Permutations of Ethnicity in Jewish American Literature: The New Russian Cohort

• In Event: Lightning session in Literature {Jewish Yiddish, Hebrew) and Jewish Politics

Abstract

This paper will approach the phenomenon of recent Anglophone fiction by Soviet-born Jewish American authors within the classic frameworks of ethnicity and assimilation in Jewish American Literature, and will focus on alienation as an expression of ethnicity. I will address permutations of ethnicity and transitions of Jewishness between the early twentieth century Russian Jewish immigrant writers, the mid-twentieth century second and third generation writers, and the current crop of Russian Jewish American immigrant writers. Relying on contemporary sociological and literary scholarship, I will juxtapose Isaac Rosenfeld's PASSAGE FROM HOME and Anzia Yezierska's SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS to Anya Ulinich's PETROPOLIS, Lara Vapnyar's MEMOIRS OF A MUSE, and Boris Fishman's A REPLACEMENT LIFE. My contention is that in this literature the interplay of ethnicity’s essential and symbolic manifestations conveys alienation in its social and aesthetic expressions, with negative identity as a key component in the formation of the post-Soviet Jewish American self.

Author

• Baruch Beckerman, Bar-Ilan University