This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory...

This book offers a comparative study of the Jewish response to identity structures in Eastern Europe and the United States from 1890 to 1930 in narratives by immigrant writers from the Pale of Settlement and Romania.