Jewish American Short Stories

In this course we will seek to define and explore each of its titles four words. Why do we call these stories “Jewish?” What makes them “American?” What is a “short” story? What are the narrative strategies of the storytellers we read? In answering such questions, we trace the cultural and historical development of the American Jewish community over more than a century. Reading works by men and women, written in English and Yiddish, we will be concerned with such topics as immigration, acculturation, social and economic shifts, identity formation, the historical cataclysms and triumphs of the past 150 years. (All readings will be in English translation, although the Yiddish will be available for those who want it.) Readings will include one or more stories by Anzia Yezierska, Ab Cahan, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lamed Shapiro, and others.

Anita Norich is the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Collegiate Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century (2013), Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust (2007), The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer (1991); and co-editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (2016), Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (2008), and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures (1992). She translates Yiddish literature, and teaches, lectures, and publishes on a range of topics concerning modern Jewish cultures, Yiddish language and literature, Jewish American literature, and Holocaust literature.

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