W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture: Karolina Krasuska

Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw):

“Soviet-Born: Or How Immigrant Writers from the Former USSR Shaped Recent Fiction in the US and Remade Jewish American Writing”

Jewish American literature? The term conjures up images of Philip Roth and maybe Jonathan Safran Foer or Nicole Krauss. These are U.S.-born writers for whom whiteness is a given, migration is a thing of the past, as is Eastern Europe. But what happens to these dominant themes when they are approached from the perspective of immigrants from the former USSR? Their 21^st-century writing often stages strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, and finally, migration. The novels by writers such as Gary Shteyngart, Sana Krasikov, Boris Fishman, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya demonstrate how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.