Recovering "Yiddishland"

"The author takes a fresh look at Abraham Cahan's Yekl and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts. She translates for the first time a trove of Yiddish poems about African Americans and reveals the writers' uneasy confrontation with their passage, as Jews, into white America. Bachman discusses the modernist poet Mikhl Likht, whose simultaneous embrace of American literature and resistance to assimilating into English marked him as the supreme "threshold" poet. Throughout this work, Bachman combines sophisticated literary analysis with her own experiences as "the Yiddish student," encountering the language of her grandparents. Recovering 'Yiddishland" offers a provocative and highly readable contribution to Jewish and American literary history."--BOOK JACKET.