SPECIAL: You Need To Know These Jewish Women Writers

Dear Reader,

I hear it all the time: The giants of 20th-century Jewish American literature were Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth.

Those authors had outsize influence on Jewish American culture, true. But for my tastes, that statement is too restrictive. It makes it seem like truly great Jewish writers are all Ashkenazi men. And Bellow, Malamud and Roth, who consciously engaged with one another’s work, established a literary tradition that barely begins to cover the wealth of what Jewish American literature has to offer. Tillie Olsen; Fran Ross; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala — what about them?

So for Women's History Month, we decided to run a series of profiles of under-recognized Jewish women writers through history. The list I came up with is far from complete. I've stuck primarily with authors of fiction and nonfiction; drama and poetry will have to wait for another time. But I decided to look past the United States. After all, the obscuring of women’s accomplishments isn’t exactly a local phenomenon.

There's Nadezhda Mandelstam, the author of two searing memoirs of Soviet-era Russia, whose work has often been overshadowed by the poetry written by her husband Osip. Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, two 19th-century British Jewish writers whose work experienced wildly different receptions in their native community. Natalia Ginzburg, who brought radical new life to the often-derided subgenre of domestic fiction. Rahel Varnhagen, a 18th and 19th-century star of the German intellectual world whose volumes of letters made literary history.

I've loved writing about these extraordinary women, and I hope you'll love reading about them — and then, even better, reading their work.

Warmly,

Talya Zax

Deputy Culture Editor

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