Miłosne transgresje żydowskich bohaterów: wykluczenie, awans społeczny i pytanie o tożsamość
Love Transgressions of Jewish Heroes: Exclusion, Social Advancement, and the Question of Identity

Author(s): Brygida Gasztold
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: immigration; Jewish Americans; mixed marriages; identity; Sholem Aleichem; Anzia Yezierska; Philip Roth
Summary/Abstract: The article aims at presenting three strategies the heroes of Jewish originapply to mixed marriages. In Tevye the Dairyman, Sholem Aleichem shows how the preceptof preserving ethnic separatism and the necessity of Judaism to survive during thediaspora dictated complete rejection of exogamy and excluded those who violated thisnorm from the Jewish community. For the heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s novel Salome ofthe Tenements, marriage to a rich goy was supposed to be an open sesame to the betterprivileged America; however, it turned out to be a painful object lesson in cultural andlinguistic differences. And finally, the contemporary protagonists of Philip Roth’s novelThe Counterlife struggle with the issue of their own identity – the character of shiksa constitutes a specific catalyst for the questions of the nature of Jewishness in Roth’s book.

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