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The Confessions of a Bad Reader: Embodied Selves, Narrative Strategies, and Subversion in Israeli Women's Autobiography
Abstract
Since the 1992 quincentennial of the Iberian events of 1492, a large number of autobiographies by Jews who are not Ashkenazim have been published in a variety of languages. In this article, I seek to contextualize this outpouring of memory work and self-analysis. Focusing on memoirists of Spanish-Portuguese background, however attenuated, I read the tarnished but treasured place of Sefarad in these recent works and interpret the authors' often ambivalent self-location with regard to Sephardic identity. A fruitful contrast can be made with the initial flourishing of Ashkenazic autobiography in the nineteenth century. I compare the recent works with their Sephardic predecessors as well as with other non-Ashkenazic but not Spanish-Portuguese memoirs, finding in general a late modernist devaluation of religion, tradition, and tribalism, but also hints of a perhaps postmodernist return of the repressed.
This essay explores Oluremi Obasanjo’s reconceptualization, in Bitter-Sweet: My Life with Obasanjo, of the culturally defined proper African woman. Published at the pinnacle of her husband’s life as a respected political leader in Africa, the text is a compendium of personal details of their marital life. The study examines how the author-protagonist defies culturally imposed restrictions on female expression by engaging instances of male abuse, neglect, and marital infidelity.
So, I'm just like everybody else. I go to the bookstore. I pick out a book I love. If it says memoir, I know that—that maybe the names and dates and times have been compressed, because that' what a memoir is.
—Oprah Winfrey on Larry King Live, 11 January 2006
I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require. I altered events all the way through the book.
—James Frey, New York Times, 2 February 2006
Sometimes the facts threaten the truth.
—Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
Of course it is impossible to tell the truth. For example, how does one know it? I will not belabor the difficulty by telling you how hard I have tried. And if compulsion forces me to tell the truth, it may also lead me into error, or invention.
—Kate Millett, Flying
Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?
—Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
The paper discusses the changes in the representation of motherhood in Hebrew novels written by women within the span of a century. The outline of the changes is found to be similar to the general trend discernible in women's writing in the West, despite the anomalous history of Hebrew literature. In most general terms, the history of the mother in these novels might be outlined in terms of a move from absence to presence, from silence to voice, from passivity to activity, from asexuality to overt promiscuity, from submission to aggression. Given the culturally ingrained model of the Jewish Mother that the novelists have to cope with, this move is shattering. The mother, who was neglected or even suppressed in the earlier novels, returns, with a vengeance, in more recent ones. The vengeance, though, may prove excessive.