Many Americans believe that they have a true ethnic identity, but others have seen identity as a preference, a choice. Elsewhere I’ve discussed this phenomenon in broader terms, but here I want to talk about one woman, her family, and the choices she made.

In in his memoir, Secret Family, Thomas Stern tells his readers of his reaction upon learning, in 1925, of his mother Elizabeth Stern's forthcoming book, I Am a Woman—And a Jew , which has since become one of the classics of immigrant autobiography.

This confrontation throws into relief two very different ideas of ethnic identity—whether it is essential, as Thomas Stern believes, or can be created, as Elizabeth Stern remade herself into a Jewish immigrant. For if we are to believe Thomas Stern's account, his mother was neither Jewish, nor an immigrant: the way generations of readers have remembered her has very little to do with who she really was. Moreover, the picture her readers may have developed about her life, and by extension about Jewish immigrant life in general, is based upon fiction.

Ethnic impostor autobiography offers us a range of voices which challenge our ideas about ethnicity, about the autobiographical "I," and about the very notion of self. Through studying these impostors we are forced to confront difficult questions: how much of ethnicity is a construction? Is there such a thing as an authentic ethnic or racial identity? And what is it about our culture that makes us accept these impostors so readily? Ethnic impostors force us to rethink our easy assumptions about identity; they expand the notion of the melting pot and make us question even our own identities, the basis for our sense of self. Over the past one hundred and fifty years, while rewriting themselves into new ethnicities, the authors of ethnic impostor autobiographies have escaped the trap of unwanted identities. Paradoxically, by successfully playing into current cultural stereotypes of their newly chosen ethnicities, they have mired their readers further in the structures of ethnic thinking. Authenticity is not the issue here—whether Elizabeth Stern was "authentic" is less important than her success in creating a usable past for herself and her audience.

Elisabeth Stern’s best-selling 1926 autobiography, I Am a Woman—And a Jew has all the hallmarks of a "real" autobiography of the period. Steve Rubin, the editor of the 1991 Jewish Publication Society anthology, Writing Our Lives: Autobiographies of American Jews, 1890-1990 prefaces the excerpt from I Am a Woman—And a Jew by detailing Stern’s biography: her 1890 birth in Skedel, Poland, her early immigration to the United States, and her dual careeers as social worker and writer, and her two autobiographies, the first of which, My Mother and I (1917), appeared, like Zangwill’s Melting-Pot, with a preface by Theodore Roosevelt. Although Stern was an early feminist and assimilated American, Rubin continues, "she was also able to acknowledge proudly her own Jewish identity and her unbroken ties to her people."

Indeed, the autobiographical work of Stern’s which remains best-known, I Am a Woman—And a Jew, published under the pseudonym Leah Morton, explores these very 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. What makes Stern’s work so appealing to contemporary audiences, and insures its inclusion on the syllabi for college courses on Women and Judaism, is her limning of feminist issues. As Magdalena J. Zaborowka points out in a recent essay on Stern, in comparision to Mary Antin, Stern describes a greater rebelliousness against the strictures under which women in Orthodox families operated. In comparision to Anzia Yezierska, with whom she also shares many characteristics, Stern stresses the benefits of collective action and of active involvement in the political issues of the day, rather than individual achievement. In I Am a Woman—And a Jew, Zaborowka writes, the "idea of the melting pot might seem attractive as a theory, but, as Stern shows us, it meant virtual death to the immigrant’s ethnicity in the process of his or her Americanization."

