Post-War Jewish Women's Writing in French

Abstract

As anglophone-based French studies increasingly open up to the purviews and agendas of cultural studies, including those of gender and ethnicity, this essay seeks to remedy a significant gap in that evolution. Beginning with broad synopsis and then moving into closer analysis of individual texts, it plots certain salient coordinates within French-language Jewish women's writing of the post-war period. Particular attention is paid to four broadly representative writers: two authors who, on the whole, appear to exemplify the more traditional concerns of the second generation (Elisabeth Gilles and Myriam Anissimov), and two who, in contrast, exemplify a post-1968 episteme which is informed by, though not reduced to, gendered structures of experience (Eliette Abécassis and Karine Tuil).

Contesting the Mommy Myth: Un heureux événement (Eliette Abécassis) as Maternal Counternarrative

“…45 As Lucille Cairns points out, 'although little in Barbara's experience of motherhood is Jewishencoded, it is nonetheless clear from various cultural references that Barbara is Jewish'. 46 The Jewish Orthodox view on motherhood is represented in the novel by one of the secondary characters, Myriam Tordjmann, who lives in the same building as Barbara. Myriam, who is barely thirty-five years old, already has ten children under the age of twelve.…”

“…Thus, the character of Myriam heightens the reader's awareness of Un heureux événement as a text that offers 'a serious probing of the extent to which motherhood, or at least certain elements of it, might be deleterious to the mother'. 47 To bring this article to a conclusion, I would like to return to the notion of maternal ambivalence introduced in the early stages of the argument and defined by Parker as 'the experience shared variously by all mothers in which loving and hating feelings exist side by side'. 48 As we have seen so far, what is essentially transgressive about Abécassis's narrative is that it dares to give a voice to the darker side of motherhood, the part that, as Almond reveals, has never really been acceptable to society despite its ubiquitous existence.…”