Haunted in the New World by Donald Weber

Haunted in the New World by Donald Weber

Maps the affective landscape of Jewish American culture. This book offers a genealogy of the emotions - shame and self-hatred, nostalgic longing and the impulse to forget - that organized 20th-century Jewish American expressive culture.

More than five million East European Jews migrated to the US between 1880 and 1920, and a challenge confronted the first generation of Jewish novelists: how to transmute their experiences of poverty and shame into the materials of artWeber (Mount Holyoke College) offers a fascinating study of the popular culture that resulted from the Jewish encounter with the US. The author looks first at Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, whose fiction captures the acute loss of dignity suffered by immigrants adapting to the new world. He provides clear illustrations of how they popularized their own circumstances and in some cases (Eddy Cantor, Al Jolson, George Jessel, Fannie Brice) became famous movie stars. Weber discusses Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, which by the mid 1930s had become the first undeniable classic of the immigrant era, and The Goldbergs, which became an enormously popular radio (later television) soap opera, conveying sentimental family-centered values that helped sustain listeners during the Depression. Weber ends with the novels and short fiction of Saul Bellow, providing a subtle, wise discussion that says important things about the way Jews have chosen to participate in American culture. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.January 2006

-- M. Butovsky * emeritus, Concordia University *

Donald Weber is Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His essays on Jewish American literature and popular culture have appeared in many publications, including The Forward, and he is author of Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780253345790
ISBN 10	0253345790
Title	Haunted in the New World
Author	Donald Weber
Series	Jewish Literature And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Indiana University Press
Year published	2005-06-08
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.