Laura Browder

Elisabeth Stern's 1926 I am a Woman-And a Jew joined the host of memoirs and autobiographical novels of the period, including Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925), Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923), which presented the experience of Eastern European immigrants to a largely native-born, gentile audience. More than entertainments, these texts were voices in a culture-wide debate on the role of the immigrant in American life-a battle fought by the one third of Americans who were immigrants or the children of immigrants, by members of Congress, and by the millions of members of the newly reformed Ku Klux Klan. Harvard College's 1922 institution of quotas to curb Jewish enrollments and the extremely restrictive immigration bill passed by Congress in 1924 added more urgency to the voice of the immigrant autobiographer. Given the stakes in this fight, what does it mean that Am a Woman-And a Jew is, in fact, fake? I Am a Woman-And a Jew explores issues common to many Jewish immigrant autobiographies and autobiographical novels of the period: conflicts between old and new worlds, between Orthodox Judaism and assimilation, between spiritual and worldly success. However, Elisabeth Stern was not, as she claimed, an Eastern European immigrant, the daughter of a rabbi, but was instead the Pittsburgh-born illegitimate child of a German Lutheran father and a Welsh Baptist mother. Stern's work, which was one of several successful ethnic impostor autobiographies of the period, forces us to rethink the significance of the immigrant voice and to question our notions of the melting pot.