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.

Profiles important new Jewish immigrant writers in America

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.

Reviews

This engrossing volume brings evocative personal accounts of displacement-physical, emotional, and particularly linguistic-by contemporary writers like Norman Manea, Lara Vapnyar, and Geoffrey Hartman.Spring 2009

* Jewish Book World *

What binds the writers in this book together, despite their varied approaches to exile and emigration, is that they all moved from one place and ideological system - the Soviet Union and Communist eastern Europe - to another, the United States, where they each have found quite successful personal and professional homes as writer, thinkers and tenured professors. This is no small feat for a fiction writer. . . Perhaps this is one of the volume's unwitting arguments: late twentieth/early twenty-first-century America is now or has once again become the cosmopolitan reservoir of so much Jewish literary creativity.Vol. 39.2 August 2009

-- David Shneer * University of Colorado *

[T]his is an immensely valuable collection of truly stimulating essays. Vol. 28, no. 1, 2009

* SHOFAR *

[T]his is a worthwhile read. . . . Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, general readers.March 2009

* Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253219817
Author Alvin H. Rosenfeld
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press