Synopses & Reviews
Here, generously represented, are the writers who have shaped the tradition, among them Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, and Harold Bloom. Joining them are younger writers such as Melvin Jules Bukiet, Jacqueline Osherow, Art Speigelman, Steve Stern and Allegra Goodman, who bring the tradition up to its thriving present. Traces in breadth and depth America's rich Yiddish-language culture, from the work of Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelshtadt in the 1880s through the Yunge and Introspectivist movements to the post-Holocaust writings of Kadya Molodowsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Also represented is Hebrew writing, in translations of the work of Ephraim E. Lisitzky and modernist Gabriel Preil. "Jewish Humor" offers choice selections of Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, and a cluster of perennial Jewish jokes; "The Golden Age of the Broadway Song" samples the unforgettable lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Sondheim, among others; "Jews Translating Jews" reflects on the translator's role in transmitting tradition, gathering poems translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish by Jewish American poets from Emma Lazarus to David Unger. The Reader's Apparatus includes a general introduction, period introductions, author headnotes, explanatory annotations, and selected bibliographies.
Synopsis
: With the work of 145 writers, from 1645 to the present, writing in all genres--fiction, poetry, drama, essays, letters, editorials, journals, autobiography, cartoons, song lyrics, and jokes.
Synopsis
From the early settlers to Broadway lyricists to today's great writers'"a redefinition of a vital American literary tradition.
Synopsis
This rich anthology reconsiders Jewish American literature from its seventeenth-century origins to its flourishing present. It gathers the work of 145 writers in all genres'"fiction, poetry, drama, essays, journals, autobiography, song lyrics, and cartoons. Here readers will find the petitions and memoirs of the first Sephardic settlers, the Yiddish and English voices of the great era of immigration, modernist writers exploring their Americanness, and activist writers working for change. Here too is the generation of writers and poets who define postwar American literature'"Arthur Miller, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth'"and a younger generation'"Art Spiegelman, Jacqueline Osherow, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Allegra Goodman'"whose work makes clear that Jewish American literature continues to thrive.
This collection shows as never before how literature has played a vital role in shaping and passing down the legacies of "the people of the book."
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 1171-1206) and index.
About the Author
Jules Chametzky(Professor of English Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is an editor and founder of The Massachusetts Reviewand author of From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan and Our Decentralized Literature. Co-editor of Black and White in American Cultureand, most recently, edited The Rise of David Levinskyby Abraham Cahan.
John Felstineris the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. He teaches at Stanford University.Hilene Flanzbaum(Associate Professor of English / Head of the Creative Writing Program, Butler University) is author of The Americanization of the Holocaustand numerous poems, articles, and essays.
Kathryn Hellerstein(Senior Fellow in Yiddish & Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania) is translator and editor of In New York: A Selection of Poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpernand Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Her translations of Yiddish poets appear in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthologyand her poems in Tikkun and Poetry, among other publications.