Jewish American Literature of the Late 20th - Early 21st Century: In Search of Identity (in Russian) (original) (raw)

New Voices: Contemporary Jewish American Literature. Open Library of the Humanities (2018).

Open Library of the Humanities, 2018

The retirement of Philip Roth in 2012 signifies a definite break with the past, the silencing of one of the last living links with the Jewish generation that dominated post-war American literary culture. This does not, however, mean the end of Jewish-American literature. Recent years have shown the remarkable tenacity of Jewish-American writing: its enduring ability to initiate critical debates. Now is the perfect moment to start talking about younger Jewish writers as they emerge from the shadow of the “kibitzing giants” of their literary adolescence. In exploring themes as varied as queer sexualities, Israeli relations and the experiences of specific religious communities, today’s writers force critics to constantly adapt their conception of the nature of Jewish writing in, and of, America. For this collection, articles were invited that offered either thematic or author-focused essays that share a fascination with the ceaseless dynamism of the field, that offer original perspectives on contemporary writers and works that have yet to receive significant critical attention.

Scenes of Encounter: The “Soviet Jew” in Fiction by Russian Jewish Writers in America

Prooftexts, 2015

This essay analyzes early twenty-first-century English-language literature by Soviet-born Jewish writers as a response to the Jewish literary and cultural politics of the Cold War period. First, by reexamining the postcolonial concept of hybridity, it argues that the "Soviet Jew" is not a neutral description of a Jewish person from the USSR. Rather, it is a discursive product that emerged during the Soviet Jewry Movement, a figure who requires reeducation, specifically of a religious nature, as part of advocacy by Jews in the West on behalf of Jews in the USSR. Second, it analyzes texts by Elie Wiesel, Bernard Malamud, and Chaim Potok that have become part of the North American Jewish literary canon with a focus on these works' scenes of encounter between Jews in the USSR and Jewish writers visiting from abroad. These depictions specifically emphasize the visiting writers' projections of their concerns about their own Jewish identities and about Jewish continuity more broadly onto the figure of the "Soviet Jew." Finally, it demonstrates that Boris Fishman, Anya Ulinich, and David Bezmozgis offer a contemporary restaging of such scenes of encounter, now between émigré Jews from the USSR and their Jewish hosts in North America. In these recent works, the "Soviet Jew" is a figure that can be manipulated-frequently in satirical ways-as immigrant literary protagonists navigate the process of fitting in (or, not fitting in) within North American Jewish communal landscapes created, in part, with the help of the figure of the "Soviet Jew" itself. O n a first date in a Manhattan bar, Arianna Bock-the American-born Jewish woman who is a character in Boris Fishman's 2014 debut novel A Replacement Life-relays a story to the book's main protagonist, Slava Gelman, a Jewish young man who was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the Scenes of Encounter y 99 Winter 2015 United States as a child. When Arianna was little, her American-born parents procured, at a high cost, a synagogue membership for a newly arrived Jewish family of three from the USSR. At the time, Arianna's father shared his doubts about this gift with his wife: "'I don't think this is for them, Sandy.' Meaning, they're not religious." 1 Still, he failed to dissuade Arianna's mother, who retorted: "'How will they ever become religious unless people like us-' and so on and so forth" 2-implying that it was upon the well-established, synagogue-committed Jews in America to inculcate a similar communal and religious identification among the newly arrived Jews from the USSR. Those Jews, based on what the Bocks knew, came from an atheist Soviet background and had not been allowed to practice Judaism, at least not in any form recognizable to the Bocks as American Jews. Having paid for the immigrant family's synagogue admission, Arianna's parents subsequently discovered that the Soviet Jews they had sponsored sold the membership to another American family-and never showed up in the synagogue themselves. This exchange in Fishman's novel, which is one of a growing number of twenty-first century works by Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers in English, 3 points toward something peculiar in the formation of mutual relations between Soviet-born and American Jews: American Jews wish the best for the Soviet Jews and hope to see them become more like themselves. Émigré Jews from the USSR, in turn, respond by exploiting the Americans' good-but, as it turns out, naïvewishes. In this case, Arianna's mother wants to call the police to report what she considers the Russian Jewish family's theft of synagogue membership, but her husband encourages her to let it go: "Just let them be. Think about what they've been through. Give it thirty years and then they'll ask for it." 4 "What they've been through" here is code for what American Jews like Arianna's father know-or, think they know-about Soviet Jews. Despite the synagogue membership incident, in which Soviet Jews exploit American Jews' (lack of) knowledge about them, the American Jews persist in imagining that Soviet Jews will nonetheless resemble them in due time. Within the emerging body of scholarly work on Anglophone literature by émigré Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union, one term from postcolonial theory-hybridity-appears with particular frequency. Yelena Furman, arguing against reviewers who have read this body of work solely in its American Jewish 100 y Sasha Senderovich PROOFTEXTS 35: 1 literary context, calls attention to their failure to sufficiently acknowledge the authors' Russianness. Instead, she argues, the literary output by this cohort of writers "is hybrid: both Russian and American, neither wholly Russian nor wholly American, it is precisely Russian-American." 5 Noting that she borrows her critical terms from the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, Furman suggests that "these writers inhabit a 'third space' in which those terms form a hybridized Russian-American immigrant identity." 6 Furman contends that this fiction's "hybridity" occurs at the point of encounter between the "Russian" and the "American" and makes the writers in question "Russian-American." Adrian Wanner expands on the discussion of Russian-American "hybridity" by discussing Soviet Jewish émigré writers in other countries who are "Russian-Israeli" and "Russian-German" and whose "hybrid" identities are created of two equal parts, one native and one adopted. 7 These formulations, however, overlook a key feature of hybridity as defined in the theoretical literature: hybridity emerges out of an unequal power relationship between colonizer and colonized. It is worthwhile, therefore, to return to Bhabha's now-classic theoretical paradigm and to reconsider, with greater precision, the Soviet Jewish émigré texts in question. Such a reconsideration aims not to propose

