📚 KPA 2024 Presentation: Thoughts

In March, I presented a paper called "Golem Girl or Golem Goy: Molding Jewish Identity in Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl" at the Kentucky Philological Association. Here is the abstract for that paper:

     Riva Lehrer, in an interview with Jewish Women’s Archive, remarks that she felt Jewish later in her childhood, thinking she was going “to make Aliyah;” but, when she got “into Bezalel and [her] parents forbade [her] to go” she has since felt as though “religion doesn't really have a use for her.” Later in the interview, though, she adds that “our culture has fed me tremendously and I am intensely fond of and connected to it. And I do think I’m a Jewish writer” (Lehrer). This complicated push and pull informs much of Lehrer’s reflections in Golem Girl, if not always overtly. The way this appears early on is in her exploration of the golem, an image which represents who she is, who she believes she must move past, and who she must become; she relates to the golem because of her spina bifida, a disability that she spends the entire memoir wrestling with. In this essay, I will explore the ways her disability is both competing, and complementary with, her Jewish identity, as she grows into young adulthood working through this complicated intersectionality. One such example of her identities subsuming the others, in some way competing, comes early in the work, when Lehrer and her classmates find themselves under siege—a substitute teacher stands before a classroom of children with various disabilities and screams at them that they are abominations and that their sins have led them to becoming all “crippled up” (65). Her mother, instead of calling attention to the substitute’s ableism, attributes the malice to something else, her lack of Jewish identity, and can only say one word: “Goyim” (65). Lehrer’s Jewishness and her disability struggle to become the allies she believes they are upon reflection, and it does not end with the golem, but starts with it.

The panel was so fascinating; one of the other presenters talked a bit about an adaptation of Gurney Norman's Wilgus stories, something I had not heard of before. Since I am currently thinking a lot about adaptation, it was an eye-opening presentation for that reason alongside simply broadening my knowledge of Appalachian writers.