Generation without memory: A Jewish journey in Christian America

by Anne Roiphe

Anne Roiphe, author of Up the Sandbox, was raised in a Jewish family that Celebrated Christmas. Like many of her generation, she was a thoroughly asimilatcd Jew. Yet even as she was growing up, she was aware that something special was being lost, and wondered about her Jewish identity. Generation Without Memory is her deeply pcrsnnal and forthright exploration of the lack of a spiritual dimension in an increasingly secular world.

Genres: Judaism

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Over a four-decade career, Roiphe has proven so prolific that the critic Sally Eckhoff observed, "tracing Anne Roiphe's career often feels like following somebody through a revolving door: the requirements of keeping the pace can be trying." (Eckhoff described the writer as "a free-thinking welter of contradictions, a never-say-die feminist who's absolutely nuts about children"). Roiphe published her first novel, Digging Out, in 1967. Her second, Up The Sandbox (1970), became a national best-seller and made the author's career.

Roiphe has since published seven novels and two memoirs, while contributing essays and reviews to The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and others. In 1993, The New York Times described her as "a writer who has never toed a party line, feminist or otherwise." Her 1996 memoir Fruitful A memoir of Modem Motherhood was nominated for the National Book Award

From 1997 to 2002, she served as a columnist for The New York Observer. Her memoir Epilogue was published in 2008, and another memoir, Art and Madness, in 2011.

Reviews

[Ron Hoffman · Rating 2 out of 5]

An intelligent, articulate read that's refreshing or a slow death depending on your point of view. Ms. Roiphe has an agenda and she assumes affirmation. Skittish at times, you struggle to hold on to swirling directions, I felt personally obligated to trudge on sentenced to endure a family member assimilate.

Roiphe connotes 'doctor' in Yiddish however this author never took the Hippocratic Oath. One reads nearly unrelenting attacks against traditional Judaism, its values its adherents, and God (dare I say?) Himself. The Holocaust is utilized most often as the excuse to be enraged and rebel against what she perceives as God the enemy or not there at all. She cannot bring herself to hypocritically pray or do rituals to a God she can't decide if she's enraged with or isn't there at all. She and modern society know better.

At times she wistfully observes traditional Jews, manipulatively befriended for research, wishing somehow she could magically have the serenity and faith they, unlike she have retained.

Ms. Roiphe is woke 40 years before cancel culture. She shows disdain for her Jewish history, fearful of giving her daughter any of the dreaded disease which is her native culture. Her daughter will choose her own path with no parental direction. When a traditional family they visited sends a traditional Jewish book to her daughter, Ms. Roiphe laments the breach in maintaining no contact to tradition. Her culturally starving daughter takes the morsel and marches to her library for more. Her daughter will choose. But the outside world, in this case traditional Judaism is difficult completely to repel.

As a Jew I felt obligated to drudge through her complaints and disdain to understand the mindset of American, affluent, unaffiliated Jews whom wisfully wish they had received some tradition which might have saved them. 'Christian pun intended. Sadly they can't leave the fold fast enough, the author extolling the virtues of the non-Jewish wife, as the fastest ticket out of the 'ghetto'. The prognosis for Ms. Roiphe's followers if that's what they are and daughter, victims of imposed ignorance is not positive, as future Pew Reports would testify to.

The most disturbing part for me is that the author learned numerous teachings and traditions in researching this book, but she pompously rejects them out of hand. She believes none of Maimonides' 13 Principals of Faith which every Jew must believe. Her frame of reference is understandably skewed as secular, swimming with the stream of modernity, rejecting any hint of chosenness. Gender roles and male-dominted leadership are prejudiced. Talmudic wisdom as staid and outdated while Portnoy's Complaint and other rebellious, modern writers are glorified.

Ms. Roiphe pompously proclaims we have the answers in 1980 universalism and she thankfully leaves us pining for some new Reform Judaism which is somehow non-exclusive. She wishes connect to a social system while embracing the Christian world, happily celebrating Christmas dinner without Christ. She admits her beloved psychotherapy gets her nowhere. I'm sad to watch Jews wilfully, slowly melting into the pot of Christian America.

[Mia Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for class. I found Roiphe's storytelling and personal opinions to be both entertaining and complex.

[Jean Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the title was a little off. It seems much more like Roiphe in search of her Jewish memory. Her efforts in interviewing young Orthodox children and others spoke to her sincere efforts to gain some understanding and to wonder who she would have been with more Jewish education or background.