Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack: The ethnic child speaks to you who never were there

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Muir, Lisa

The consequences of ethnic life are plain when both autobiographies end with numbing misfortunes emphasizing the unfair exclusions of American life. Spewack finally loses her sickly brother Herschey, and Cohen stands isolated from her family and American culture. But it cannot be said that Cohen and Spewack have abandoned the inclusion of a romanticized past even with the sadness that pervades their conclusions. The recovery of memory in autobiography implies a selection process from a set of recalled facts, a process that involves not only romanticizing but also dividing what might be termed "true" memories from the memory or recollection of those "true" memories. In fact, I would argue that memory might not even exist in the conventional sense. Memory only exists as one set of conclusions concerning one situation drawn at one particular time. Whereas society together mutually decides on its truths, the single mind has no capacity for this kind of cooperative thinking. Instead, the closest one can come concerning memory is to have the memory of memory.

Albert E. Stone views the emphasis and interplay of circumstances and their organization in an autobiography as more valuable than seeing them as evidence of the truth of a life. "Given the notorious weakness of memory, the autobiographical act as history is more trustworthy as a record of the author's reactivations [my italics] than of the actor's original behavior and perceptions" (1991, 97). In addition, those reactivations are all relative, derived from what the author has become rather than what she has been. Coe concurs, emphasizing that above all the autobiography is a form of literature and follows the laws governing any literary text, that "the truth of the imagination shall take precedence over the truth of fact" (1984, 84).

The autobiographical act, furthermore, is not one-sided. As soon as a life, or the perception of a life, is formed into words, it invites reader participation, for the autobiographer needs and expects both the sympathetic reader's reaction and that of the skeptic. Coe argues that the autobiography can be at best a "compromise": "Childhood revisited is childhood recreated, and re-created in terms of art" (1984, 84). If this is true, then no one could ever tell his/her story with any certainty. Each autobiographical telling could only approximate a truth, that of something like it but not it. This metaphorical element is present in both Cohen's and Spewack's works. Cohen, especially, concludes the majority of her chapters with highly effective metaphoric endings meant to linger with the reader, and both women use drama and symbolic discord to end their autobiographies, ultimately condemning America through literary technique without having to do so directly.

Despite the condemnations, the published autobiography also provided connections between author and reader. This connection begins with the writer herself, especially when the text is produced, as Mary Dearborn observes, "by agents other than the ethnic woman" (1986, 33). Mary Antin's The Promised Land began as travel letters written to an uncle in Russia, Bella Spewack wrote privately never intending publication, and Cohen refers late in her autobiography to diary entries which must have provided much source material for her. Cohen and Spewack's works are the kind of mediating texts Dearborn describes in Pocahontas's Daughters. For Dearborn mediating texts like Antin's uncover similarities between an author's culture and dominant American culture (1986, 40), but I would argue that the mediating text can also be used in the opposite way to uncover difference and thereby use difference as a tie between cultures. The resulting text obviously first serves as a connecting point for the writer herself. Just as the I is a place of convergence for Butler, a "transfer point," the ethnic autobiography becomes a kind of border text. It becomes a point of convergence and mediation between author and reader, but on a more personal level it becomes a mediating point for the writer herself, connecting old and new lives. The abject has gained authority, the I being, as Smith has described, neither "powerless nor passive" but quite capable of"celebrat[ing] agency" Mediating texts for Dearborn are also written with a great sense of audience (1986,40) and this is obvious in Cohen and Spewack upon closer inspection. The authors must have hoped their words would prompt responses from their readership broadening the public's own perceptions of the foreign immigrant. Each first met the expectations of her new home, however, by creating an acceptable American persona: the hardworking immigrant girl yearning to become American. This figure fit neatly into the idealistic picture America loved to paint of herself but required a balancing act on the part of Cohen and Spewack.