Recalling Home: American Jewish Women Writers of the New Wave

In much recent work by American Jewish women writers, a postmodern awareness of the complexity of "selving" is coupled with a persistent interest in the particular, constructive power of the search for origins. Deviating in this respect from the American writers like Henry James who realize themselves by leaving home and family, American Jewish women's memoirs and novels of the last two decades are revisiting the places of the authors' or their parents' childhoods and clarifying formative elements of that search.