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ASU ENG 101 - Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity

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Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish IdentitySplit at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity-Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich is one of America's leading poets, an essayist, and a committed feminist. Her poetry has wonnumerous awards, including the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck. In the following selection, from Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-85, Rich performs a kind of self-analysis by looking at the sources of her own divided identities in her experiences growing up and seeing the world from "too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, exmatriate southerner, split at the roof"Suggestion for ReadingAs you read, notice how Adrienne Rich analyzes her identity as "split at the root," composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting selves. Annotate those passages where Arch identifies these various selves and their relations to each other.For about fifteen minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to be so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary. It comes to me that in order to write this I have to be willing to do two things: I have to claim my father, for I have my Jewishness from him and not from my gentile mother; and I have to break his silence, his taboos; in order to claim him I have in a senseto expose him.And there is, of course, the third thing: I have to face the sources and the flickering presence of my own ambivalence as a Jew; the daily, mundane anti-Semitisms of my entire life.These are stories I have never tried to tell before. Why now? Why, I asked myself sometime last year, does this question of Jewish identity float so impalpably, so ungraspably around me, a cloud I can't quite see the outlines of, which feels to me to be without definition?And yet I've been on the track of this longer than I think.In a long poem written in 1960, when I was thirty-one years old, I described. myself as "Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,/Yankee nor Rebel."1 I was still tryingto have it both ways: to be neither/nor, trying to live (with my Jewish husband and three children more Jewish in ancestry than I) in the predominantly gentile Yankee academic world of Cambridge, Massachusetts.But this begins, for me, in Baltimore, where I was born in my father's workplace, a hospital in the Black ghetto, whose lobby contained an immense white marble statue of Christ.My father was then a young teacher and researcher in the department of pathologyat the Johns Hopkins Medical School, one of the very few Jews to attend or teach at that institution. He was from Birmingham, Alabama; his father, Samuel, was Ashkenazic, an 1 Adrienne Rich, "Readings of History," in Snapshots of' a Daughter-in-Law (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), pp. 35-40.immigrant from Austria-Hungary, and his mother, Hattie Rice, a Sephardic Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi. My grandfather had had a shoe store in Birmingham, which did well enough to allow him to retire comfortably and to leave my grandmother income on his death. The only souvenirs of my grandfather, Samuel Rich, were his ivory flute, which lay on our living-room mantel and was not to be played with; his thin gold pocket watch, which my father wore; and his Hebrew prayer book, which I discovered among my father's books in the course-of reading my way through his library. In this prayer bookthere was a newspaper clipping about my grandparents' wedding, which took place in a synagogue.My father, Arnold, was sent in adolescence to a military school in the North Carolina mountains, a place for training white southern Christian gentlemen. I suspect that there were few, if any, other Jewish boys at Colonel Bingham's, or at "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, where he studied as an undergraduate. With whatever conscious forethought, Samuel and Hattie sent their son into the dominant southern WASP culture to become an "exception," to enter the professional class. Never, in describing these experiences, did he speak of having suffered-from loneliness, cultural alienation, or outsiderhood. Never did I hear him use the word anti-Semitism.It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate theNegro and avoid the Jew / is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was-an untold side to my father's story of his student years. He looked recognizably Jewish, was short and slender in build with dark wiry hair and deep-set eyes, high forehead and curved nose.My mother is a gentile. In Jewish law I cannot count myself a Jew. If it is true that"we think back through our mothers if we are women" (Virginia Woolf)--and I myself have affirmed this--then even according to lesbian theory, I cannot (or need not?) count myself a Jew.The white southern Protestant woman, the gentile, has always been there for me to peel back into. That's a whole piece of history in itself, for my gentile grandmother andmy mother were also frustrated artists and intellectuals, a lost writer and a lost composer between them. Readers and annotators of books, note takers, my mother a good pianist still, in her eighties. But there was also the obsession with ancestry, with "background," the southern talk of family, not as people you would necessarily know and depend on, butas heritage, the guarantee of "good breeding." There was the inveterate romantic heterosexual fantasy, the mother telling the daughter how to attract men (my mother oftenused the word "fascinate"); the assumption that relations between the sexes could only be romantic, that it was in the woman's interest to cultivate "mystery,” conceal her actual feelings. Survival tactics of a kind, I think today; knowing what I know about the white woman's sexual role in the southern racist scenario. Heterosexuality as protection, but also drawing white women deeper into collusion with white men.It would be easy to push away and deny the gentile in me-that white southern woman, that social christian. At different times in my life I have wanted to push away oneor the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some of my southern gentile whitewoman's culpability? If I call myself only through my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where


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ASU ENG 101 - Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity

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