The premise of this anthology of urban Jewish stories is that Jews have a special relationship with the city, a space in which they feel both sheltered by anonymity and lost in it. The city is an area where Jews have cultivated their own restricted space, calling it a neighborhood, long after others have crammed them into a ghetto. Murray Baumgarten, an English professor at University of California Santa Cruz, and Lee David Jaffe have collected stories and selections from longer works (mostly fiction) from many centers of Jewish life and organized them thematically in sections called “Refugee Snapshots,” “Other Homelands,” and so on. If you read the anthology from beginning to end, though, it moves in a rough chronological progression from early secular writing in Eastern Europe to the great immigration to New York, the Holocaust, Israel, and contemporary Jewish writers. The writing seems to improve as time goes by, and the later sections of the anthology are the most rewarding in a literary sense. Writers such as Rebecca Goldstein, Walter Mosley, Shalom Auslander, and Lara Vapnyar are represented along with Mordecai Richler, Chaim Grade, Isaac Babel, and Sholom Aleichem. The editors claim that this is the first collection of urban Jewish writing with an international scope, and many of the stories by Latin American and Israeli writers will be new to readers and provide fresh, unexpected perspectives on Jewish life. on) from many
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