Literary Perspectives on Cultural Memory in Jewish American and Native American Women's Writings

Abstract

This project examines representations of cultural memory in late twentieth-century writing by Jewish American and Native American women working in the United States. As a Jewish, non-Indigenous scholar, I compare the work of prominent Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich with works by a few different Jewish American women writers in three categories of literature: poetry, children’s and young adult novels, and fiction. I found that these texts figure women’s intergenerational relationships as central to the transference of cultural memory in response to the respective histories of trauma (the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples in America, and the Holocaust). By creating a dialogic relationship between the texts, this project demonstrates how a reader from one culturally specific group might engage with representations of their own and another marginalized history alongside one another, without neglecting the cultural specificities of each experience.