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Between Generations: New Families
in New Cultures
Particularly in the United States, patterns of immigration produced a type of poem concerning efforts at mutual adjustment by different generations within the same family---as all sought to comprehend America. These texts exhibit a poignancy of separation in the midst of desire for reconciliation that is both touching and revelatory. Most are written by the younger generation about the older generation--until after the Shoah, when poets of an older generation wonder about explaining the exterminations to their children.
In Britain, images of family relations cast Anglo-Jews as "children" in relation to the (sometimes unloving) "step-mother," England (or Spain). The variation in the deployment of familial themes, turning on notions of experience.
Writings throughout two centuries.
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