Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the 1980s

by Janet Handler Burstein

Overview

Janet Burstein argues that American Jewish writers since the 1980s have created a significant literature by wrestling with the troubled legacy of trauma, loss, and exile. Their ranks include Cynthia Ozick, Todd Gitlin, Art Spiegelman, Pearl Abraham, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Jonathan Rosen, and Gerda Lerner. Whether confronting the massive losses of the Holocaust, the sense of “home” in exile, or the continuing power of Jewish memory, these Jewish writers search for understanding within “the little secrets” of their dark, complicated, and richly furnished past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299212407
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/17/2006
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Janet Handler Burstein is professor of English at Drew University and chair of the Modern Literature section of the Association for Jewish Studies. She is the author of Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women

Editorial Reviews

Burstein’s work will leave many readers amazed at the quantity and quality of the American Jewish contribution to contemporary literature.”—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled

“Lucid, sophisticated, intelligent.  Burstein shows how contemporary Jewish American writing grapples in new and complicated ways with issues of trauma and identity.”—Sara Horowitz, Centre for Jewish Studies, York University, Toronto

From the Publisher

Burstein (English, Drew Univ.; Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters) discusses American Jewish literature since the 1980s from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective. She uses novels, short stories, memoirs, and critical essays to describe the cultural works of mourning and liberation by the second generation of American Jewish post-Holocaust writers. Taking Philip Roth's work as a starting point and touchstone, she examines the nature of the writer's relationships to history, memory, the body, and personal autonomy. She also explicates the nature of the home in memoirs and fiction and addresses gender concepts of the male and female bodies, convincingly explaining the need for a feminist critique of male and female roles and stereotypes. A discussion of Jewish critical essays ("Midrash as Undertow") is especially valuable for its insights into Jewish methods of interpretation and understanding. Among the many authors Burstein makes important comments about are Norma Rosen, Thane Rosenbaum, Rebecca Goldstein, Lev Raphael, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Pearl Abraham, and Cynthia Ozick. She makes plain the secrets of contemporary American Jewish writings: secrets of mourning, hatred, angst, and acceptance. Recommended for Jewish studies collections.-Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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