The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

The Writer Uprooted is the first book to examine the emergence of a new generation of Jewish immigrant authors in America, most of whom grew up in formerly communist countries. In essays that are both personal and scholarly, the contributors to this collection chronicle and clarify issues of personal and cultural dislocation and loss, but also affirm the possibilities of reorientation and renewal. Writers, poets, translators, and critics such as Matei Calinescu, Morris Dickstein, Henryk Grynberg, Geoffrey Hartman, Eva Hoffman, Katarzyna Jerzak, Dov-Ber Kerler, Norman Manea, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, Lara Vapnyar, and Bronislava Volkova describe how they have coped creatively with the trials of displacement and the challenges and opportunities of resettlement in a new land and, for some, authorship in a new language.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and founder and former director of the Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program. He is author of Imagining Hitler (IUP, 1985) and A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (IUP, 1980). He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.