This memoir of Jewish family history is also a documentation of atrocities inflicted by the fascist militia during the German occupation of Eastern Europe. It is a personal account of the legacy of the Holocaust.
In his intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history—a memoir of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love—award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate and discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family’s story of repeated upheaval, four generations of wandering from pre-Shoah Lithuania to apartheid-era South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel. At the heart of Cohen’s story is the powerful bond he had with his mother, the “girl” forced to travel far from home. Tormented by a deep depression yet stoic in her struggle, she embodied her son’s complex inheritance. Graceful, honest, and sweeping, The Girl from Human Street is a remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations, a gripping saga, and a resonant portrait of identity and memory in the modern age.
"Africa Writing Europe" offers critical readings of the meaning and presence of Europe in a variety of African literary texts. Authors discussed include Leila Aboulela, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Alice Solomon Bowen, Ken Bugul, and Tayeb Salih.
From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.
This book provides a critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction; highlighting the rich diversity of the field, identifying key themes, analysing the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situating them in a historical context.
The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
What do we learn about death from the Holocaust and how does it impact our responses to mortality today? Facing Death: Confronting Mortality in the Holocaust and Ourselves brings together the work of eleven Holocaust and genocide scholars who address these difficult questions, convinced of the urgency of further reflection on the Holocaust as the last survivors pass away. The volume is distinctive in its dialogical and introspective approach, where the contributors position themselves to confront their own impending death while listening to the voices of victims and learning from their life experiences. Broken into three parts, this collection engages with these voices in a way that is not only scholarly, but deeply personal. The first part of the book engages with Holocaust testimony by drawing on the writings of survivors and witnesses such as Elie Wiesel, Jean Améry, and Charlotte Delbo, including rare accounts from members of the Sonderkommando. Reflections of post-Holocaust generations—the children and grandchildren of survivors—are housed in the second part, addressing questions of remembrance and memorialization. The concluding essays offer intimate self-reflection about how engagement with the Holocaust impacts the contributors’ lives, faiths, and ethics. In an age of continuing atrocities, this volume provides careful attention to the affective dimension of coping with death, in particular, how loss and grief are deferred or denied, narrated, and passed along.
Hero–or Nazi? Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community. But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.” The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family. A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.
With the release of Nelson Mandela, the advent of nonracial democracy, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africans have found themselves grappling with the legacy of apartheid's racial and cultural divisions. Together with Claudia Bathsheba Braude's path-breaking introduction, the stories collected in this anthology tap silences that were central to apartheid rule and that have particular resonances for South African Jewish history and memory. ø Bringing together the best and most noteworthy of a wide range of contemporary writers who represent the historical specificities and contradictions of South African Jewish life under apartheid, Contemporary Jewish Writing in South Africa makes compellingly clear the depths and complexities of a society in which racial identities, including Jewish whiteness, were deliberately constructed. The contributors include Nobel Prize?winning novelist Nadine Gordimer; well-known writers such as Rose Zwi and Dan Jacobson; exiled ANC activist and constitutional court judge Albie Sachs; satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, a penetrating critic of apartheid; and actor and writer Matthew Krouse, whose fiction offers a provocative blending of gay and Jewish identities in the postapartheid era. ø The volume traces the construction of memory and racial identity in South African Jewish literary and cultural history. Among the recurring themes in these stories are the selective presentation of certain aspects of Jewish life under apartheid, a reevaluation of identity after its fall, and the conflicting shadow of the Holocaust in a white supremacist society. Giving nuanced voice to questions about history, race, and ethnicity in postapartheid South Africa, these stories will be of broad interest.