Writing the self: a woman's story. . - Reviews - Moving Tales: My Journey from Victim to Victor, A Memoir - Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman - book review

Moving Tales: My Journey from Victim to Victor, A Memoir. By SHIRLEY PRIMACK AZEN. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Corporation 2001.

Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman. By HELEN JACOBUS APTE, edited by MARCUS D. ROSENBAUM. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 1998.

The force and allure of autobiography partially stems from the idea that a coherent and whole self can be written, drawing from the resources of experienced events, memories, and emotions. Whether the act of writing about one's life simply translates an already real identity onto the page or actually creates the illusion of a harmonious identity as the writing takes place is a question not easily answered. But in either case, the self writing, or the act of writing the self, puts into a framed and contained space a record of lived experiences that contribute to a recognizable whole self. Both Shirley Primack Azen, in her book Moving Tales: My Journey from Victim to Victor, A Memoir, and Helen Jacobus Apte, in her collected diary entries entitled Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman, embrace this autobiographical mode as a means, through writing, to gather up life fragments and piece them together. As a result, we have two fascinating-and eloquently executed- acts of autobiography that tell us something about Jewish American women who turn to written expression as a way to make meaning and sense out of their lives. Pen in hand, they use their own voices to achieve a powerfully creative exploration of identity.

Shirley (b. 1913), a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, and Helen (b. 1889), a daughter of German Jewish immigrants, both present a picture of American life that is defined by successive struggles and hard-won triumphs, trials and victories that are specific to a woman's experience. These are triumphs dictated and curtailed by the eras and cultural systems in which they occur, but impressive all the same. For Shirley, the road from victim to victor means facing physical and emotional abuse, severe agoraphobia, and the challenging task of gaining an education as a female in the first half of the twentieth century. For Helen, these trials and triumphs include perpetual illness and frustrating confrontations with remnants of Victorian feminine ideals and their demand that she stifle desire in the face of duty. Both women negotiate a twentieth-century American culture of codes and roles, often feeling the intense split between a social self formed by external expectations and a private self formed by internal desires, needs, and dreams. Shirley, in the form of an autobiographical memoir meant for the public eye, and Helen, in the form of private journal entries that her grandson edits and publishes, seem to find, in the act of writing, a space m which to heal this split and to gather their multiple selves up into the person they triumphantly present. Writing, here, is an act of narrativizing the self into a single identity.

Crucial in both of these texts is the sense that these are women who face prescribed female roles that produce a sense of dissatisfaction and painful lack in the self. As Helen describes it in her journal later in life, "I have everything to make a woman happy, yet always there is that vague unrest, that faint nostalgia- for what?" (151). Expected to keep the home a haven of cleanliness and purity, to have a child and perform the role of motherhood with grace, and to remain at home blindly grasping the marriage "stone of duty," Helen submits to a Victorian ideal that forces her to ignore her apparent stronger, personal desires as a woman (2). Flirtatious and youthful, Helen longs to be admired by men, but she castigates herself for and repeatedly purges herself of this yearning which she perceives as a glaring lack of purity. But the "vague unrest" seems to have not only been one of unfulfilled passion; she desires intellectual stimulation as well. Helen's intellectual curiosity leads her to read voraciously and she becomes well-versed in many areas, often quoting literature and psychology in her journal, but it seems that she has no effective outlet for her intellect. Swimming in social circles that promote the ideal feminine homemaker, education and a career seem not to be an option. A clear admirer of education, Helen, as her grandson aptly remarks, "certainly would have continued her education" if she had been ham in another era (xvi).

Shirley is born later, but in her family and community, she finds herself similarly surrounded by cultural codes that hem her in. Taught that housekeeping duties reveal a woman's worth, Shirley struggles with her intense love of and desire for higher education, at one point feeling the need to hide and seek refuge in a library as she devours books while a young girl. Indeed, throughout her memoir, education clearly enchants Shirley; she virtually worships its possibilities. This immense desire is enfiamed as she grows older, despite a father who gives her no approval for her attempts at attending Purdue University, and despite a severe lack of funds. In addition to this absence of support for her educational goals, Shirley faces a dominating and abusive husband who makes her feel "worthless" (180). Such external pressures that chop away at Shirley's self-confidence work to tell her she is only capable of being the supposed ideal: the submissive woman who performs her role at home or in helping her husband's c areer. But incredibly, and this is part of the power of her book, Shirley's personal desires do slowly chip away at this image of feminine duty and she takes full advantage of changing times that begin to endorse her desires: in 1981 she receives her BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and in 1991 she completes her Ph.D. in Literature at the same institution. Where Helen succeeds in quieting her desires so as to live up to an ideal that does not satisfy her, Shirley finds a way to reject the ideologies that promote her lack of confidence and to embrace her own desires as valid. The result is a woman who finds refuge in her own agency.