Title: Looking forward, looking back : images of Eastern European Jewish migration to America in contemporary American children's literature /
Authors: Pohl, Jana.
Publisher: Rodopi,
Year: 2011
Subjects: Jews, East European United States Juvenile literature.; Jewish diaspora in literature.; Children's stories, American History and criticism
Abstract: "How is the life-altering event of migration narrated for children, especially if it was caused by Anti-Semitism and poverty? What of the country of origin is remembered and what is forgotten, and what of the target country when the migration is imagined there a century later? Looking Forward, Looking Back examines today's representation of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe to America around the turn of the last century. It explores the collective story that emerges when American authors look back at this exodus from an Eastern European home to a new one to be established in America. Focusing on children's literature, it investigates a wide range of texts including young adult literature as well as picture books and hence sheds light on the dynamics of the verbal and the visual in generating images of the self and other, the familiar and the strange. This book is of interest to scholars in the field of imagology, children's literature, cultural studies, American studies, Slavic studies, and Jewish studies."--Publisher's website.
Contents: Part I: The Corpus. The Historical and Personal Dimension of the Narratives. -- Part II: Theory: Image Studies. Functions ; Aspects of Image Studies in Children's Literature Research ; Migration Narratives. -- Part III: The Country of Origin: Russia. Push-factor Anti-Semitism ; Push-factor Poverty ; Books without Push-factors ; History and Historiography as a Frame of Reference ; Cold War Ideology and Paratextual Clues ; Disappearance of the Shtetl ; Visual Russia: Samovars, Soldiers and the Absence of Poverty ; Two Examples: Russia as the Contrapuntal Image ; Conclusion. -- Part IV: The Target Country: America. Dreaming about America: the Image, its Origin and Variations in an Eastern European Jewish Context ; The American Dream in Children's Literature: Narrative Patterns and Traditions ; The American Dream in the Corpus. -- Part V: The American Dream and Its Poetic Functions in Migration Narratives for Children. New York's Lower East Side and the Exposure of the American Dream ; Innocent Children and Sceptical Adults: the Image of America as a Device of Characterization ; Laughing at America's Gold: the Image as a Humorous Device. -- Part VI: Adapting an Immigrant Autobiography. Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) and Rosemary Wells's Streets of Gold (1999), Illustrated by Dan Andreasen. Mary Antin: The Promised Land ; Rosemary Wells: Streets of Gold ; Conclusion. -- Part VII: Conclusions -- Part VIII: References.