Autorentext

Lori Harrison-Kahan is a professor in the English department at Boston College. She is the editor of multiple books, including Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards, and The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson (both Wayne State University Press). She is also the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary and has published widely on Jewish American women's literature.

Klappentext

Repositioning women writers of the American West as formative to Jewish literature.

Blending history, collective biography, and literary criticism, author Lori Harrison-Kahan repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish women's literature. This book demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, gender, class, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works challenge masculinist views of Jewish literature and contrast dramatically with well-known stories of the New York ghetto. Mining print and archival sources (including newspapers, magazines, novels, letters, diaries, and unpublished writings), Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities--from bourgeois women's clubs to socialist bohemia--sustained them. With incisive purpose and clear-eyed nuance, West of the Ghetto showcases Jewish women writers' vital and wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture.