San Antonio College Library

Rubin (Utrecht Univ.; coeditor, Religion in America: European and American Perspectives) has collected essays from 29 Jewish American writers, of which about half were written especially for this volume. Arranged chronologically by the authors' date of birth, beginning with Saul Bellow and ending with Yael Goldstein, the essays represent three generations of writers. Some of the themes explored include religion, the immigrant experience, the destruction...

For more than two hundred years, Jews have played important roles in the development of American literature. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature addresses a wide array of themes and approaches to the distinct yet multifaceted body of Jewish American literature. Essays examine writing from the 1700s to major contemporary writers such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Topics covered include literary history, immigration and acculturation,...

Bibliography: p. 244-246.

"The certainty that deep down we are all schlemiels is perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public. In this unique, revised history of the schlemiel, Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the schlemiel from his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century...

"Janet Handler Burstein argues that American Jewish writers since the 1980s have created a significant literature by wrestling with the troubled legacy of trauma and exile. Some of these writers - children of survivors - look through the lens of the Holocaust to understand how to live with the residue of trauma. Others consider how massive losses can shape a sense of "home," how the European past shapes Jewish ideas of gender, and how ancient Jewish...

Providing a literary criticism of Holocaust literature, the author recognizes the inherent inability to answer many questions concerning the Holocaust. he recognizes that despite basic shortcomings in such works ... The literary world cannot neglect such writing, but must realize that amidst these shortcomings the only adequate response possible to a tragedy of such magnitude evolves. Study is divided thematically, as well as according to nationality...