The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Editor)
The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature
The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Editor)

eBook

$12.99  $16.95 Save 23% Current price is $12.99, Original price is $16.95. You Save 23%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

The Writer Uprooted is the first book to examine the emergence of a new generation of Jewish immigrant authors in America, most of whom grew up in formerly communist countries. In essays that are both personal and scholarly, the contributors to this collection chronicle and clarify issues of personal and cultural dislocation and loss, but also affirm the possibilities of reorientation and renewal. Writers, poets, translators, and critics such as Matei Calinescu, Morris Dickstein, Henryk Grynberg, Geoffrey Hartman, Eva Hoffman, Katarzyna Jerzak, Dov-Ber Kerler, Norman Manea, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, Lara Vapnyar, and Bronislava Volkova describe how they have coped creatively with the trials of displacement and the challenges and opportunities of resettlement in a new land and, for some, authorship in a new language.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253000361
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 06/18/2008
Series: Jewish Literature and Culture
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 522 KB

About the Author

Alvin H. Rosenfeld is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and founder and former director of the Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program. He is author of Imagining Hitler (IUP, 1985) and A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (IUP, 1980). He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Table of Contents


Introduction   Alvin H. Rosenfeld     ix
Nomadic Language   Norman Manea     1
On Norman Manea's The Hooligan's Return   Matei Calinescu     27
Writing about Uprootedness   Henryk Grynberg     51
Exile as Life after Death in the Writings of Henryk Grynberg and Norman Manea   Katarzyna Jerzak     75
The Writer as Tour Guide   Lara Vapnyar     92
Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer   Morris Dickstein     110
A Displaced Scholar's Tale: The Jewish Factor   Geoffrey Hartman     133
Exile: Inside and Out   Bronislava Volkova     161
From Country to Country: My Search for Home   Zsuzsanna Ozsvath     177
Finding a Virtual Home for Yiddish Poetry in Southern Indiana   Dov-Ber Kerler     216
Afterword   Eva Hoffman     234
List of Contributors     247
Index     251

What People are Saying About This

"This volume collects essays by eastern European Jewish writers all now living and working in the US: Norman Manea and Matei Calinescu from Romania, Henryk Grynberg and Katarzyna Jerzak from Poland, Lara Vapnyar and Dov-Ber Kerler from Russia, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath from Hungary, and Bronislava Volkova from Czechoslovakia. Rosenfeld (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) also includes a memoir by German-born literary critic Geoffrey Hartman about his long search for his Jewish origins, and an essay on immigrant writers by critic Morris Dickstein. A brief introduction by Rosenfeld and an afterword by Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), complete the volume. The important issues of exile, from place and from language, are discussed from various viewpoints, though always more autobiographically than analytically. The organization of the book is curious: the opening piece, by Manea, is followed by Calinescu's discussion of Manea's memoir The Hooligan's Return (2003); Grynberg's autobiographical piece is followed by Jerzak's essay on both his and Manea's writing. Neither Hartman's account nor Dickstein's quite fits with the rest of the material—but doubtless this arises because the book comprises the proceedings of a conference. Despite these oddities, this is a worthwhile read. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers. —Choice"

from the afterword by Eva Hoffman

The essays in this richly revealing and valuable collection are reports from a late stage and distinct kind of exile, one marked by stark dramas and quiet ambiguities. As these personal and subtle statements show, each emigrant story, and trajectory, is unique and filled with its particular details of difficulty and success, private sorrow and unexpected satisfactions.

H. I. Needler]]>

This volume collects essays by eastern European Jewish writers all now living and working in the US: Norman Manea and Matei Calinescu from Romania, Henryk Grynberg and Katarzyna Jerzak from Poland, Lara Vapnyar and Dov-Ber Kerler from Russia, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath from Hungary, and Bronislava Volkova from Czechoslovakia. Rosenfeld (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) also includes a memoir by German-born literary critic Geoffrey Hartman about his long search for his Jewish origins, and an essay on immigrant writers by critic Morris Dickstein. A brief introduction by Rosenfeld and an afterword by Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), complete the volume. The important issues of exile, from place and from language, are discussed from various viewpoints, though always more autobiographically than analytically. The organization of the book is curious: the opening piece, by Manea, is followed by Calinescu's discussion of Manea's memoir The Hooligan's Return (2003); Grynberg's autobiographical piece is followed by Jerzak's essay on both his and Manea's writing. Neither Hartman's account nor Dickstein's quite fits with the rest of the material—but doubtless this arises because the book comprises the proceedings of a conference. Despite these oddities, this is a worthwhile read. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers. —Choice

H. I. Needler

This volume collects essays by eastern European Jewish writers all now living and working in the US: Norman Manea and Matei Calinescu from Romania, Henryk Grynberg and Katarzyna Jerzak from Poland, Lara Vapnyar and Dov-Ber Kerler from Russia, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath from Hungary, and Bronislava Volkova from Czechoslovakia. Rosenfeld (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) also includes a memoir by German-born literary critic Geoffrey Hartman about his long search for his Jewish origins, and an essay on immigrant writers by critic Morris Dickstein. A brief introduction by Rosenfeld and an afterword by Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), complete the volume. The important issues of exile, from place and from language, are discussed from various viewpoints, though always more autobiographically than analytically. The organization of the book is curious: the opening piece, by Manea, is followed by Calinescu's discussion of Manea's memoir The Hooligan's Return (2003); Grynberg's autobiographical piece is followed by Jerzak's essay on both his and Manea's writing. Neither Hartman's account nor Dickstein's quite fits with the rest of the material—but doubtless this arises because the book comprises the proceedings of a conference. Despite these oddities, this is a worthwhile read. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers. —Choice

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews