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Haunch Paunch and Jowl
Author: Samuel Ornitz
Publisher: University of New Orleans Press
Published: 2024-10-01
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781608012695
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Long out of print, Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch, & Jowl (1923) deserves the renewed attention it has received as a lost classic of modernist Jewish-American literature. The novel provides a panorama of the first generation of Jewish immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side through a cohort of young men: the struggles between religion and secular success, socialism and capitalism, tradition and modernity, manufacturers and labor unions. Originally marketed as an autobiography, the novel became a best-seller as an exposé of corruption. It was the first work by author Samuel Ornitz, a lifelong reformer later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten during the McCarthyist era. Ornitz intended for his narrator, Meyer Hirsch, to be a negative example of assimilation, yet Meyer Hirsch's savvy voice still speaks contemporary American truths about poverty, social mobility, corruption, ethnic politics, and the costs of social mobility.
Haunch, Paunch and Jowl; an Anonymous Autobiography
Author: Samuel Ornitz
Publisher: Legare Street Press
Published: 2023-07-18
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781021947307
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →First published in 1933, this novel tells the story of a Jewish family living in New York City in the early 20th century. The book explores themes of identity, assimilation and the immigrant experience. Written in a humorous and irreverent style, the novel was controversial at the time of its release for its frank portrayal of sexuality and its use of slang and non-standard English. Today, it is recognized as an important work of Jewish-American literature. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Haunch, Paunch and Jowel
To be Suddenly White
Author: Steven J. Belluscio
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 0826264859
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference. To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, and George Schuyler's Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, and Guido d'Agostino's Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative's exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself. When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and "white ethnic" (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity. The desire "to be suddenly white" serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. Byexamining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.
A Right to Sing the Blues
Author: Jeffrey Melnick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2001-03-16
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 0674040902
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision. Black-Jewish relations, Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made Black music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their natural affinity for producing Black music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.
Growing Up Ethnic
Author: Martin Japtok
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2005-04
Total Pages: 214
ISBN-13: 1587295946
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Growing Up Ethnic examines the presence of literary similarities between African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories in the first half of the twentieth century; often these similarities exceed what could be explained by sociohistorical correspondences alone. Martin Japtok argues that these similarities result from the way both African American and Jewish American authors have conceptualized their "ethnic situation." The issue of "race" and its social repercussions certainly defy any easy comparisons. However, the fact that the ethnic situations are far from identical in the case of these two groups only highlights the striking thematic correspondences in how a number of African American and Jewish American coming-of-age stories construct ethnicity. Japtok studies three pairs of novels--James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Edna Ferber's Fanny Herself, and Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Giver--and argues that the similarities can be explained with reference to mainly two factors, ultimately intertwined: cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman genre. Growing Up Ethnic shows that the parallel configurations in the novels, which often see ethnicity in terms of spirituality, as inherent artistic ability, and as communal responsibility, are rooted in nationalist ideology. However, due to the authors' generic choice--the Bildungsroman--the tendency to view ethnicity through the rhetorical lens of communalism and spiritual essence runs head-on into the individualist assumptions of the protagonist-centered Bildungsroman. The negotiations between these ideological counterpoints characterize the novels and reflect and refract the intellectual ferment of their time. This fresh look at ethnic American literatures in the context of cultural nationalism and the Bildungsroman will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary and race studies.
Haunch, Paunch and Jowl
Slippery Characters
Author: Laura Browder
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2003-06-20
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 0807860603
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities. Significantly, notes Browder, these ersatz autobiographies have tended to appear at flashpoints in American history: in the decades before the Civil War, when immigration laws and laws regarding Native Americans were changing in the 1920s, and during the civil rights era, for example. Examining the creation and reception of such works from the 1830s through the 1990s--against a background ranging from the abolition movement and Wild West shows to more recent controversies surrounding blackface performance and jazz music--Browder uncovers their surprising influence in shaping American notions of identity.
Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature
Author: Rachel Rubin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780252025396
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the hands of Jewish literary communists - themselves engaged in transgressing cultural boundaries - the figure of the Jewish gangster provides an occasion to craft a virile Jewish masculinity, to consider the role of vernacular in literature, to interrogate the place of art within a political economy, and to explore the fate of Jewishness in the "new worlds" of the United States and the Soviet Union."--BOOK JACKET.
