THE ISSUE OF ANTISEMITISM IN KATE CHOPIN'S THE AWAKENING

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Notes

Kate Chopin, The Awakening. A Boolean search of the internet for <Reisz and German and Jewish> yields almost 5,000 links. The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry lists 138 Jewish burials to date under the surname Reisz, for the State of Louisiana, which is where The Awakening takes place. A famous member of that clan was Karel Reisz, the Czech-British director of the French Lieutenant's Woman and other major films.

Kohn, “The Jewess in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.”

Chopin, The Awakening, 43.

Chopin, The Awakening, 98–9.

Biggs, “Si tu savais,” 166. Because Jewish girls in that era often had typically Jewish forenames, I take the omission of Reisz's as something of a signifier on the author's part. Chopin presumably knew that contemporary readers would be unlikely to recognize Reisz as a Jewish surname and did not want to give further hints that it could be.

Chopin, The Awakening, 80, 98, 138, 147.

Culley, Kate Chopin, The Awakening, vii.

Chopin, The Awakening, 81–2.

Chopin, The Awakening, 131.

Lipset and Raab, The Politics of Unreason, 93.

Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo, 92–3.

Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo, 94.

Toth, Kate Chopin, 323. We now understand why, according to the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, there have been four Jewish burials in Louisiana under the surname BREAZEALE. For information on Louisiana State University's archives of this distinguished family, go to www.lib.lsu.edu/special/findaid/2442.pdf

Chopin, The Awakening, 43.

Ehrlich, Zion in the Valley, 220, 299n, 406n.

Toth, Kate Chopin, 246.

Toth, Kate Chopin, 247.

Tritt, “Kate Chopin's ‘Cavanelle’,” 549.

Tritt, “Kate Chopin's ‘Cavanelle’,” 549, 551.

Tritt, “Kate Chopin's ‘Cavanelle’,” 554.

Tritt, “Kate Chopin's ‘Cavanelle’,” 543.

Chopin, The Awakening, 98.

Chopin, The Awakening, 71–2.

Chopin, The Awakening, 17.

Chopin, The Awakening, 72.

Chopin, The Awakening, 186, 81.

“Impressions have long persisted”, wrote Ehrlich (Zion in the Valley, 295 n.26), “that Temple Israel came into existence as much for social reasons as for religious; that is, the ‘so that we can be with our own kind’ syndrome. One can no doubt interpret some statements made by Temple Israel's founders that way, especially since many represented the affluent ‘elite’ of St. Louis German Jewish society.”

Minutes of Regular Meetings, 1895–1898, National Council of Jewish Women (see Figure 1A in the Appendix), Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Thomas Jefferson Library, University of Missouri St Louis, Collection 443, Box 4, Volume 8, pp. 26, 27.

According to Sandra J. Berkowitz (“Rosa Fassel Sonneschein,” 182), this fear was borne out, for she claimed that “the waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia … aroused intense antisemitism in the United States.” I am sceptical of that claim. The potato rot in Ireland in the 1840s brought nearly two million poverty-stricken Irish immigrants to the United States in a single decade without generating the level of hatred associated with antisemitism. (By comparison, “About two million Jews came to the United States during [the peak] forty-year period,” according to Ehrlich [Zion in the Valley, 303].) Despite their being fully integrated into the national society, the Jews remaining in Nazi Germany were slaughtered. The causes of antisemitism have much less to do with the behaviour of Jews than with their accusers' self-serving opportunism.

Toth, Kate Chopin, 10.

McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 18.