Just Like Grandma Did: Reading and Writing as Religious Memory Work in Jewish Girls’ Fiction

I analyze a recurrent scenario in middle-grade and young adult literature targeted to Jewish girls, in which female protagonists become skilled historians and writers in training; as young Jews coming-of-age, they cultivate a specific, religiously significant praxis of researching and writing about earlier generations. Frequently in these texts, the bat mitzvah girl or pre-collegiate teenager discovers information about her ancestors’ lives by reading recovered documents (often letters or diaries), thereby marking her journey into Jewish adulthood with reconnections to deceased, beloved ancestors. I argue that a specific type of writing and reading in this literary trope is itself a cultural performance, reenacted frequently by Jewish women writers, read by Jewish girls, and used to model and transmit Jewish values and practice.

In my analysis, I bring together Robert Orsi’s reflections on family myths and Diana Taylor’s theorizing on the performed transmission of cultural knowledge. The former, in Between Heaven and Earth, describes ways in which individuals tell their own stories through a matrix of sacred and family stories that, via repeated retelling, influence lived experience. Applied to Jewish literature, I observe how grandparents’ stories shape Jewish kids’ imaginations so extensively that the young protagonists narrate their own stories in relation to those sanctified or memorialized figures; in other words, the grandparents’ stories provide a scaffold that can shape children’s own self-narratives.

While Orsi offers a framework for considering the layering of sacred stories onto daily life, Diana Taylor provides tools to recognize how the repetition of plot devices fits into broader cultural performance. In The Archive and The Repertoire, she explains how seemingly ephemeral cultural performances anchor communal memory; repeated acts and scenarios create a continual “againness” that transmits histories and values across generations. Taylor defines the scenario as a meaning-making paradigm that reactivates past situations. Though she focuses on performance rather than text, I consider how a reactivated literary trope, performed by girls in the novels, and often by the authors autofictionally recounting their own girlhood experiences, becomes a recurrent and ritualized practice performed publicly. In other words, not only do tween and teen protagonists perform a startling amount of research in uncovering family history, but they engage in a kind of performance, as lived religion, in which the careful reading, writing, and family research is itself religious praxis that circulates communal values and history. By acting as historians-in-training and burgeoning writers, the characters become more self-aware of their situatedness in Jewish community, and their efforts tangibly bolster both family cohesion and a broad sense of Jewish continuity.

I specifically consider two relevant works (with nods to others in the genre). In Hannah Reynolds’A Summer of Lost Letters, 17-year-old Abby Schoenberg pieces together her grandmother’s story through library research, university archives, Jewish organizations, census data, historical site visits, exchanges with a nearby university professor, oral history databases, and personal interviews with the town rabbi and local elders. Her research uncovers a forgotten family history that is enriching both symbolically and materially, as it leads to recovered jewels. Further, Abby has her own summer romance while reading of her grandmother’s; indeed, their respective courtships, generations apart but on the same island and with boys from the same family, demonstrate a sense of “once againness” through which Abby connects meaningfully to her deceased grandmother and conceptualizes her lived experience through the narrative scaffolded by her grandmother’s letters.

Featuring many similar elements, Elissa Brent Weissman’s The Length of A String tells of twelve-year-old Imani’s bat mitzvah research project, for which she reads letters from her grandmother’s diary. Through her reading and research, Imani comes to think about her adoption story in relation to, or as layered upon, her grandmother’s story. Indeed, Imani’s transition into Jewish adulthood (culminating in her bat mitzvah) is enacted through this research project in which she researches genealogy and family history, feels a personal connection to deceased family members, and finally, narrates her own story—and her own adoption experiences—through sacred family narratives across time and space. The novel concludes by reuniting Imani’s family with long-lost relatives overseas.

These novels reproduce a particular scenario and cultural performance in which a Jewish youth researches moments from an ancestor’s life and weaves “their story” into “mine” as part of Jewish coming-of-age praxis. The protagonists’ storytelling mirrors Orsi’s family mythmaking, in which families circulate hagiographic tales of saints and ancestors into their own lived experience; older stories are intertwined by—or in Taylor’s framing, reactivated by—future generations. This “Jewish girls’ genealogy project” is also more legible through Taylor’s concept of the scenario, which draws attention to how live participants engage in ritualized setups, reenacted over time in ways both predictable and variable. The repetition of this ritual practice illuminates an underrecognized assumption that Jewish girls are keepers and transmitters of family stories. Specifically, the protagonists perform a praxis of relational reading and writing that preserves and imparts cultural knowledge across generations. In other words, they learn not only the content of particular Jewish pasts, but also an embodied mode of safeguarding and conveying that knowledge forward.