And yet, writes her son in his 1988 memoir, Secret Family, Stern was not who she claimed to be. In his first chapter, "Imaginary Jews," he begins to lay out the patterns of deception that he says characterized his mother’s life. Rather than being, as she claimed, the Orthodox East Prussia-born daughter of rabbi Aaron Levin and his wife Sarah, she was the Pittsburgh-born illegitimate child of a Welsh Baptist mother, Lillian Morgan, and a German Lutheran father, Chris Limburg. Placed with the Levins as a foster child when she was seven, she remained with them until she was seventeen, when she returned to the home of her natural mother. She eventually married another illegitimate child who, like she, was raised within a Jewish foster family; both pretended to be Jewish. As an adult, according to her son, she and her husband moved nearly effortlessly from one ethnic identity to the next—when she enrolled in social work school, for example, "She said she was Elizabeth Levin, the daughter of a Jewish rabbi. But Elizabeth was far from constant in her tale. Frequently she boasted that she was the daughter of a prosperous German merchant, Chris Limburg. And often she boasted that she was a Morgan, the offspring of ‘important people’ in Pittsburgh, who were Welsh or English. Sometimes Elizabeth admitted that the Morgans were coal miners, even though that lowered her status." Thomas Stern, her son, records a childhood of "ethnic confusion": his parents employed by a Jewish immigrants’ resettlement organization before its director learned that they were "false Jews" and fired them, years spent moving from the Lutheran world of his natural grandfather, a prosperous merchant, to the home of his Welsh grandmother, to the Orthodox Jewish world of his foster grandparents.

In Elizabeth’s case, her decision to "pass" as Jewish had more complicated motives than simply wishing to hide her illegitimate origins. During the years she lived with the Levins, Aaron sexually abused her. She became pregnant by him when she was fourteen, and after forcing her to have an abortion, he let her alone. When Elizabeth was grown, although Aaron wanted to forget she existed, she had a hold on him "because of the awful things he did to me, when I was a girl."(3) Given this version of events, it is possible to read the opening of Stern’s book very differently than does Zaborowska. Citing the powerful opening paragraphs of the memoir, as Stern recounts gazing down at the face of her dead father, Zaborowska notes that "As a symbol of her Jewishness and Old World roots, the narrator’s father in I Am a Woman—And a Jew also represents her ethnic language, and his death can thus be seen as its metaphorical obliteration."(101) However, it is possible, knowing more of Stern’s actual background, that the sentences with which she describes this experience take on a very different coloration: "I remember looking down at the face of my father, beautiful and still in death, and for a brief, terrible moment feeling my heart rise up—surely it was in a strange, suffocating relief?—as the realization came to me: ‘Now I am free!’" To gaze down upon the face of the man who sexually abused her, now dead and powerless, could have left Stern feeling free indeed.

Autobiographical accounts in direct contradiction to one another can only serve to highlight the fragile nature of memory, and the incredible strength of the human desire to create a livable past. It is possible that the writing of each "autobiography" served as a cathartic experience. Thomas, describing his childhood, writes that "we shifted identity even more violently than before. We were our true selves; and our false selves. We were superior and inferior to everyone. Our oscillations dizzied me." His writing of the autobiography is not only a way to make sense of a complex past, but a way of banishing the memories that haunted him: "I had dark Freudian dreams about black snakes. They were partly inspired by the stories that Elizabeth told about her rapes by Zadie Levin, and partly by Aunt Lillian’s tales of her whippings with a black leather belt by Chris Limburg [his maternal grandmother and grandfather]. I had those nightmares repeatedly for fifty years, until I began to write this book."(147)

Ellen Umansky, who wrote the introduction to the 1986 reprint edition of I Am a Woman—And a Jew, did extensive genealogical research after Thomas Stern contacted her with his allegations about Elizabeth’s background. Although many records were destroyed by Elizabeth Stern, making certainty about the true circumstances of her birth impossible, Umansky reports that "Scattered pieces of information…do seem to substantiate Thomas Stern’s assertions." And, as she writes, "if her eldest son’s story of his family origins—a story that apparently took him thirteen years of research to unravel—is even half true, it sheds new light on Elizabeth Stern’s representations of Jewish women."

