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| A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg''s Journal
ISBN: 9780253040794
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Indiana University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature ; History;
"This novel invites the reader inside the mind of a Polish Jewish woman who has recently arrived in New York just after WWII began in Europe." --Jeffrey Shandler, author of Anne Frank Unbound
Rivke Zilberg, a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the United States, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American "allrightnik."
In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsky provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman's struggles as a Jewish refugee in the United States during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place.
Kadya Molodovsky (1894-1975) was one of the most well-known and prolific writers of Yiddish literature in the twentieth century. Born in Bereze, a small town in what is now Belarus, educated in Poland and Russia, Molodovsky was an established writer when she came to the United States in 1935. Known primarily as a poet, essayist, and editor, she published over twenty books, including plays and four novels. Anita Norich is author of Writing in Tongues: Yiddish Translation in the 20th Century ; Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Literature in America During the Holocaust ; The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer ; and editor of Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives ; Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intercontext ; and Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures . She is Professor Emerita of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and 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. |