A Companion to Jewish American Literature: 1945 - Present

Literary history is the narrative frame for understanding the context of a literary work; however, there is no natural way to construct a literary history. After all, literary classifications are empirical and subject to change over time; with their narrative frame shaping interpretation with the text. James Joyce, for example, is appreciated differently from

The Destruction of Israel and Other Fantasies in Jewish American Literature

This article is an attempt to reformulate the critique of Israel in recent years in literary terms; namely, how postcolonial perspectives regarding Zionism are utilized toward the emergence of a new sensibility in twenty-first-century Jewish American Literature. More specifically, the article focuses on the growing preoccupation of twenty-first-century Jewish American novelists with Israel and its destruction. By discussing Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am (2016), I argue that Israel and Israelis provide an opportunity for Jewish writers to regain a marginalized stature in the American literary field, to reclaim an "expertise in alienation" that Jewish authors have lost since the immediate years following World War II. The destruction of Israel (or the Jewish Hurban) is depicted in both novels as a utopian dystopia, a national Jewish entity blown away to small diasporic pieces. The growing preoccupation of writers with Israel is identified here not only as a testament of the gradual separation of many Jews in America from what they perceive to be an oppressive, colonizing state, but in supplementary aesthetic terms as well-the national center against which Jewish American writers imagine their own otherness.

Teaching 20th century Jewish American Literature: Community, family, and displacement

UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2013

This thesis will articulate my philosophy of teaching a higher level undergraduate literature course while serving as a curriculum guide for other educators interested in teaching a course on 20th century Jewish American Literature. The curriculum I created for this thesis provides students with a comprehensive understanding of three major themes in Jewish American literature: family, community, and displacement. By exploring various texts where the characters and themes are specifically Jewish, students can then understand and discuss how various authors attempt to define the complexities of Jewish American identity in their works beyond the experience of the Holocaust biography protagonist. Before students understand Jewish identity in literary works, it is essential for students to explore the meaning of Jewish identity as a whole. Identity is a complex topic by itself, and it is even more complicated in terms of Jewish racial awareness. Exploring texts that truly make a difference in finding the meanings behind Jewish identity in terms of community, family, and displacement is an integral part of understanding the 20th century Jewish American culture through literature.