Description
Book SynopsisThis book considers some of the most famous Yiddish writers in America, the controversies their works aroused—in Yiddish and English—during the Holocaust, and the ways in which reading them contributes to a revision of American Jewish cultural development.
Trade Review"Discovering Exile is a vital, compact study of a formative moment in American Jewish culture when writers in both English and Yiddish began to confront the holocaust and its implications. Probing politics of representation, Norich uncovers the crucial role of Yiddish in American Jewish culture and American literary modernism." -- Tony Michels *
AJS *
"In
Discovering Exile, Anita Norich restores a significant part of Jewish American cultural and literary history that had been supplanted by a prevailing myth of what she calls "gradual dissipation," the notion that Yiddish culture was somehow divided and displaced by English and thereby split from its Yiddish roots. Instead, she shows how Yiddish and English speaking worlds of the thirties, forties, and beyond drew on each other for inspiration. In rehistoricizing the living, breathing American Jewish life of these decades, Norich also gives us back an era long lost to historians who made the Holocaust the central and therefore over-determining event of the twentieth century. The result is a first-rate literary history of a largely overlooked world." -- James E. Young * University of Massachusetts, Amherst *
"In her fascinating study of this traditional view/assumption, Norich examines the premises of historical and cultural pressures that determined Jewish fate from the optimistic 18th-centruy Enlightenment to its violent end in the concentration-camp universe Including helpful notes and an extensive bibliography, this thought-provoking study will reward a broad audience with fresh insights and better understanding." --
CHOICETable of ContentsCONTENTS Acknowledgments xxx Introduction 1 1. Cultural Questions, Jewish Answers 000 2. "Good Night, World:" Yankev Glatshteyn's Ambivalent Rejection 000 3. Sholem Asch and the Christian Question 000 4. From the Politics of Culture to the Culture of Mourning 000 Epilogue 000 Appendix 1. Selected News Review in Contemporary Jewish Record 000 Appendix 2. Translation of Rachel Auerbach's "Amol iz geven a meylekh" [Once There Was a King] 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index
