Cultural Encounters: Glimpses of the United States in Late Twentieth-Century Romanian Travel Narratives

2019

Abstract Travel narratives are complex accounts that include a significant layer of factual information – related to the geography, history, and/or the culture of a particular place or country – and a more personal layer, comprising the author’s unique perceptions and rendering of the travel experience. In the last thirty years of transition from a communist to a democratic society, the Romanians have been free to travel to any country they choose; however, during the communist period, especially during the 1980s, travelling to Western, capitalist countries, such as France, Great Britain, Canada, or the United States, was rather limited and fraught with complex issues. Still, Romanian trave…

Gender and Ethnicity: Life Stories of Jewish-American Immigrant Women in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

2020

Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants left oral and written testimonies of their experience in the United States, many of them housed in various ethnic-American archives or published by ethnic historical societies. In 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York City encouraged Jewish-American immigrants to share their life stories as part of a written essay contest. In 2006, several of these autobiographical accounts were translated and published by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer in a volume entitled My Future Is in America. Thus, this essay examines the autobiographies of two Jewish-American immigrant women, Minnie Goldstein and Rose Schoenfeld, with a view…

Spaces of Identity: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Quicksand (1928)

2018

Abstract The 1920s marked a fervent time for artistic and literary expression in the United States. Besides the famous authors of the decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen, among other female writers, also managed to carve “a literary space” for their stories. Yezierska and Larsen depicted the struggles and tribulations of minority women during the fermenting 1920s, with a view to illustrating the impact of ethnicity and race on the individual female identity. Yezierska, a Jewish-American immigrant, and Larsen, a biracial American woman, share an interest in capturing the nuances of belonging to a particular community…

Renate Haas, ed. Rewriting Academia: The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang…

2017