Salvage Poetics

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies 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 texts—those that exist on the border between ethnography and art—Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust.

Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, including texts by Maurice Samuel, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Lucy Dawidowicz, Roman Vishniac, alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations. Rather than simply an ethnographic reference to a "dead" or "dying" language and culture, Jelen argues that American Jewish authors create a unique form of ethnographic literary text by adopting what she calls a salvage poetics of Yiddishkeit.