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What are the limits of empathy and forgiveness? How can someone with a shameful past find a new path that allows for both healing and reckoning? When Clovis and Christelle find themselves face-to-face on a train heading to the outskirts of Paris, their unexpected encounter propels them on a cathartic journey toward understanding the other, mediated by their respective histories of violence. Clovis, a young undocumented African, struggles with the pain and shame of his brutal childhood, abusive exploits as a child soldier, and road to exile. Christelle, a young French nurse, has her own dark experiences but translates her suffering into an unusual capacity for empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christelle opens her home and heart to Clovis and presses him to tell his story. But how will she react to that story? Will the telling start Clovis on a path to redemption or alienate him further from French society? Wilfried N'Sondé's brave novel confronts French attitudes toward immigrants, pushes moral imagination to its limits, and constructs a world where the past must be confronted in order to map the future.

Homecoming travel narratives are typically written by first-wave immigrants, their children, or grandchildren. Usually, homecoming books are accounts of emotionally charged travels that oscillate between nostalgia and idealization of the ancestral land on the one hand and a sense of grief, loss and unbelonging on the other. The present paper examines two homecoming travel narratives that sidestep such pitfalls: Leonard Kniffel’s A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home (2005) and Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace (2020). For both authors, a starting point of the journey is a deep bond with their late maternal grandmothers, whose stories of “the old country” have shaped their sense of identity. Neither Kniffel, a Polish-American author, nor Kassabova, a Bulgarian-born writer writing in English, has ever lived in the countries their grandmothers left as young women—Poland and Macedonia. Return travels not only allow them to better understand the interplay of past and present in their immigrant family history but also to accept their homeland as a complex historical, cultural, and personal legacy. Thus, in both books, returning to the ancestral homeland, undertaken at mid-life, is represented as an essential stage in one’s life journey, which results in a symbolic sense of closure and restoration.

The British Yiddish writer Katie Brown wrote humorous stories and sketches for the London Yiddish newspapers Di post (The Post) in the 1930s and Di tsayt (The Times) in the 1940s. The stories, set in London's Jewish East End, concern the day-to-day effects of immigration, poverty, and Jewish culture in Britain. After the Second World War, in a bombed-out East End where Jewish migration to the suburbs was accelerating, Brown did not write entirely new sketches, but rather edited versions of her prewar stories. Looking at the earlier and later stories together, we get a sense of the changes happening to London's Jewish community: the decline of Jewish culture and religious practice, the changing relationship with the Eastern European homeland, and the decline of the Yiddish language. Through close reading and analysis, this article gives historical background to Brown and the social, cultural, and political context of her stories. It situates Brown as the only female journalist writing regularly for the press and identifies her unique perspective in making poignant interventions into Jewish debates of the day through stories of small incidents in family life. She raises questions around how to maintain a Jewish identity in England and visibility as a Jew in a Christian world, and traces change through two decades by describing the tension between the immigrant generation and their children. Using a range of neglected source material in Yiddish, this article throws new light on the Jewish East End in its twilight years.

The Friend (2018), the seventh novel of Sigrid Nunez, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. It not only tells a touching story about the human-canine bond between the narrator and a huge Great Dane but also involves much meditation on writing as a profession and the universal concerns of humanity. Looking back at her writing career, Nunez talks about her beliefs as a writer, her observation of the contemporary literary scene, her evaluation of the status of fiction in the current era, her teaching experiences in writing programs, and her personal story as a child of immigrants and a former assistant to Susan Sontag. According to Nunez, a life of solitude is conducive to writing books, and experiences of frustration are normal for a writer. However, she maintains that writing should be seen as a vocation instead of a means of self-advancement. With respect to new trends in literary culture, Nunez believes the house of fiction does have many rooms, and the definition of a novel has become much broader.

