News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

Thanks to Amy Hunsaker, Librarian for Music & the Performing Arts, for contributing this post.

From magical realism master Gabriel García Márquez to exciting debut novelist Xochitl Gonzalez, there are thousands of Latinx authors to celebrate during Hispanic Heritage Month, which overlaps September and the first few weeks of October.

We’ve gathered some book recommendations from UVA librarians and Ph.D. candidates from the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department.

Take a look at their selections below. (For a more extensive list, see this guide.)

Recommended by Katie Rojas, Head of Archival Processing

“The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina” by Zoraida Córdova (Atria Books, 2021)

One of my favorite literary styles is magical realism, and this book did not disappoint. Córdova’s novel tells the story of the Montoya family and the strange blessings of their matriarch, Orquídea Divina. Even her name, which means “Divine Orchid” alludes to the delicate and mysterious beauty of orchids, which must have just the right conditions to bloom and thrive. Orquídea Divina lives up to her name, never leaving her home, yet creating a flourishing landscape and bounty of food in a place that was once barren. Upon receiving invitations to Orquídea Divina’s funeral, three of her adult grandchildren travel back to their family’s small hometown of Four Rivers and embark upon a journey of discovery, self-preservation, and family history which leads them to Ecuador. As an archivist, I especially love how the themes of family origin, identity, and place all relate well to current understandings of how the history of our families impacts us today. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantasy, light horror, and stories of self-discovery.

(UVA Library hardcover copy is on order.)

Recommended by Amy Hunsaker, Librarian for Music & Performing Arts

“Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey Books, 2020)

This spooky book set in remote Mexico in the 1950s brings the reader into a gothic horror setting that includes an eerie house, ghoulish relatives, a haunted, forbidding cemetery, and Noemí,‏ the stylish and clever socialite who must solve the mysteries surrounding High Place manor. Is there a perfectly scientific explanation for the supernatural aberrations that seem to be spiraling our hero toward certain doom? Will she be able to save herself and her cousin from a fate worse than death? Is there anyone she can trust? Will you, gentle reader, be able to look at mushrooms in the same way ever again?

(UVA Library hardcopy is on order.)

“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Knopf, 1988)

Florentino Ariza lives only for love. He only wants to die for love. But his most sincere love isn’t requited.

“… his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning … to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

The obsessed Ariza can never be cured of his lovesickness for Fermina Daza in a story that spans several decades, explores the complexities of relationships, and illustrates how noble it is to suffer for love. Márquez’s luscious storytelling poetically explores themes of love, philosophy, and life in general.

(Available in Spanish; Electronic Copy: Internet Archive)

Recommended by Miguel Valladares-Llata, Librarian for Romance Languages and Latin American Studies

“Olga Dies Dreaming” by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron Books, 2022)

Publisher’s summary: “A blazing talent debuts with the tale of a status-driven wedding planner grappling with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots, all in the wake of Hurricane María.”

“Neruda on the Park: A Novel” by Cleyvis Natera (Ballantine Books, 2022)

Publisher’s summary: “An exhilarating debut novel about members of a Dominican family in New York City who take radically different paths when faced with encroaching gentrification, for readers of ‘Such a Fun Age’ and ‘Dominicana.’”

“Brown Neon: Essays” by Raquel Gutiérrez (Coffee House Press, 2022)

Publisher’s summary: “Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection ‘Brown Neon’ gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutierrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds.”

(On order for Clemons Library.)

Recommended by Carlos Velazco Fernandez, Ph.D. Candidate

“La mucama de Omicunlé” de Rita Indiana (Editorial Periférica, 2015)

Publisher’s summary: “This overwhelming novel, which enshrines Rita Indiana as narrator, contains many layers and fascinating twists. … Including deities that inhabit the Caribbean Sea, political interests, Goya’s prints, gender reassignment and numerous plot twists, few other works of fiction speak of contemporary art as precisely as ‘La mucama de Omicunlé.’”

“Tentacle” by Rita Indiana, translated by Achy Obejas (And Other Stories, 2018)

Publisher’s summary: “Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean and humanity from disaster. … Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: ‘The Tempest’ meets the telenovela.”

The other two books are poetic since poetry is the water of the soul. Besides, these books are close to our university, since the first one was written by a guest professor at our university last year and the second one is written by another professor who currently teaches at our university:

“Adiós a Lenin: Antología Poética” de Federico Díaz-Granados (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2017)

Publisher’s summary: “Ultimately, only the poetic word is capable of evoking the lost paradise of childhood, family, love, the desired body, the longed-for plenitude. Yes, to evoke them, but only in fragments and scraps, in their traces and absences, in their ‘brief passage through the word.’ Hence precisely the tragic beauty of the poetry of Federico Díaz Granados.”

(Electronic copy available.)

“America” by Fernando Valverde, translated and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché  (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

Publisher’s summary: “In Fernando Valverde’s América, ‘sorrow is ancient.’ Mournfully lyrical, politically sharp, with a sweeping view of American roots, dysfunctions, and ideals – as if from above, and yet also from within – this is a book that deconstructs the legacy of empire. Valverde is widely regarded as one of the most important younger Spanish-language poets. Here his vibrant voice and convictions are translated and introduced by Carolyn Forché, herself a world-renowned poet of witness. Bilingual, with Spanish originals and English translations.

 

Recommended by Elizabeth Mirabal, Ph.D. Candidate

“El infinito en un junco: la invención de loss libros en el mundo antiguo” de Irene Vallejo. (Siruela, 2019)

Publisher’s summary: “In an essay sprinkled with personal anecdotes, Irene Vallejo breaks down and covers 30 centuries of the history of the book.”

(An English translation will be available in late September.)

“Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World” by Irene Vallejo, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle (Knopf, 2022)

Publisher’s summary: “A rich exploration of the importance of books and libraries in the ancient world that highlights how humanity’s obsession with the printed word has echoed throughout the ages.”

“Jardín” de Dulce María Loynaz (Aguilar, 1951)

You can electronically read this novel in the critical edition by Zaida Capote Cruz published in 2015 in La Habana, Cuba (Editorial Letras Cubanas), via the Internet Archive. No English translation available.

“My Tender Matador” by Pedro Lemebel, translated by Katherine Silver (Grove Press, 2003)

Publisher’s summary: “Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades.”

 

 

“Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” a new exhibition at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, showcases portraits that African Americans in central Virginia commissioned from the Holsinger Studio during the first decades of the 20^th century. The photographs expressed the individuality of the women and men who commissioned them, while silently yet powerfully asserting their claims to rights and equality. Opening Sept. 22, the exhibition is the result of years of research by UVA professors, students, and community members.

John Edwin Mason, a UVA associate professor of history and a documentary photographer, first learned about the Holsinger Studio Collection, held in the Small Special Collections Library, when he saw a small exhibition at the UVA’s Woodson Institute, curated by the late professor Reginald Butler and professor Scot French (now of the University of Central Florida) in 1998. The collection, which UVA acquired in 1978, includes about 10,000 glass plate negatives taken by the Holsinger Studio of life in Charlottesville and Albemarle and Nelson counties from the 1890s to the 1920s. Many of the photographs were commissioned portraits and more than 600 of those portraits are of African American citizens in central Virginia. Mason was immediately intrigued.

“I thought that we could use these portraits not simply to enjoy for their beauty as aesthetic objects, but we could see history through them, we could tell history through them. By researching the lives of the people in the photographs, we can learn a lot about the history of this place,” he said.

The portraits were taken during the height of the Jim Crow era, when state laws enforced racial segregation in the South, the Ku Klux Klan had local chapters in the Albemarle region, and a wealthy, white UVA alumnus successfully commissioned two statues of Confederate leaders (Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson) to be erected in Charlottesville parks. “It was an incredibly oppressive time,” Mason said. “But the magic of these portraits is that you don’t see the oppression in them. And that was intentional on the part of the people who had their images made. They are saying, ‘We are not who you think we are. We are not those stereotypes, we are not defined by our status in Jim Crow society.”

A community effort

In 2015, Mason turned his interest in the photos into action. He launched the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project, to delve into the lives of the portrait subjects; a partnership with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities director Worthy Martin in 2018 provided the project with a web presence to share their research. With a 3Cavaliers grant from the office of UVA’s Vice President for Research, the team was able to hire seven undergraduate students to examine census records, military records, birth and death certificates, and African American newspapers from surrounding regions. They also dug through personal papers in UVA Special Collections to find original Holsinger prints, giving the students information about the people in the portraits and about central Virginia during that era.

A grant from Virginia Humanities allowed the team to begin reaching out to the local community to help identify portrait subjects. In 2019, the project partnered with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to host a “Family Photo Day,” where participants could examine the Holsinger Studio portraits in flipbooks and add comments if they had any information about the subjects. “We had over 300 people come to our Family Photo Day,” Mason said. “That was a moment where we could see the potential for the project; we could see how engaged and how excited people were by these portraits.”

That same year, the team also installed 30 of the portraits around the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers construction site, drawing attention from hundreds of passers-by each day. Two Charlottesville community members, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA co-chair DeTeasa Brown Gathers (who found a photo of her great-great grandmother in the Holsinger Studio Collection) and local realtor Edwina St. Rose, joined the project as community advisors. Working with the group The Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery, they launched an exhibit of the portraits at CitySpace in downtown Charlottesville in the summer of 2019.

A significant grant from the Jefferson Trust earlier this year, awarded to the University’s Corcoran Department of History, IATH, and the UVA Library, is supporting the team to think more broadly about a community engagement program. In March, the team launched a pop-up exhibit of the Holsinger photos at the Northside branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. “Our trustees were fascinated to learn that such an interesting collection of African American history is held by the University,” said Amy Bonner, director of grants at the Jefferson Trust. “The opportunity to help launch such a powerful exhibition and support the associated research was impossible to pass up.”

Viola Green Porter (1898-1985) commissioned this portrait to commemorate her graduation from the eighth grade at Charlottesville’s segregated Jefferson Graded School. The white dress and diploma make this photo similar to other Holsinger Studio graduation portraits of young women, both Black and white.

The grant is also supporting the “Visions of Progress” exhibition launching Sept. 22 in the Main Gallery of the Small Special Collections Library, where visitors can view almost 100 Holsinger Studio portraits and take in the biographical information about the subjects unearthed over the past few years by the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project team. They can also learn about the “New Negro” movement that countered the Jim Crow oppression of the early 20^th century, stemming from Black intellectual leaders Booker T. Washington, Alain LeRoy Locke, and Charlottesville native George W. Buckner, whose manifesto, “The New Negro,” caused an uproar when the Charlottesville Messenger, the city’s Black newspaper, published it in 1921. “The New Negro the country over is coming to see that his salvation is in his own hands,” Buckner wrote.

The portraits in the exhibit reflect this ethos, Mason said. “It’s important to emphasize that even though the people in the portraits are dressed to the nines, they are everyday people. Most had working-class jobs.” By dressing so beautifully, Mason said, the portrait sitters were pushing back against racist caricatures that were common in American media during that era. “There was dynamism within the African American community,” he said. “Immediately after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, over 100 African American women registered to vote in Charlottesville. Black people were running barber shops, running blacksmith shops, running laundries, and campaigning for a high school. People were not defined by their oppression.”

Vibrant portraits

In 2020, Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, reached out to Mason to suggest co-sponsoring an exhibition after seeing the enthusiasm the Holsinger Portrait Project garnered on Grounds in the community.

“The Holsinger Studio portraits have been an important part of the UVA Library’s collections since the 1970s,” Robertson said. “We’ve done so much work to describe and provide access to the collection — it was one of the first photographic collections we fully digitized in the late 1990s, and each portrait is available online through Virgo. We’ve taken painstaking care to provide the best preservation environment for the fragile glass plate negatives as well as the business ledgers. Yet, we’ve never exhibited this collection. As the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project grew, we saw a wonderful opportunity to partner in telling the stories of Black central Virginians through our amazing collections.”

UVA Library staff played a crucial role in preparing the portraits for the Special Collections exhibition. Stacey Evans, an imaging specialist and project coordinator for the Library, led a team in rephotographing the glass-plate negatives to capture plate identification numbers that had been cropped in scanning efforts in the 1990s. This helped to identify photo subjects. By following standards set by the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative, Cultural Heritage Imagining, and the Library of Congress, Evans and her team then took their photographic reproductions of the negatives and created “artist’s renderings” of the portraits using Photoshop.

Evans, a photographer who has nearly 30 years of experience scanning negatives and working in digital imaging, said that when comparing the original scans of the negatives in Virgo to the images her team created, the tonal range of the portraits has dramatically improved. “On a personal note,” she said, “John Mason and I have been friends in the Charlottesville photo community for many years. It’s an honor to work with him on this project.”

Brandon Butler, the Library’s Director of Information Policy, conducted extensive research on copyright issues pertaining to the Holsinger collection to prepare for the exhibition. “Perhaps surprisingly, some portraits in the Holsinger Studio Collection are still subject to copyright regulations more than 100 years after they were created,” Butler said. “We believe the portrait copyrights belonged to whoever paid to have them taken — often the subject or a relative. Because that right would endure for 120 years, the descendants of the portrait sitters may still hold rights to their ancestors’ images.”

Mason and Library staff members urge exhibition visitors who might recognize ancestors or have any information about the portrait subjects to email the team at
HolsingerStudio@virginia.edu. A brochure of the portraits will be freely available at the opening, and the Holsinger Project website, built by IATH, will live on after the exhibition ends in June 2023. With further support from the Jefferson Trust grant, the Holsinger Studio Project will continue to bring the portraits into the local community, visiting schools, religious organizations, and civic groups. An exhibition at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center curated by Andrea Douglas, the center’s Executive Director, is in development.

“We want to change the way that everyone in central Virginia sees our shared history,” Mason said.

Public exhibition opening details

The public opening celebration for “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift” will be held on Sept. 22 in the Main Gallery of UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library from 5-8 p.m.

John Edwin Mason will host two rounds of gallery talks that evening: one at 5:30 p.m., another at 6:30 p.m.

Kendall King and Jalane Schmidt, curators of another UVA Library exhibition, “No Unity Without Justice: Student and Community Organizing During the 2017 Summer of Hate,” will speak in the First Floor Gallery at 6 and 7 p.m.

This event is free, but registration is required: 100 tickets will be released via EventBrite for the 5:30/6:00 talks, and another 100 for the 6:30/7:00 talks. Register here: https://Visions-UVA.eventbrite.com

A shuttle will run from the Jefferson School African American Center to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVA every 30 minutes from 4-8 p.m. for the public opening celebration on September 22, 2022. Registered attendees may also request a code to park for free in the Central Grounds Garage.

For reporters

A press kit, which includes four Holsinger studio portraits and biographical information about the subjects, is available for download.

For press inquiries, please contact Elyse Girard at elyse@virginia.edu.

Five years ago this week, community organizers, activists, students, and residents of Charlottesville stood up to an unprecedented wave of far-right hate and terror. Several hundred white supremacists marched at the University of Virginia and in downtown Charlottesville as part of the “Unite the Right” rally, events that led to violence and three deaths. Immediately following the weekend of Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, senior leaders at the University of Virginia Library asked curators and archivists to collect both physical and digital materials related to the rally.

Library staff got to work, gathering accelerants and tiki torches that had been thrown in bushes; white supremacist propaganda left in driveways; and posters and banners from students, faculty, staff, and community members who had counter-protested the white nationalists. UVA curators teamed up with the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library to collect images, videos, and stories about the rally from the local community. At the same time, digital preservationists were gathering rally-related tweets, photos, and postings online before they disappeared, including hateful speech from places like 4chan. It was challenging work.

“We realized that we hadn’t prepared for this. Although we had been working towards developing workflows for collecting born-digital content, we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support the technological challenges or emotional challenges of the work,” said Kara M. McClurken, the Library’s Director of Preservation Services. “From my own perspective, as a manager, I wasn’t sure how to best support my staff who were being asked to do things like stabilize the tiki torches used to threaten and harm our students and a Library colleague.”

