Description
Book SynopsisHow have Jews reshaped their identities as Jews in the face of the radical newness called America? This book explores the ways in which exposure to American literary culture - in particular the visionary tradition identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman - led American Jewish writers to a new understanding of themselves as Jews.
Trade Review. . . Exiles on Main Street is an original contribution to the continuing story of the creative encounter between Jewish writers and America.Summer 2009
* Jewish Book World *
Levinson's well-researched book makes a significant contribution to studies of Jewish American Literature and Jewish Cultural continuity.2007
-- S.L. Kremer * Choice Reviews Online *
. . . a standout work in the field of American Jewish Literature . . . Levinson is well-attuned to the critical trends and thinking that are prevalent in the world of literary scholarship and applies them to the book's selected authors and texts in a way that is fresh and thoughtful. . . December 12, 2008
-- Shana Rosenblatt Mauer * Jerusalem Post *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Breathing Free in the New World: Transcendentalism and the Jewish Soul
1. Songs of a Semite: Emma Lazarus and the Muse of History
2. Ecstasies of the Credulous: Mary Antin and the Spirit of the Shtetl
Part 2. Battling the Nativists: Mystics, Prophets, and Rebels in Interwar America
3. "Pilgrim to a Forgotten Shrine": Ludwig Lewisohn and the Recovery of the Inner Jew
4. Modernist Flasks, Jewish Wine: Waldo Frank and the Immanence of God
5. Cinderella's Dybbuk: Anzia Yezierska as the Voice of Generations
Part 3. Yiddish Interlude
6. From Heine to Whitman: The Yiddish Poets Come to America
Part 4. "Orating in New Yorkese": The Languages of Jewishness in Postwar America
7. "My Private Orthodoxy": Alfred Kazin's Romantic Judaism
8. The Jewish Writer Flies at Twilight: Irving Howe and the Recovery of Yiddishkayt
Conclusion
Notes
Index
