need not be so explicit as it must have been in my friend's training camp in Missouri...

...The Jewish American Jezebel image is well-established in fiction, and even has its roots in the guber-nya of Isaac Bashevis Singer...

...And the stereotypes that pass for "good" women in Herzog or in Humboldt's Gift (and are characterized by their corsetry) may be exotic or faintly tinged by Jewish blood—Ramaona—but they certainly never come from the protagonist's old neighborhood...

...They mourn their inability to find women—a woman, rather—to suit intellectual and sexual needs while they take up with Swedes, with young students, with women blond and strange—Roth almost always makes his narrator conscious of his own dark complexion—and they yearn for one who will comprehend their torment while assuaging it...

...Yet it is Roth, ironically, who manages to put living words in the mouth of a female character...

...Because I am a feminist, some have thought me an unlikely champion of Philip Roth, many of whose narrators resemble the types one talks to an analyst about...

...Perhaps the subject is too painful for anything but humor, but I am beginning to feel the one-liners as kicks in the stomach...

...Of course, this is Herzog the narrator speaking, but in Bellow's books in general a positive image of a Jewish woman is most difficult to come by...

...Most frequently, these are elegies: how is that for Oedipal resolution...

...He confessed he had had "problems," "bad experiences," with Jewish women...

...A girl, in Zelda's view, had a right to expect from her husband nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs...

...although Portnoy the analy-sand certainly conjures up an intimidating picture of the knife-wielding Sophie and her spiritual daughter, the avenging Israeli, towards the end of the book, even in Portnoy's Complaint Roth casts light on the Oedipal situation as it involves the father...

...But there is a crucial difference between Roth and the other American-Jewish male writers...

...Moreover, Roth is not only the most explicit contemporary Jewish novelist in dealing with the connection between social class and the uses of sexual passion...

...I will not comment on the bigotry involved in viewing Gentile women as having these characteristics...

...And is not the search for the shiksa in actuality the longing for the soft-spoken, compliant, intellectually inferior, self-effacing and undemanding servant girl who could never in any way threaten or rival a man...

...This obviously suggests ill treatment from Black men as well as from Whites of both genders...

...Thus the "badness" of his experiences consisted in the seriousness of these women and their monagamous aims and desires...

...I would just like to point out some stunning limitations...

...The shiksa fantasy appears in the works of the major Jewish-American (male) writers, most notably, of course, in the writing of Philip Roth...

...With Roth, while I would have my suspicions as to what the fictitious hand had been doing, neither of us would have to pretend that it had been devoted exclusively to turning the pages of the Talmud...

...I had a most enlightening conversation with a Gentile acquaintance some weeks back...

...When I asked him what these had been, he confessed that of the three or four Jewish women he had taken out, each and every one of them had wanted to marry him...

...That Bellow could have won the Nobel Prize (Singer as well) while ignoring the existence of one half of humanity (with all the Jews, myself included, congratulating ourselves on our boys doing it) only testifies to how trivial such a concern as the minds and hearts of women is to the Jewish intellectual community...

...I do not intend to discuss the self-abnegation apparent in the title...

...or he may be an Israeli, since Israelis who live abroad frequently see their native land as a kind of lower middle class mishpochah, and their native culture as the social inferior, on a world scale, of the Anglo-Saxon...

...Indifferent to Jewish survival...

...Thus in a certain way, the Jewish man's hatred for Jewish women may be seen as sexism pure and simple, as a rejection of the woman's claim to respect in the context of the family or in the context of an egalitarian relationship...

...He courts the great writer Lonoff and wins his approval...

...Whereas the women never considered marrying, or even dating (as far as I know) Gentile men, my uncles have married Gentile women several times over, and have consistently refused, from youth to middle age, to have anything to do with Jewish women...

...We have heard the term bandied about in our families and have observed the figure it refers to portrayed ad nauseum in the fantasies of our friends...

...Nor does Bellow limit the description to one woman: "What crooks they were—Madeleine, Zelda . . . others...

...The Jewish woman, according to male perceptions both Jewish and Gentile, cannot be so easily had...

...with her "odors of feminine secretions—the dirty way she had with her," she is yet seen as "masterful" and "canny, a superbly cunning, very canny woman...

...In many cases, they turn away from the Jewish world altogether and turn towards Gentile men who have a different set of notions about Jewish women, a set which contains stereotypes also, but which are declaimed more carefully, and are perhaps easier to live with...

...Roth has the courage as well as the artistic integrity to implicate himself—through the concerns of his narrators—in the dirty business of heterosexual social relations under the current dispensation...

...And, as Roth reminds us in his essays, some Jews become their stereotypes...

...The shiksa question, it seems to me, and the accompanying loathing of Jewish women, is too often looked upon as lying in the province of the borsht-belt comedian and his inheritors...

...I have had the occasion to observe a similar syndrome in detail and over the years within my own family...

...The odd thing is that he believed this...

...she contributes, that is, her shadowy, benign and pregnant presence when all the real issues have been resolved...

...For my uncle at the University of Iowa, for my radical friend Sid here in the deep South, for my acquaintances in the Down East region of academe, the sense of self has been seriously undermined...

...Social and psychological causes, it seems to me, reinforce each other...

...Brutish about their well-being...

...like the figure of the Monkey in Porl-noy's Complaint, the shiksa is an object of use, a sort of degraded Miltonic Eve brought into being for purposes of male pleasure...

...Portnoy's knife...

...Helen, for example, in The Professor of Desire, when visiting David Kepesh in his mountain idyll, elucidates the problems of her life, and of Kepesh's, in a voice both dignified and moving...

...But this son will not permit his individuality to be sacrificed, and sets off in search of a resolution to the conflict with his father and with his people...

...Of course, there are differences in the American-Jewish experience...

...Because Roth explores this murky territory, the image of Anne Frank can emerge in his work, and with it the complex relation of the Jewish woman to the Jewish man...

...I beg to differ...

...and by people who would find calling Blacks lazy or Puerto Ricans violent repugnant and offensive), is more than a curiosity, as one hears over and over that Jewish women are calculating, possessive, sexually aggressive, and, in Bellow's terminology, "masterful," which is to say, unmanning...

...At her wit's end, she told him Anglo-Saxons don't act in such a manner...

...In other words, his attitude towards Jewish or Gentile women has little to do with reality and is somewhat pathological, as is misogyny in general, of course, where women reflect images of fear and hatred rather than of real human beings...

...Roth's protagonist, Nathan—i.e...

...To be wed somehow to you, I thought, my unassailable advocate, my invulnerable ally, my shield against their charges of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous informing...

...Roth seems to be not really interested in female psychology as such but in the anguished distortions of the male mind, as the last line of Portnoy's Complaint suggests...

...The Jewish woman may be slapped with the latter image in the most informal and ostensibly friendly settings...

...through the application of their considerable intellectual powers to the pursuits, pleasures and prestige of the Wasp world, or, as in The Ghost Writer, of the Wasp world infiltrated by Jews...

...stricken by loneliness and boredom, or excitement and guilt, they see Jewish women primarily as mothers and sisters, occasionally attributing the powers of the vagina dentata to them: one recalls Mrs...

...Sid had been working for a progressive newspaper, and had succeeded in making trouble for the state's corrupt politicians...

...Who would not rather be thought of as a warm, sensual, giving earth-mother than as a castrating, shrewish, money-grubbing bitch...

...I have begun to meditate on the roles Jewish women played in the past, of the women raped, of those who stood naked at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, babies at their breasts...

...With the exception of Nathan in The Ghost Writer, whom I shall look at shortly, they never go out with a nice Jewish girl...