F172.
Working-class Jews: A Poetics of American Assimilation
Friday, February 9, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
For decades, the struggle of American identity has played out in the literature of Jewish immigration. Collisions of class and culture, personal and economic sacrifices made for survival. What does it mean to forge this identity on the page? How do we continue telling these familiar yet necessary stories? Do we resist or embrace pressures to assimilate? In this conversation, panelists of varying genres, and varying generations from the Old Country, discuss writing the Jewish experience.
Participants
Jeffrey Wolf is a fiction writer from Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Bat City Review, JewishFiction.net, and elsewhere. He teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is currently working on his debut manuscript.
Kim Brooks, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is the author of Small Animals (Flatiron Books), an NPR Best Book of the Year, described by the National Book Review as “an impassioned, smart work of social criticism, as well as a novel The Houseguest (Counterpoint Press).
Yelena Akhtiorskaya is the author of Panic in a Suitcase, selected as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and named a Notable Book of 2014 by the New York Times. Her short fiction has appeared in N+1, The American Reader, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere.
Dan Alter’s poems and reviews have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva. His first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Awards Poetry Prize. He lives in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician.
