The Unraveling of the Self: Genre Hybridity in Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley and Vivian Gornick

While literary history has cast 1960-90 as the era of Jewish-American fiction dominated by male voices, many Jewish women writers undertook a different, unacknowledged project during this same period. Lore Segal, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Vivian Gornick made bold moves, engaging in genre hybridity to forge inventive forms that represented fractured identity in ways realist and conventional autobiographical modes had not. They centered female protagonists and drew on autobiographical writing in their fiction, while destabilizing the traditional temporal storytelling that typically structures these genres. Through their work, the specific intersection of post-Holocaust Jewish identity with gender generated pointed tensions around assimilation, religion, and belonging in their literature. Rather than disavowing Jewish identity or fully embracing feminist ideals, they crafted protagonists with nuanced relationships to both categories who interrogate contradictions through sustained questioning. This study demonstrates how these writers engaged in formal experimentation to navigate the complexities and trauma related to being both Jewish and female, advancing feminist literary theory and Jewish American literary studies. Writers like Segal, Ozick, Paley, and Gornick developed characters who expanded the narrowness of the label “Jewish,” asking the era’s most urgent questions about Jewish identity not through escape but through reimaging it from within.