ABOUT THIS BOOK

Janet Burstein argues that American Jewish writers since the 1980s have created a significant literature by wrestling with the troubled legacy of trauma, loss, and exile. Their ranks include Cynthia Ozick, Todd Gitlin, Art Spiegelman, Pearl Abraham, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Jonathan Rosen, and Gerda Lerner. Whether confronting the massive losses of the Holocaust, the sense of “home” in exile, or the continuing power of Jewish memory, these Jewish writers search for understanding within “the little secrets” of their dark, complicated, and richly furnished past.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Janet Handler Burstein is professor of English at Drew University and chair of the Modern Literature section of the Association for Jewish Studies. She is the author of Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women

REVIEWS

“Burstein’s work will leave many readers amazed at the quantity and quality of the American Jewish contribution to contemporary literature.”—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled

“Lucid, sophisticated, intelligent. Burstein shows how contemporary Jewish American writing grapples in new and complicated ways with issues of trauma and identity.”—Sara Horowitz, Centre for Jewish Studies, York University, Toronto

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface                                        xi
Introduction: The New Wave                      3
1   Riddling Identity: The Gates of Roth           14
2   Writing the Pathos of Belatedness:
Second-Generation Memoirs                   25
3   Voice and Mourning in the Aftermath:
Second Generation Fictions                  48
4   Recalling "Home" from Exile:
Revisiting the Past                         76
5   Portnoy's Successors: Gendered Ethnicity
and the Embodying of Jewish Men             116
6   Becoming Rubies: Engendering Jewish Women     141
7   Midrash as Undertow: Looking Back
and Moving On                               174
Epilogue: Moving from the Mirror
to the Window                              206
Notes                                         209
Index                                         249

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