Rezensionen 112 Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, Unshtetling Narratives: Depictions of Jewish Identities in British and American Literature and Film. Foreword by Jules Chametzky. (Salzburg Anglophone Critical Studies 3). Salzburg: Poetry Salzburg, 2006. Susanne Rohr The title of Cheryl Alexander Malcolm’s novel irritates and illuminates to equal measure. First of all, it takes quite some time to decipher it on the artistically notquite-successful cover. But it is true: Unshtetling Narratives. The neologism points towards the book’s intention: it sees itself as a “study of post-immigrant treatments of Jewish identity” (21) in Jewish-American and Anglo-Jewish works of art in different media and genres: literature, film, and the theater. The book investigates the specific period of the post-immigration phase from 1896 to 2003. In this period, as the author establishes early in her study, significant differences distinguish the American from the European approach: while Jewish-American literature has been an established literary genre for quite some time, Anglo-Jewish literature is a relatively new phenomenon still striving for full recognition on the literary market. The “Unshtetling” in the title thus bears a twofold meaning: it recalls the cruel end brought to East European shtetl culture with the Nazi-perpetrated genocide; concurrently, it refers to the continuing echo of this culture in the critical as well as the affirmative means by which British and American Jewish artists attempt to grapple with this inheritance. In these artistic and narrative negotiations, the concept of inheritance is “unsthetling” - though the expression also refers to (and this is the enlightening aspect of the rather irritating title) liberation from stereotyped conceptions of (a) Jewish identity. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm chooses the concept of identity as a central analytical criterion for her study. More precisely, she examines how processes of identity construction are not only staged in a textual manner, but how Jewish identity is also depicted as being culturally constructed. Hence, it comes as something of a surprise that Malcolm, who by recognizing identity as construct, performance, and choice reflects the latest theoretical reflections on the subject, reaches an unexpectedly conservative conclusion in her analysis of a specifically Jewish identity. The consistency which she identifies in works from Abraham Cahan to Anita Brookner is the understanding of a Jewish identity which, as during the days of the stereotyped “wandering Jew,” revolves around the state of iterance and unfamiliarity, isolation and loneliness, and the accompanying latent enmity and vulnerability. The fulcrum, for Malcolm, continues to be the wrestling of a subject for a position between the pull of assimilation and the pronounced recognition of ethnic belonging, together with the accompanying dynamics of personal loss and gain. This insight, however, requires revision in light of an entire generation of young Jewish-American authors, a group which includes Melvin Jules Bukiet, Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, and many more. For these authors, the question of an ethnic or American belonging has become irrelevant, as with their understanding of Judaism as a religious identity they are ingrained in the liberal understanding of mainstream society. It is noteworthy that works by these authors are not included in the Unshtetling Narratives. AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 1 Rezensionen 113 Despite these oversights, which make the study appear one-dimensional at times, the book captivates with its careful and sensitive close readings. With her comparative analyses, Cheryl Alexander Malcolm brings texts into a fruitful transatlantic dialogue which opens completely new perspectives on canonized as well as lesserknown texts. In her fifth chapter, titled “Poets and Other Imposters: Marrying In and Moving Up,” she reads the novel Providence by British author Anita Brookner in juxtaposition to “Virility,” a short story by the grand mistress of Jewish-American literature, Cynthia Ozick. The issues at stake are assimilation as conversion, loss, and concealment. Both protagonists are shown in the processes of denying their sexual belonging and their non-British background, respectively. The fluidity of their identity construction is thus shown in the sense of a “forged identity.” Cheryl Alexander Malcolm makes a similar argument in the next chapter, “Missing Mothers and Foreskins.” In this chapter, she compares Langston Hughes’ “Passing” with Bernard Malamud’s “The Lady of the Lake.” Both texts concern the phenomenon of “passing,” the denial of one’s own race, ethnicity, religion, or gender for the sake of resembling the norms of mainstream society. The “passing for white” of Hughes’ Afro-American protagonist follows the same dynamics as the denial of his Jewish background for Malamud’s main character. The result, in both scenarios, is the same: the characters do not only lose their status in the world but are also deprived of their masculinity, disappearing in a diffuse grey zone of culture. Other texts, as Malcolm reveals, are able to develop the characters’ oscillation between identities as a source of strength, as it is beginning to be for marginalized minorities in an increasingly globalized world: a transnational consciousness which can develop into a multiple consciousness of the limitations of cultural systems. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm’s lucid and well-informed study thus does justice to the task she had set for herself - “to provide a useful contribution to the field of Jewish studies in general and comparative Jewish-American and Anglo-Jewish research in particular” (25). Susanne Rohr J.F. Kennedy-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin Berlin