Description
Book SynopsisMaps the affective landscape of Jewish American culture. This book offers a genealogy of the emotions - shame and self-hatred, nostalgic longing and the impulse to forget - that organized 20th-century Jewish American expressive culture.
Trade ReviewMore than five million East European Jews migrated to the US between 1880 and 1920, and a challenge confronted the first generation of Jewish novelists: how to transmute their experiences of poverty and shame into the materials of art. Weber (Mount Holyoke College) offers a fascinating study of the popular culture that resulted from the Jewish encounter with the US. The author looks first at Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, whose fiction captures the acute loss of dignity suffered by immigrants adapting to the new world. He provides clear illustrations of how they popularized their own circumstances and in some cases (Eddy Cantor, Al Jolson, George Jessel, Fannie Brice) became famous movie stars. Weber discusses Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, which by the mid 1930s had become the first undeniable classic of the immigrant era, and The Goldbergs, which became an enormously popular radio (later television) soap opera, conveying sentimental family-centered values that helped sustain listeners during the Depression. Weber ends with the novels and short fiction of Saul Bellow, providing a subtle, wise discussion that says important things about the way Jews have chosen to participate in American culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.January 2006
-- M. Butovsky * emeritus, Concordia University *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Adjusting to America
1. Outsider in the Old World, Greenhorn in the New: Christopher Newman and David Levinsky
2. Gastronomic Nostalgia: Anzia Yezierska
3. The Claims of Descent: Immigrant Cinema
4. Haunted in the New World: Henry Roth
5. To Make "a Jew": Projecting Antisemitism in Post-War America
6. Memory and Repression: Goldberg Variations
7. The "Jewish Opera": Saul Bellow and Other Jewish Sons
Epilogue: Nostalgia and 1950s Popular Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
