The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyles.

Edith Blicksilver's multicultural anthology first appeared in 1978. Despite the proliferation of such readers since that time, this one, devoted entirely to women, is still useful. The expanded edition, with some 100 pages more than the original volume, adds two new sections and twenty works.

The editor defines ethnicity as "a heterogeneous population, as distinguished by customs, characteristics, language, common history, and so forth." Over twenty such ethnic groups are included. By far the two groups with the widest representation are Jewish American and African American women (there are more than twenty works by or about each of these groups). Blicksilver, who teaches at Georgia Institute of Technology, has chosen a sizable number of works set in the South.

Many well-known authors are included, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, ntozake shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Nicholasa Mohr, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Mary McCarth, and May Swenson. However, the works of several lesser-known authors are among the most striking in the book, including Ferris Takahashi's poem about self-hatred "Nisei, Nisei," Mary Elizabeth Vroman's story of a teacher and her students "See How They Run," Marina Rivera's poem about a child's relationship with her abusive uncle "Chon," and Barbara Woods' story set during slavery "The Final Supper."

The book is divided into fourteen sections covering such topics as the family, education, work, religion, ethnic pride, and the immigrant experience. Poems, fiction, essays, memoirs, letters, and several excerpts from larger works are included. Many of the pieces were previously unpublished.

The lack of notes (e.g., for terms such as chalunt, koularakia, and halakhah, and for historical references to people such as Patrice Lumumba or Gabriel Prosser) limits the book somewhat as a classroom tool. In addition, further updating is necessary. Author biographies have not always been revised; e.g., the Walker biography stops before The Color Purple, and the one for shange lists nothing after for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. The suggested readings include no works after the 1970s, and there are some odd choices (fifteen titles by Martha Ostenso, but none by Zora Neale Hurston).

None of these limitations, however, negates the importance of this anthology, which discusses the issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in a candid, illuminating manner. Many of the writers claim a dual heritage in a particular ethnic group and the larger "American" community, a tendency exemplified by Diana Chang's poem "Saying Yes." When asked first if she is Chinese and then if she is American, the speaker in the poem replies, "...I would rather say / yes / Not neithernor, / not maybe, / but both, and not only / The homes I've had, / the ways I am / I'd rather say it / twice, / yes." Nevertheless, as the book's subtitle implies, the "problems and protests" of being an ethnic American woman have not been overlooked. The tensions between different groups is evident in Evelyn Avery's "Bittersweet Encounter: Blacks and Jews in the Fiction of Ethnic Women." But the book's overall theme is that only through a better understanding and appreciation of each other's cultures can such tensions possibly be relieved.