What does the recent success of 2018’s Yiddish production of Fidler afn dakh (Fiddler on the Roof) have to do with Roman Vishniac’s prewar photographs of Jewish Eastern Europe, or Maurice Samuel’s 1940s English-language retellings of Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz? What frames can we deploy to understand how American Jews have looked back on the Ashkenazi Jewish experience and how that encounter has evolved over time? Or, as Sheila E. Jelen asks in Salvage Poetics, “How do American Jews know what they think they know about pre-Holocaust East European Jewish life?” (1)
Jelen’s monumental monograph offers a welcome new perspective on historical and contemporary American Jewish attempts to bridge the gap between then and now. Jelen’s concept of “salvage poetics”—which names how primary cultural materials from Jewish Eastern Europe are mediated in order to make their cultural world more legible and accessible to an American...
