MANUSCRIPT: JEWISH STEREOTYPES BETWEEN SHTETL
MANUSCRIPT: JEWISH STEREOTYPES BETWEEN SHTETL

Summary/Abstract: My paper examines Anzia Yezierska’s literary handling of Jewish stereotypes, analyzing how mythic America triggers the transplantation of the Eastern-European system of absolute thinking in the U.S. by operating a mere shift of variables (certitude of gain replacing certitude of loss). By contrast, I show that, in the real America, Jews learn the true stakes of democracy, functioning on contingencies not absolutes, hence their changed identity. More precisely, my intention is to show that Yezierska uses stereotypes as reversible representation practices, and by this she re-articulates the Jewish-American self as a type of identity upholding the experience of difference. In order to articulate this thesis, I will first show how Yezierska’s short stories reveal two unsatisfactory stereotypes triggered by the Jews’ obtuse interpretation of their old and new location. These are the victim stereotype characteristic of Jewish shtetl life in Eastern Europe and the Jewish beggar image typical of their American existence and related to utopian expectations of the United States. Then, in analyzing the writer’s novels, I point out to the writer’s reversed use of one variant of the beggar stereotype, namely the gendered ghetto girl stereotype presented as a Cinderella manquée by means of which the re-articulation of the Jewish American self as contingency-based is achieved.

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