Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 18901930: Struggles for Recognition

(Hardback)

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The compelling argument ofEastern European Jewish American Narratives, 18901930: Struggles for Recognitionis that narratives of Eastern European Jewish Americans are important discourses offering a response to Americas norms of assimilation, rationalized progress, and control in the early twentieth century under the guise of commitment to the specificity of individual experiences. The book sheds light on how these texts suggest an alternative ethical agency which encompasses both mainstream and minority practices, and which capitalizes on the need of keeping alive individual responsibility and vulnerability as the only means to actually create a democratic culture. In that, this book opens up novel areas of inquiry and research for both the academic world and the social and cultural fields, facilitating the rediscovery of long-neglected Eastern European Jewish American writers and the rethinking of the more familiar authors addressed.

Reviews

Jewish American literature may be considered the first ethnic literature to have achieved great influence in the United States, in which hyphenated and multiple identities proliferate. Dana Mihilescus Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 18901930 offers a timely new critical contribution by studying the plural and often shifting character of Jewish identity among immigrants in a new land, deepening our understanding of the Jewish historical background of Jewish-American literature. Mihilescu studies not only narratives of immigrant writers of Orthodox background from the Russian Pale, as has been the tendency in earlier studies, but also provides a comparative study of other less well-known Romanian immigrant writers, coming from a more progressive milieu. She studies how all these authors forged differing and complex hybrid Jewish-American modern identities through the ethical reconfiguration of Old World traditional norms. She also points out the tension in Jewish assimilation along gendered lines, where female writers criticized the gender bias of Judaism, never questioned by the male writers, some of whom, in turn, were caught in unconscious clinging to Eastern European traditions. -- Louise O. Vasvri, Stony Brook University
Thanks to her choice of immigrant Eastern European Jewish American literary works under scrutiny and rigorous critical perspective, Dana Mihilescu reconfigures what both Eastern European and immigrant signify. By focusing on canonical writers from the Pale of Settlement and now lesser known Jewish authors from Romania, Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 18901930 diversifies the codified meanings of Eastern European of the time. Simultaneously, Mihilescu proposes ethical readings of this literature that foreground the contingent position and vulnerability of its immigrant protagonists in their struggle for recognition in the new political setting of the United States. -- Karolina Krasuska, University of Warsaw
How lives can be transformed into stories, and how stories can illumine the values and practices of entire societies, constitute the great theme of Dana Mihilescus absorbing book. Focusing on half a dozen figures of varying fame and influence who moved from east to west, she has contributed with admirable sophistication to trans-Atlantic literary history, and has given us a study notable for its clarity and insight as well. -- Stephen Whitfield, Brandeis University

Author Bio

Dana Mihilescu is associate professor of English/American studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania.