Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative

Jennifer Lemberg, Assistant Director for HEN, is proud to be included among the authors in Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative, a collection focusing on the newest generation of Jewish American writers, those who published their first books in 1988 or later. As editor Derek Parker Royal writes in the Introduction to the volume:

“…recent Jewish American fiction has taken a variety of forms with its negotiations of orthodoxy, representations of a post-Holocaust world, reassertion of folkloric traditions, explorations of postmodernity, reevaluations of Jewishness, alternative delineations of ethnic identity, engagement with visual narrative and various forms of new media, accommodations with multiculturalism, and even… reemphasis of the immigrant experience. The conditions underlying the recent flowering of Jewish American writing are multifold, and we would do well to broaden our understanding of this literature so as to account for its varied expressions.”

In her chapter for the collection, “’Unfinished Business’: Journeys to Eastern Europe in Thane Rosenbaum’s Second Hand Smoke and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated,” Dr. Lemberg examines fictional representations of travel to sites of memory by children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The chapter grows out of her longstanding interest in the multigenerational transmission of trauma and in Jewish American literature.

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