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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Muir, Lisa

But, to expect publication, Cohen and Spewack could not openly condemn America, so they skillfully "sell" their stories as American success stories. Cohen's conclusion, for instance, leaves the reader assuming she will marry her lover DC since, as she tells her sister, she has learned the meaning of happiness. We are left with her father's final words of joy: "Ali! After all this is America" (1995, 313). But though these two autobiographies can be read as American triumphs, Cohen and Spewack's works are celebrations of the immigrant struggle only on the surface. The authors' deliberate use and portrayal of ethnicity reveal how some women survived living on the edges of two different worlds, but only through constant negotiation. Rather than end at celebratory points, Cohen and Spewack actually conclude their autobiographies at a moment of acute American rejection. Each woman has lived just a decade or so in America at the conclusion of her work and is only in her later teens, but already she comprehends deeply her alienation from both the New and Old Worlds. This rejection is, in fact, two-sided. America has rejected them as young Jewish Americans, but Cohen and Spewack have also rejected America. In the same way that Nina Baym writes of what she terms the overplot in earlier mid-nineteenth-century women's novels, where female authors wrote seemingly conventional novels but underneath taught female readers of their potential power, the autobiographies of Cohen and Spewack contain more serious implications than are apparent in what might be termed the "conventional" stories of immigrant struggle driving their autobiographies. For Baym, to learn a type of fiction one must "learn its story" since fictions are "linked by their participation in one overplot." Authors then distinguish themselves largely by "the plot elements they select from the common repertory and by the varieties of setting and incident with which they embellish the basic tale" (1978, 12). Cohen and Spewack, who tell a similar tale, are "linked" by their participation in an overplot striving toward reconciliation while simultaneously expressing the importance of difference. They accomplish this by professing one desire in their autobiographies-the expected desire of the typical immigrant to be a hardworking and "good" American-but revealing how America forced them to perform alternatively in order to survive-by attempting (ultimately unsuccessfully) to return to the ethnic community.

Their autobiographies demonstrate that in following the assumed path toward American individualism, Cohen and Spewack had become too far removed from their own families' ways and beliefs to return comfortably to the safety of the ethnic community of the Lower East Side. In laboring to become Americans, they had already learned to reject their own ethnicity because America had rejected their ethnicity. To combat the marginalization by both cultures, the authors would come to use ethnic difference as a tool for connection rather than as a mark of division or separation in their appeal to the reader.