Jewish American literature

The Jewish- American literature takes in American literature a prominent place. In addition to a tradition of English-language writing it includes other languages, among which the most important was the Yiddish. While the majority of authors and critics recognize the independence of the Jewish literature, other authors refuse to be a " Jewish Voices" classified.

Survey

Starting with the autobiographical reports and petitions of the Sephardic immigrants who populated the United States since the 17th century, the Jewish-American literature has developed over the centuries, further proof, until they finally all literary forms - such as epic, poetry and drama - included. A special place in the 20th century, the novels of Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth. These authors explore in their works alongside non-Jewish themes, the conflicts that arise when confronting the secular society and the Jewish tradition, and which are scarcely less dramatically felt by the children and grandchildren of immigrants from their ancestors themselves.

Younger writers like Jonathan Safran Foer continued the confrontation with the Jewish identity problem in their work and further issues are here, however, the Holocaust, the progressive assimilation and the - existing especially in the younger generation - trend toward rediscovery of Jewish traditions. To an increasing extent, the Jewish-American literature also deals with the issues of Israel, Zionism, anti-Semitism and " New anti-Semitism ".

Early Jewish Literature

This Yiddish literature, which gained a high level of maturity in the 19th century by authors such as Mendele Moicher Sforim, in the Jewish families of Eastern Europe plays an important role. With the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews who left their home countries between 1880 and 1920, came Yiddish literature in the United States.

The first Yiddish writer to a "school" were formed in the U.S., were the " Sweatshop Poets ," under which Winchevsky Morris, David Edelstadt, Joseph Bovshover, Eliakum Zunser, and especially Morris Rosenfeld were the most important. Your creative time this group had about 1880-1905. In her poems, the " Sweatshop Poets " denounced the inhumane working conditions to which the Jewish immigrants were exposed in the factories of New York's Lower East Side. This revolutionary poetry was followed by 1907/1908 a new generation of Jewish writers who " Di Yunge " ("The Boys " ) were called and examined in the literature, not social criticism, but beauty. The leading poets in this group were body Mani, H. Leivick and Moyshe Leyb Halperin, but they also included narrator like David Ignatoff and Isaac Raboy.

To the extent in which the Eastern European immigrants einlebten and went up in the American society, the authors said among them on to write Yiddish. An exception is the Polish born 1904 Isaac B. Singer, who grew up in Warsaw and there began to write stories. He emigrated in 1935 to the United States. His stories are set in pre-war Poland as in the camps of Hitler and Stalin or report of the fate of immigrants from Poland. Singer, who in 1978 received the Nobel Prize in Literature, first wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish later.