Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048098 ISBN 13: 9780393048094

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Synopsis

The Most Comprehensive Anthology of Jewish American Literature Ever Published: With the work of 145 writers, from 1645 to the present, writing in all genres―fiction, poetry, drama, essays, letters, editorials, journals, autobiography, cartoons, song lyrics, and jokes.

Classic and Contemporary Writers: Here, generously represented, are the writers who have shaped the tradition, among them Emma Lazarus, Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Nathanael West, Clifford Odets, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Cynthia Ozick, and Harold Bloom. Joining them are younger writers such as Melvin Jules Bukiet, Jacqueline Osherow, Art Speigelman, Steve Stern and Allegra Goodman, who bring the tradition up to its thriving present.

Yiddish and Hebrew Writing in AmericaJewish American Literature: Traces in breadth and depth America’s rich Yiddish-language culture, from the work of Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelshtadt in the 1880s through the Yunge and Introspectivist movements to the post-Holocaust writings of Kadya Molodowsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Also represented is Hebrew writing, in translations of the work of Ephraim E. Lisitzky and modernist Gabriel Preil.

Special Sections: "Jewish Humor" offers choice selections of Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, and a cluster of perennial Jewish jokes; "The Golden Age of the Broadway Song" samples the unforgettable lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Sondheim, among others; "Jews Translating Jews" reflects on the translator’s role in transmitting tradition, gathering poems translated from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish by Jewish American poets from Emma Lazarus to David Unger.

Helpful and Lively Reader’s Apparatus: The Reader’s Apparatus includes a general introduction, period introductions, author headnotes, explanatory annotations, and selected bibliographies.

About this title

Review:

Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology is a comprehensive collection of Jewish American writings, from colonial times to the present. The book is organized chronologically, with thematic sections on Jewish humor, the Broadway song, and the art of translation. Editors Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein provide enlightening introductions for each section, helping readers to discern the lines of development through the various contributions, whose genres range from autobiography to sermons to songs and jokes, by writers as diverse as Irving Berlin, Emma Lazarus, Allegra Goodman, and Woody Allen. Among the many fascinating strains to follow in this collection is the changing yet abiding role of Scripture as a source of inspiration for American Jewish writers. "It may be that in the past, Jewish civilizations survived by cleaving to the righteousness and difference inscribed in sacred texts," notes the book's general introduction. "Some would hold that this spiritual tenacity is still necessary and sufficient. Possibly so. But with it come wit and self-deprecation, moral dilemma, verbal ingenuity, aspiration, tragedy, and joy, families aplenty, nostalgia, satire--a full slice of human life at its most vocal." --Michael Joseph Gross

About the Author:

Jules Chametzky (Professor of English Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is an editor and founder of The Massachusetts Review and author of From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan and Our Decentralized Literature. Co-editor of Black and White in American Culture and, most recently, edited The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan.

John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. He teaches at Stanford University.

Hilene Flanzbaum (Associate Professor of English / Head of the Creative Writing Program, Butler University) is author of The Americanization of the Holocaust and numerous poems, articles, and essays.

Kathryn Hellerstein (Senior Fellow in Yiddish & Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania) is translator and editor of In New York: A Selection of Poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky. Her translations of Yiddish poets appear in American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology and her poems in Tikkun and Poetry, among other publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0393048098
• ISBN 13: 9780393048094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1100
• Editor: Chametzky Jules, Felstiner John, Flanzbaum Hilene, Hellerstein Kathryn