The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir

Part history, part memoir, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir recounts a narrative of lives lived in dramatically changing times. In the background loom author Deborah Heller's distant forebears: a maternal great-great-grandmother, the first Jewish woman in her nineteenth-century German village to refuse to shave her head and wear a wig (sheitel) after marriage, who earned her passage to America by driving geese to market; and a seventeenth-century Talmudic scholar, successively chief rabbi of Vienna, Prague, and Cracow, who wrote an important commentary on the Mishnah and was arrested and imprisoned by the imperial authorities.

Echoes of the rebellious Goose Girl and the scholarly rabbi reverberate in the lives of Heller's parents, born at the beginning of the twentieth century--her mother in Brooklyn, her father in a Russian shtetl. Emerging from very different worlds, they came together as New York schoolteachers, sharing the radical hopes and fears of a generation marked by strong political passions.

Drawing on written and oral history, legal records, and her own memories, Heller follows her parents from their early years through the McCarthy years and beyond. Focusing both on individuals and on the worlds in which they lived, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers illuminates significant moments in Jewish and American history.

Deborah Heller was born in New York City. She received her BA in English from Cornell University, studied German literature at the Free University of West Berlin just before the wall went up, and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She taught in the English and Humanities Departments at York University, Toronto, Canada for more than thirty years, during which she spent two sabbatical years in Florence, Italy. She has published book chapters and articles on British, North American and comparative literature, including Wordsworth, George Eliot, Mme de Stael, Dickens, Kafka, Ibsen, Anna Banti, Alice Munro, and Grace Paley. She is the author of Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists, Daughters and Mothers in Alice Munro's Later Stories, and is co-editor of Jewish Presences in English Literature. She lives in Toronto, Canada.