How a lifelong fascination with Jewish culture led this author to become a science fiction pioneer
Joanna Russ Photo by Tee A. Corinne
By Benjamin Ivry November 26, 2023
Joanna Russ, whose science fiction innovations are honored by a new collection in the Library of America series, saw literature as a quest to rescue her Ashkenazi Jewish mother.
As she explained in To Write Like a Woman, Russ was born in the Bronx to schoolteacher parents. Emotions were at a high pitch at home, although her highly cultured parents encouraged her literary leanings. Even in later life, Russ, who died in 2011, still recalled bitterly how when she stored fungus from a high school science project in the refrigerator at home, her mother reacted with unbridled hysteria.
What Russ saw as the “outsider” status in America of families of Ashkenazi origins may have inspired her profound overturning of traditional gender associations. Russ’ 1975 novel The Female Man makes the celebrated cross-dressing in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” seem like a mere Purimshpil by comparison.
Russ pondered over her perception that familial oppression of women in Ashkenazi Jewish households meant that men were privileged to associate with “poetry, philosophy, science, and fiction, all the things I loved the most,” whereas women were responsible for tasks requiring brawn and physical endurance.
Yet curiously, this does not mean that Russ fully empathized with either of the repressed elders at home. In posthumously published letters to a friend, Russ deemed her mother “nutty as a fruitcake,” a “vampire,” and a “crazy” woman who tried to “possess” her “utterly.” Russ also blamed her father retrospectively for not taking sides in Jewish mother-daughter squabbles at home.
Fortunately, these attitudes did not prevent Russ from gaining a lasting fascination with Yiddishkeit, which she expressed by repeatedly adding Jewish references to her writing. At the end of her 1978 novel, The Two of Them, a character has a dream about a valley of dry bones, a clear allusion to The Book of Ezekiel in the Tanakh. The prophetic Vision of Dry Bones linked with Ezekiel symbolizes the people of Israel, to be revitalized and resurrected by bringing them to the Land of Israel.
And in We Who Are About To…, a 1977 novel included in the LOA volume, the narrator refers to a maternal ancestor who arrived in America at Ellis Island as a “sheitel-maker.” She adds that that she had inherited the looks from “little, dark, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish frontier at night with rubies, emeralds, and uncut diamonds sewn into the hems of their cloaks.”
This romanticized depiction of the Jewish past is further evoked in that novel, which is an odd parable akin to a fantasy of Edgar Allan Poe, rewritten to underline the theme of Jewish survival. The narrator alludes to a supposed “old Jewish story” of a rabbi and a nobleman “both tied to chairs” and left alone in a cellar one night. In the morning, the rabbi was inexplicably “serene and fresh,” but the Count was dead, after an attack of apoplexy.
The title of 1980’s On Strike Against God by Russ refers to the 1909 strike by over 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants who labored in New York’s shirtwaist industry. Again Russ presents a narrator with a distinct self-image, describing her own “melancholy Jewish face, big-featured, lean, and hungry. A prophet’s face.” The self-awareness is so distinct that the reader may wonder if Russ wrote her works in a room containing a mirror.
Here, one finds yet another imaginary example of Hebrew lore, vaguely citing an unnamed novel with a “Jewish character, a big fat man who fled Germany in the late 30’s and who says ‘Why travel? Wait, and they’ll chase you around the world.’”
This expression of rueful resignation to persecution is typical of Russ’s sometimes bitter narrative tone, especially in trenchant accounts of the routine oppression of women in society, such as How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983). It also captures the tragic sense of futility that refugees like Walter Benjamin experienced, eventually wondering if there was any point in fleeing inevitable torments.
Russ transferred these tragic emotions to her daily life, as one fellow writer, Alice Bradley Sheldon, later recalled. Sheldon noted that how Russ could be an “absolute delight” one minute, but then would rush out and “bite” Sheldon’s “ankles” with the next sentence.
As with this quasi-canine behavior and paradoxical memories of her parents, Russ alternated plaudits and brickbats for mother and father figures among American Jewish science fiction predecessors and other writing rivals.
In 1979, she praised a memoir by Isaac Asimov for containing “much fascinating material” about the lives of “East European Jewish immigrants in the New York of the ’20s and ’30s.” Russ was particularly intrigued by Asimov’s detailed evocation of a ferocious work ethic, capturing the tireless diligence of Jewish emigrants, for whom “dental work was an impossible luxury” as part of the “asceticism of outright poverty.”
Yet Russ also criticized Asimov’s book for devolving into a “fairly dry list of professional facts” as well as personal details that “ought to be more interesting than they are.” She was even more critical of the machismo and violence in works by Harlan Ellison, a fellow Jewish writer born in Cleveland. Of the film adaptation of Ellison’s novella A Boy and His Dog, Russ said that “sending a woman to see A Boy and his Dog is like sending a Jew to a movie that glorifies Dachau.”
Part of the problem may have been what she saw as Jewish parochialism or myopia about the rights of other downtrodden groups among Jews who might have been more sensitive to the maltreatment of others. In an introduction to a 1989 book of journalism by Clara Fraser, a West Coast Jewish labor organizer, Russ mentioned a friend of her father’s whose sole interest was “What’s in it for the Jews?”
“The only thing he cared about,” she wrote, “was what might directly, narrowly, benefit the Jews.”
According to Russ, this limited viewpoint led to, among other disasters, strife in the Middle East. The combination of critical praise and blame extended to other writers, like Judith Merril (born Grossman), who collaborated with Cyril Kornbluth, another Jewish science fiction pioneer, as well as the feminist Dorothy Dinnerstein.
Russ had originally enthused about Dinnerstein’s 1979 The Mermaid and the Minotaur, inspired by her studies with the social psychologist Solomon Asch. Dinnerstein posited that as long as raising children would be exclusively assigned to women, sexism and aggression in society would continue.
Russ later second-guessed her initial hosannahs about Dinnerstein’s conclusions, inspired by the work of the Freud disciple Melanie Klein, as pertaining only to the “white professional middle class of [Dinnerstein’s] generation and mine.”
Yet ultimately Russ’ redemptive quest, the idealistic if unlikely determination to redeem the lives and culture of her Ashkenazi Jewish family, illumine the compelling Library of America volume.
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