Glaspell's work articulates what many women could not: her writing speaks for women with limited agency and lack of access to justice due to their social class and their status as immigrants or children of immigrants. To provide a context for a discussion of sexual abuse in The Morning Is Near Us, I review the facts of Elmer Glaspell's case and other relevant portions of Glaspell's biography and supply a detailed overview of the relevant cultural and legal aspects of the charge of the seduction of working-class immigrant woman in these decades.6 I then go on to show how this biographical information and Glaspell's sense of herself as collateral damage might contribute to a reading of The Morning Is Near Us through an analysis of Glaspell's fictional depiction of protagonist Lydia Chippman's somewhat reluctant excavation of the traumas experienced by her mother, Hertha. According to Glaspell's biographers, Alice was apparently an ineffectual housekeeper who likely longed for a better life and lived vicariously through Susan. In Fugitive's Return, through her protagonist Irma, Glaspell repeatedly expresses her shame at her family's straitened conditions, exemplified by an outhouse instead of a bathroom, and exacerbated by her humiliating contacts with the girls from a more prosperous part of town.12 In The Road to the Temple, Glaspell, in a mode resembling biographical fiction, expresses resentment over her husband's family's status in Davenport.

This essay tells the story of my immigrant journey from Cuba to the United States and how I found my voice as a Jewish writer through my travels as an anthropologist. My eventual return to Cuba opened the path to my imaginative work as a poet and fiction writer. My interrupted childhood in Cuba now informs my writing for contemporary children.

An illegitimate son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, born in Paris on April 23, 1918 and one of the France’s most prolific men of letters, Maurice Druon made a name for himself as a patriotic egophiliac. Through his critically acclaimed series of historical novels, Les Rois Maudits, and Les Grandes Familles, for example, he intended to revive the long-lost French medieval egotistic glory. With his wartime resistance hymn, “Chant des Partisans”, which he and his uncle, Joseph Kessel, adapted from the Russian-born troubadour Anna Marly’s lyric song, he infused a strong sense of ego in the French fighters against the German wartime occupiers. It was for all such contributions to nation building and for his unflinching determination to promote French linguistic and political culture that he was made Minister of Cultural Affairs in Pierre Messmer’s cabinet (1973-1974), a Deputy of Paris (1978-1981) and a ‘perpetual secretary’ of the Académie Francaise. But in between his writing Les Rois Maudits, as he said in the preface to the story, he wanted to try his hands in something else and ended up writing Tistou Les Pouces Verts. This paper makes use of the properties of ecocritical theory in order to investigate the importance of Maurice Druon’s stride from egotistic to eco-conscious writing meant for children.

Modern-day conceptions of American childhood and family situate children, and the labor required to rear them, outside of the wage labor market. This ethnographic study of a foster care adoption program shows how board payments elicit commodification anxiety at this local site, and in American culture more broadly. In using board payments as a litmus test to weed out parents with profiteering motives, workers inadvertently play into a model that devalues care work—which is disproportionately done by women and minorities. This study places everyday casework into the context of welfare state history and the history of foster care, and describes troubling similarities between the profiteering parent of foster care and the stereotype of the welfare queen used to garner public support for the 1996 welfare reforms. I argue that a socially just approach to caregiving must abandon the fiction that sentiments and markets operate in separate spheres.

Mayer's Differences, published two years after the war by Jewish publisher Bloch & Co.,3 breaks with this pattern of historical settings by telling a story of American Jews before, during, and after the Civil War. The novel's primary characters are Jews who are either German or French immigrants themselves or the children of such immigrants, and the novel's plot runs from June 1860 through late 1865, a half decade in which questions of American national identity were paramount. [...]all of these results are accomplished through a clear understanding that Jews may suffer minor social costs at the hands of Gentiles but are still clearly White and European and thus distinct from a far more oppressed group, enslaved Blacks. (The elder Mayer was opposed to Reform, but we have no records of the presumed family tensions between father and son over religion and tradition.) Indeed, Wise handed Mayer the responsibility for \"conduct[ing] the department of belles lettres\" for The Israelite.6 Mayer's own writing was influenced by his mentor's, and the two novels of his own that he serialized in The Israelite echo Wise's historical emphasis: the 1856 The Count and the Jewess, about the legends surrounding Prague's Rabbi Loew, the sixteenth-century rabbi credited with creating the Golem; and the 1858 The Fatal Secret! or, Plots and Counterplots: A Novel of the Sixteenth Century, in which Portuguese Jews flee the Inquisition for Amsterdam and then the New World.

Not every teacher may have personal narratives to make their students' readings come alive, but every teacher can diversify the study of literature in their English language arts classrooms. We need educator stories that reveal the reading of literature both as an intellectual exercise and also for understanding. Here, Saenz interweaves fiction with her personal narrative to challenge her students' perspectives about the people of Latin America and US Latinx communities.