Plotting Gotham: Interwar Jewish Writers and the Politics of Place [electronic resource].

Abstract

” Chapter four focuses on Charles Reznikoff By the Waters of Manhattan (1930). Overwriting the material reality of the city with pastoral scenes from his protagonist’s reading, Reznikoff creates a new “urban pastoral” sensibility by establishing a symbolic opposition between his protagonist’s developing poetic imagination and the city through which he moves. The coda concludes by looking ahead to the postwar period, demonstrating the formative influence of interwar literary traditions by reading Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951) as a critical revision of representational conventions from Jewish tenement narratives of the 1920s and ’30s.

a transnational, interlinguistic frame of reference as signifiers of the “Jewishness” of secular Jewish writing. Chapter one examines Yiddish works by Sholem Asch, Moyshe Nadir, and Lamed Shapiro that invoke Coney Island as a symbol of the promise and threat of American mass culture. Chapter two revisits Anzia Yezierska’s influential narratives of the Lower East Side, arguing that her allusions to the lives and writing of fellow Jewish immigrant women allowed her to construct a radical feminist literary tradition under the sign of Manhattan’s “Jewish ghetto.” Chapter three compares four Communist writers’ (Howard Fast, Mike Gold, Samuel Ornitz, and Budd Schulberg) uses of the venerable tropes of the “garden,” “the “jungle,” and the urban “wasteland” to represent characters’ struggles for imaginative and intellectual growth within the dehumanizing, deterministic environment of the Jewish “ghetto.

This dissertation examines the formative and fraught relationship between interwar Jewish writers and the working-class Jewish neighborhoods and leisure sites of Manhattan and Brooklyn, illuminating political discourses and intertextual exchanges that informed representations of Brownsville, Coney Island, and the Lower East Side. More than settings drawn from life, these neighborhoods were literary staging grounds for radical critiques of American economic and social relations. While scholars have described the post-WWII period as a Jewish literary “renaissance” in America, this dissertation foregrounds the interwar literature of New York and the forms of Jewish alterity it depicted as the imaginative bedrock on which an American Jewish literary tradition was constructed. Interwar texts established an urban milieu, an investment in social and economic justice, and

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan.

Includes bibliographical references.

” Chapter four focuses on Charles Reznikoff By the Waters of Manhattan (1930). Overwriting the material reality of the city with pastoral scenes from his protagonist’s reading, Reznikoff creates a new “urban pastoral” sensibility by establishing a symbolic opposition between his protagonist’s developing poetic imagination and the city through which he moves. The coda concludes by looking ahead to the postwar period, demonstrating the formative influence of interwar literary traditions by reading Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951) as a critical revision of representational conventions from Jewish tenement narratives of the 1920s and ’30s.

a transnational, interlinguistic frame of reference as signifiers of the “Jewishness” of secular Jewish writing. Chapter one examines Yiddish works by Sholem Asch, Moyshe Nadir, and Lamed Shapiro that invoke Coney Island as a symbol of the promise and threat of American mass culture. Chapter two revisits Anzia Yezierska’s influential narratives of the Lower East Side, arguing that her allusions to the lives and writing of fellow Jewish immigrant women allowed her to construct a radical feminist literary tradition under the sign of Manhattan’s “Jewish ghetto.” Chapter three compares four Communist writers’ (Howard Fast, Mike Gold, Samuel Ornitz, and Budd Schulberg) uses of the venerable tropes of the “garden,” “the “jungle,” and the urban “wasteland” to represent characters’ struggles for imaginative and intellectual growth within the dehumanizing, deterministic environment of the Jewish “ghetto.

This dissertation examines the formative and fraught relationship between interwar Jewish writers and the working-class Jewish neighborhoods and leisure sites of Manhattan and Brooklyn, illuminating political discourses and intertextual exchanges that informed representations of Brownsville, Coney Island, and the Lower East Side. More than settings drawn from life, these neighborhoods were literary staging grounds for radical critiques of American economic and social relations. While scholars have described the post-WWII period as a Jewish literary “renaissance” in America, this dissertation foregrounds the interwar literature of New York and the forms of Jewish alterity it depicted as the imaginative bedrock on which an American Jewish literary tradition was constructed. Interwar texts established an urban milieu, an investment in social and economic justice, and

Mode of access: Internet.