Description
Book SynopsisExamines the emergence of a new generation of Jewish immigrant authors in America, most of whom grew up in formerly communist countries. This collection chronicles and clarifies issues of personal and cultural dislocation and loss, but also affirms the possibilities of reorientation and renewal.
Trade ReviewThis engrossing volume brings evocative personal accounts of displacement—physical, emotional, and particularly linguistic—by contemporary writers like Norman Manea, Lara Vapnyar, and Geoffrey Hartman.Spring 2009
* Jewish Book World *
What binds the writers in this book together, despite their varied approaches to exile and emigration, is that they all moved from one place and ideological system - the Soviet Union and Communist eastern Europe - to another, the United States, where they each have found quite successful personal and professional homes as writer, thinkers and tenured professors. This is no small feat for a fiction writer. . . Perhaps this is one of the volume's unwitting arguments: late twentieth/early twenty-first-century America is now or has once again become the cosmopolitan reservoir of so much Jewish literary creativity.Vol. 39.2 August 2009
-- David Shneer * University of Colorado *
[T]his is an immensely valuable collection of truly stimulating essays. Vol. 28, no. 1, 2009
* SHOFAR *
[T]his is a worthwhile read. . . . Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers.March 2009
* Choice *
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction / Alvin H. Rosenfeld
Nomadic Language / Norman Manea
On Norman Manea's The Hooligan's Return / Matei Calinescu
Writing about Uprootedness / Henryk Grynberg
Exile as Life after Death in the Writings of Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea / Katarzyna Jerzak
The Writer as Tour Guide / Lara Vapnyar
Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer / Morris Dickstein
A Displaced Scholar's Tale: The Jewish Factor / Geoffrey Hartman
Exile: Inside and Out / Bronislava Volková
From Country to Country: My Search for Home / Zsuzsanna Ozsvath
Finding a Virtual Home for Yiddish Poetry in Southern Indiana / Dov-Ber Kerler
Afterword / Eva Hoffman
List of Contributors
Index
