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Beyond Normativity? Post-Soviet Jewish North American Literature Meets Queer Theory

Mon, December 18, 1:15 to 2:45pm, Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, Dupont Circle Room

Abstract

This paper addresses queer presences in post-Soviet Jewish North American literature to illuminate how they influence gendered scenarios in these texts and, consequently, writerly visions of Jewishness. Using Nadia Kalman’s THE COSMOPOLITANS and David Bezmozgis’s short story “Minyan” from NATASHA AND OTHER STORIES, I demonstrate how these writers intervene into well-domesticated specific “narratives of generationality” characteristic for post-Holocaust Jewish American fiction. Namely, Kalman and Bezmozgis reconfigure intersecting notions of family, genealogy, and (procreative) heterosexuality characteristic for these narratives. However, queer presences serve other narrative functions within this literary trend, which shows that they cannot be a direct measure of cultural inclusivity. In Anya Ulinich’s LENA FINKLE’S MAGIC BARREL queer presences rather mark non-Jewish Americanness; in Lara Vapnyar’s “Lydia’s Grove” from THERE ARE JEWS IN MY HOUSE a lesbian relationship/literary cooperation seems to refer us to imperial Russia and the subversion of the current Soviet political/sexual regime.

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