There was a time in some families, and not so long ago, when the arrival of a newborn daughter was not a joyous event. It was just another fact of life marking time until a son (or another son) was born. That’s the cold reality of the world the narrator of “The New World” was born into, and the early life of the story’s author bore out this unattractive truth.
But thanks to somewhat more enlightened attitudes toward gender (we said somewhat, remember) things have improved over the generations. Now, ceremonies and blessings welcoming a newborn baby daughter into a Jewish family are in many communities as common as the ceremonial welcoming of a son. Changes like these do not come about because of some general benevolence, or a sudden recognition of past injustices, but because strong women were brave enough to state, even to themselves, at least a little of what they wanted from life.
The stories in this opening section of the collection do not offer a linear progression from birth to old age, nor a collective portrait. Instead, each story frames a few episodes in the lives of their imagined protagonists, girls and women each sharp-eyed in her own way, trying to make sense of the world around her. Despite historical constraints on the options for females, the lead actor in each of these stories looks for ways to manage her own destiny.
The undervaluing of daughters is not unique to Jews, but in a religion where practices are determined so strongly by gender—who lights the Sabbath candles, who has the right to say aloud the Kaddish prayer in memory of a deceased relative, who is permitted to chant from the Torah—discrimination often seeped into secular conditions as well. The author of the opening story was sister to the celebrated writers Isaac Bashevis Singer and Israel Joshua Singer; their mother destroyed all of Esther’s early writing, claiming it would render her unmarriageable. Messages like this weren’t lost on generations of Jewish girls and women who were warned by concerned parents to be “smart, but not too smart.”
Differentiation between the sexes provides a framework for understanding social strictures, including strife between women made to feel that they’re competing for scarce resources—the attention of other girls, or a parent; later for the attention of males, if they’re following the prescribed path into heterosexual marriage and childbearing. Which brings us to fertility, and the pressures on women to become mothers. As much as shame has been heaped upon unmarried females who were pregnant, there was equal shame (though perhaps easier to conceal or deny) for women unable to conceive.
In Jewish life there has never been an honored place for the celibate. Jewish texts—including the liturgy—elevate study, good deeds, and “chuppah”—the marriage canopy. The particular pressure on LGBTQ Jews has been profound (and is still so today, in some spaces). Sexuality isn’t dismissed or frowned upon in Jewish life, but the formal expectation is that it will take place within a sanctioned marriage. Even in proudly secular or assimilated families, these social norms were maintained, despite the sexualization of girls and young women in twentieth-century Western culture at large. And then there’s the ever-present threat of gender-based danger: harassment, discrimination, outright assault.
The fiction in this section references many of these matters, even if just by suggestion. Whether the characters are living in a contemporary Ashkenazi-American community or in the Sephardic Middle East in another era, the tensions between expectations and reality make for rich narratives.