Just as the immigrant’s account of assimilation into the hostile culture of sucess resonated with members of a native-born reading public mourning their own losses as they became successful, so Stern’s account of sexual abuse found perfect metaphor in the pre-existing genre of the female immigrant autobiography. Indeed, reading I Am a Woman—And a Jew through the filter of sexual abuse makes haunting the parallels between this and Bread-Givers. Anzia Yezierska ends her narrative with the image of her father’s presence still casting a shadow over her; for her part, Elizabeth Stern writes that "I had thought that, by marrying a Christian, I, who was in my heart no longer a Jew, would be free. I was to find not only that on that day of my father’s death, but twice again, how mistaken I had been."(2) The domineering father whose beliefs and behavior "would destroy everything in his life, the very happiness of his children"(1)

Of course, a female reader need not have experienced incest in order to sympathize with a daughter attempting to duck out under the yoke of a tyrannical father. The feminist struggles of native-born women in the twenties were presented in amplified form in the autobiographies of immigrant women. When Sara Smolinsky, in Bread-Givers, writes of the division of goods within her house, it is one with which many native-born women could identify : "since men were the only people who counted with God, Father had not only the best room for himself, for his study and prayers, but also the best eating of the house." When she describes sitting down at the dinner table with her sisters, it seems a perfect metaphor for women struggling to achieve a more equitable division of wages and legal rights. "With watering mouths and glistening eyes we watched Mother skimming off every bit of fat from the top soup into Father’s big plate, leaving for us only the thin, watery part."(10)

Like Yezierska, Stern makes clear what is to be lost through assimilation—for the father as well as for the daughter. Although she recounts a story of being permanently banished from her father’s presence for marrying a Christian, she is alive to the pain suffered by her father:

Although Stern recounts one instance after another of the anti-Semitism she suffers, she is clear about her desire to avoid iconicity: when a classmate speaks to her of "the spiritual sweetnes of your people," she is irritated. "I did not wish her to see me carrying a pale golden torch for my people. I wanted to be myself, apart from every one, from every people."(61) She is eager to become as assimilated as possible, as soon as possible: "I was no Biblical Rebecca sorrowfully pleading for her race. I was an American, now."(64) Yet later, after her father’s death, she regrets her assimilation: I had gone out because of my ignorance, because of this land where the Jew was robbed of his most precious possession, his racial integrity, by the soft words of those who pretended to be his friends."(225) Like Meyer Hirsch of Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, she insists that Jews are responsible for their social ostracism: "The truth is, it is the Jew who excludes himself. The pride of his race and in his faith builds a wall between himself and all manind."(226)

While she insists upon her particularity, Stern is not shy to impute racial characteristics to others. She writes of her maid that "it was only because of that innate kindliness of negroes that she did her work really well."(86) Of her polite future husband, she writes that "courtesy was part of his inheritance, for his father had been a Frenchman, his mother an Englishwoman of good family."(48) She feels finally trapped, as a writer, by her ethnic background, and by her father’s voice: "Whatever the Jew has given to the written art of America has been Jewish, a heritage and gift of the Jew who came to the new land, America. My father thought he had no part in this new land; he had cut himself off from me. But every word I wrote carried his feeling, his Jewish humor and, it might be, if one were sometimes blessed and happy,—a little even of his Jewish poetry."(124) By the end of the book, she feels she knows "what every Jew is and does, is something that must, indeed, belong to his people; that no other people living have our peculiar quality, which is not individual, but racial, and which gives to each of us who accomplishes with genius, the ability to express himself only through the accumulated genius of his race, so that every Jewish writer, statesman, actor, is not only himself, but the mirror of his people, the voice of his people."(359) She finally realizes that she cannot escape her racial destiny: "we Jews are alike. We have the same intensities, the sensitiveness, poetry, bitterness, sorrow, the same humor, the same memories. The memories are not those we can bring forth from our minds: they are centuries old and are written in our features, in the cells of our brains." The individuality which she grants members of every ethnic group, she denies for herself. "One is one’s self. But not when one is a Jew."(360)

Stern may have written her fictional ethnic autobiography as a means of escape into a chosen identity, but the work itself offers a vision of ethnicity as a strait-jacket. The ethnic autobiography offered native-born Americans a site in which to experience the sorrows that could not be given voice in the culture of business success, but for Stern, if her son is to be believed, her "Jewish" identity bound her forever to the man who had sexually abused her. Although she opens her work with the image of herself standing above his prone corpse, a triumphant survivor, it ends with an affirmation that her embrace of his identity cannot leave her free to be herself.

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