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Description of  Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology)

081434318X epub This volume explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" textsthose that exist on the border between ethnography and artJelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust. S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (19121914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (19061935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Read more