Full Description
The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman.
Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne, or Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it completely. Yet the novel anticipates central themes of American Jewish writing: intermarriage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will.
The narrative recounts a relationship between an abusive Jewish father and the rebellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter's efforts at finding a place in the complex social fabric of nineteenth-century America. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman's descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving orphaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time.
Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with Cora Wilburn's recently rediscovered diary, selections from which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry's least known and yet most prolific female authors.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editor's Introduction
A Note on the Text
Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny
Introduction
1. A Wandering Childhood
2. The Rhine Voyage
3. Foreboding
4. The Watcher by the Tomb
5. The Jewish Betrothal
6. Awakening
7. The Dawn of the New Life
8. The Dream's Reply
9. Bereavement
10. The Web of Destiny
11. The Second Sorrow
12. Light on the Pathway
13. The Teachings of the Fathers
14. Temptation and Trial
15. The Virgin's Shrine
16. The Step into the World
17. Spirit Teachings
18. Changes
19. Retribution
20. Manasseh's Letter
21. Above the Clouds of Earth
22. The Realities of Life
23. Toil and Suffering
24. The Mission of the Beautiful
25. The Hour before Day
26. Unrecognized
27. Realization
28. The River of Death, and the Waters of Life
29. Fraternal and Heavenly Union
Notes to Cosella Wayne
Selections from the Diary of Cora Wilburn (1844-1848)
