Description: This book offers a comparative study of the Jewish response to identity structures in Eastern Europe and the United States from 1890 to 1930 in narratives by immigrant writers from the Pale of Settlement and Romania.
Review Quotes: Jewish American literature may be considered the first ethnic literature to have achieved great influence in the United States, in which hyphenated and multiple identities proliferate. Dana Mihăilescu's Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890-1930 offers a timely new critical contribution by studying the plural and often shifting character of Jewish identity among immigrants in a new land, deepening our understanding of the Jewish historical background of Jewish-American literature. Mihăilescu studies not only narratives of immigrant writers of Orthodox background from the Russian Pale, as has been the tendency in earlier studies, but also provides a comparative study of other less well-known Romanian immigrant writers, coming from a more progressive milieu. She studies how all these authors forged differing and complex hybrid Jewish-American modern identities through the ethical reconfiguration of Old World traditional norms. She also points out the tension in Jewish assimilation along gendered lines, where female writers criticized the gender bias of Judaism, never questioned by the male writers, some of whom, in turn, were caught in unconscious clinging to Eastern European traditions.