Jews and Non-Jews ─ Memories and Interactions from the Perspective of Cultural Studies

Since the Diaspora, with the need to fit in yet at the same time and place remain outside of the culture they found themselves in, Jews have managed to preserve their language, customs and ethnic identity albeit inside foreign contexts. Aleksandrowicz-Pedich, Partyka, and their nationally diverse contributors add new studies of memories and interactions between Jews and non-Jews to the broad field of historical and cultural research. The book underlines its wish to demonstrate that Jewish studies is a field of research for both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars with the fact that the majority of the book’s contributions come from non-Jews, who consider Jewish culture as part of their heritage. Sixteen essays are: Kiev Jews in the early twentieth century; Viennese culture in 1900; Ireland’s Jewish identity crisis; the community memory of Springfield, Missouri suppresses the city’s Jewish past; Jewminicanos and the Sos<’u>a settlement; stereotyping through silence and speech; no longer other?; manifestations of Jewishness in literature of Latin America; temptations of non-Jewish lifestyle in Allegra Goodman’s and Pearl Abraham’s novels; “false veins under the skin”; the feelings of survivors of the first deportations from the Warsaw ghetto; the mother-daughter dyad in Bozena Keff’s On Mother and the Fatherland; a quest for Jewish identity in contemporary Poland; normalization through literature; the sacralization and secularization of the Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pedich is Professor of American Literature and Cross-Cultural Communication at SWPS/University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Her main field of research is Jewish American fiction.
Jacek Partyka is Assistant Professor at the University of Bialystok (Poland), where he teaches History of American Literature, Modernism in American Literature and American Holocaust Fiction.