Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

Memory Work studies how Jewish children of Holocaust survivors from the English-speaking diaspora explore the past in literary texts. By identifying areas where memory manifests - Objects, Names, Bodies, Food, Passover, 9/11 it shows how the Second Generation engage with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival.

This volume fills an important gap in research on the refugees from Nazism who settled in Britain, by giving a full and wide-ranging account of the organizations that they established. The contributions cover these organizations chronologically, from those that did not outlast the war to those still active today, and in terms of their function, as cultural or religious institutions, as historical resources for the study of Nazism and the refugees, or as all-purpose representative refugee associations. Any scholar or student working in this field needs to have an understanding of the organizations that were and are so characteristic of the refugee community.

The first multidisciplinary study of its kind, Breaking Crystal examines how members of the generation after the Holocaust in Israel and the United States confront through their own imaginations a traumatic event they have not directly experienced. Among the questions this groundbreaking work raises are: Whose memory is it? What will the collective memory of the Holocaust be in the twenty-first century, after the last survivors have given testimony? How in the aftermath of the Holocaust do we read and write literature and history? How is the memory inscribed in film and art? Is the appropriation of the Holocaust to political agendas a desecration of the six million Jews? What will the children of survivors pass on to the next generation?

Appealing to word lovers of all ages, "F E G" is a playful collection of 24 original poems in which each individual poem is a puzzle using wordplay. Full color.

"Invaluable reading for anyone interested in multiculturalism."—Julius Lester, author of Lovesong "I know of no other work that, through numerous insights and useful distinctions, so alerts us to and comprehensively documents the ongoing constitutive role of Christian and anti-semitic perceptions of Jewish existence and the interactions between them. Whereas much contemporary historiography has become so specialized that historians have surrendered the larger picture, Biale's panoramic perspective reveals the great value and interest of this work."—Steven E. Aschheim, author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

By creating a dialogue between Israeli and American Jewish authors, scholars, and intellectuals, this book examines how these two literatures, which traditionally do not address one another directly, nevertheless share some commonalities and affinities. The disinclination of Israeli and American Jewish fictional narratives to gravitate toward one another tells us much about the processes of Jewish self-definition as expressed in literary texts over the last fifty years. Through essays by prominent Israeli Americanists, American Hebraists, Israeli critics of Hebrew writing, and American specialists in the field of Jewish writing, the book shows how modern Jewish culture rewrites the Jewish tradition across quite different ideological imperatives, such as Zionist metanarrative, the urge of Jewish immigrants to find Israel in America, and socialism. The contributors also explore how that narrative turn away from religious tradition to secular identity has both enriched and impoverished Jewish modernity.