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Who Are We Here?: Jewish Immigrants and the Pains of Assimilation
This collection brings together four distinct stories of Jewish immigration. They differ in setting, narrative style, and emotional tone. What they have in common is that they all portray people assimilating to a new country or people whose parents or grandparents have assimilated. None of them shy away from showing what gets lost or damaged in the process.
Grace Paley's "The Loudest Voice"
This 1959 short story by one of the most beloved Jewish fiction writers of the twentieth century uses a Christmas play at a public elementary school to highlight the conflicted feelings some Jews had (and have) about assimilating into the dominant (Christian) American culture.
David Bezmozgis's "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist"
This 2004 short story is told from the perspective of a child whose family has emigrated from the Soviet Union to Canada in the 1980s. It depicts, sometimes with poignant humor, the challenges his family faces as they try to acculturate to the existing Canadian Jewish community.
Almog Behar's “Ana min al-yahud”
In this lyrical Hebrew short story with an Arabic title, a mysterious “language plague” causes young Israeli Jews to revert to their grandparents’ diasporic accents. In speaking with his grandfather's Iraqi Jewish accent, the narrator faces what's been lost in his family's assimilation to the dominant Ashkenazi Israeli culture.
Anzia Yezierska’s “Bread Givers”
The tensions between immigrant parents and their defiantly American children, between Jewish tradition and modern sensibilities, play out in dramatic detail in this 1925 novel set on New York City's Lower East Side.
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