From Jewish-American Princess to the Tikkun Olam: the Case of Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar.

Abstract

experience of their co-religionists in the United States from an overtly androcentric perspective. In this light, it comes as no surprise that the coeval representations of Jewish womanhood were largely based on elaborations, albeit high-profile artistic ones, of stereotypical literary figures: the Jewish mother and her daughters, the JAPs, an acronym for Jewish American Princess. The primacy of their introduction into post-World War II Jewish-American literature is to be ascribed to Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar, published in 1955. The protagonist is Marjorie Morgenstern, a beautiful young woman who leads the carefree life of a 17-year-old Jewish-American princess and dreams to make it on Broadway with the stage name of Marjorie Morningstar. Her path from adolescence to adulthood is marked, on the one hand, by her burning passion for a libertine Jewish apostate, and, on the other hand, by the pull of her family’s traditional principles. Thanks to Marjorie’s Bildung, Wouk figuratively balances the siren voice of the American way of life against the ancient Jewish tradition. Eventually, the protagonist, after a brief but life-changing brush with the then-ongoing Holocaust in Europe, chooses a path of orthodoxy, social activism and commitment to the preservation and transmission of the Jewish past in the American Diaspora, one which qualifies as a contribution to Tikkun Olam.