Grace Paley and Philip Roth: Writing Jews in America

Tuition: $300 | YIVO members: $225**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Anita Norich

What do Grace Paley and Philip Roth have in common? These contemporary—often controversial—writers pose questions about what it means to be a Jew in America, how Jewish life has changed, where it might be heading. Both revel in irony. And both have sometimes been described—incorrectly, as this course will argue—as self-hating, heretical or, at best, outlier Jews, Paley for her stand on Israel, Roth for his depiction of the Jewish family. Readers have been passionate about their preference for one or the other of these writers. We will consider why this is so as we examine the themes, characters, and narrative devices in their stories.

Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following books before the first date of class:

• The Collected Stories, by Grace Paley (Purchase)
• Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories, by Philip Roth (Purchase)

The instructor will provide any other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

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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