This crash course in what McClurken describes as “collecting in times of crisis” led the Library to form a Digital Collecting Emergency Response Group, which sought advice from other institutions that had experienced tragedies in their communities. “After the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, a group of archivists found themselves feeling similarly,” she said, and they asked the Society of American Archivists to explore ways to provide support for communities documenting in times of crisis. The Library also applied for and received a grant from the nonprofit LYRASIS, which they used to develop resources and toolkits to help institutions be better prepared to implement digital collecting strategies during and after crises.

Now, UVA Library has an official Digital Collecting Emergency Response team, led by McClurken, who also serves as co-chair of the Society of American Archivists’ Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group. “Within UVA Special Collections, this experience (as well as larger discussions in the archival community) has changed our way of viewing our work — we have a group of folks who now meet regularly to discuss a trauma-informed approach to our spaces and collections, and to consider the impact of harmful or difficult content,” she said.

 

Many of the digital items UVA Library staff collected in the days after rally are now available to the public in the “University of Virginia Collection on Events in Charlottesville, VA, August 11-13, 2017,” a 20 gigabyte digital archive, containing everything from a video of white supremacists marching up the Rotunda steps the night of Aug. 11, to a recollection of a helicopter that hovered over the city for hours on Aug. 12, to a compilation of statements by institutional leaders at Virginia colleges and universities condemning hateful ideologies.

McClurken emphasized that it was a multi-departmental Library team that gathered the materials from many different sources, noting specifically the efforts of Joseph Azizi, the Library Stacks Coordinator in Special Collections; Stacey Lavender, the Project Digital Archivist; and Lauren Work, the Digital Preservation Librarian. “I was amazed at all the ‘firsts’ they accomplished to get this collection ready,” she said. “This type of collecting in times of crisis often requires many hands.”

New exhibition centers on alumni and community activist experience

Today, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library is launching a new exhibition, “No Unity Without Justice: Student and Community Organizing During the 2017 Summer of Hate,” which will be on display in the First Floor Gallery through October 29, 2022. The exhibition is distinctive in that it was largely curated by UVA alumni who took part in the anti-fascist counter-protests in the summer of 2017 when they were students.

“In recent years, we’ve sought curatorial partnerships with the people and places on whom we place the lens of focus,” said Curator of University Library Exhibitions Holly Robertson. “Every curator brings a perspective — and necessarily their experience — to every exhibition. ‘No Unity Without Justice’ may be unique in that the curators have offered us a first-person perspective based on being fully embedded on the frontlines of Charlottesville just five short years ago.”

The 37-item exhibition provides personal narratives of the curators’ experiences, as well as those of various Charlottesville community activists. It was primarily curated by Kendall King, a 2018 UVA alum, artist, and community organizer; in partnership with Jalane Schmidt, a UVA associate professor of religious studies; with guest alumni curators Natalie Romero, Hannah Russell-Hunter, and Memory Project postdoctoral fellow Gillet Rosenblith. King and Romero pitched the exhibition idea to Special Collections when they were still students.

The exhibit is in partnership with the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Memory Project, and the study of democracy is a priority research area in the University’s 2030 Strategic Plan. Schmidt, who directs The Memory Project, said the exhibition aligns with the Project’s mission to sponsor events that promote more inclusive, democratic narratives of history. She worked with the curators to ensure the exhibition’s historical accuracy; all sources are cited in the exhibition and many objects include QR codes linking to news articles, Charlottesville City Council meeting minutes, and a successful civil lawsuit against organizers, promoters, and participants of the Unite the Right rally. “I have been impressed by the students’ energy in documenting these events,” she said. “Memory is not always pretty; it can be painful.”

The exhibition includes not only the personal items of the alumni curators and community members (a tear gas canister launched at counter-protestors during a Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville in July 2017; a shoulder bag used by an activist as a makeshift shield to protect students around the Jefferson statue on August 11; a student notebook with poetry, songs, sketches, and research from summer 2017), but also objects and papers related to UVA student activist history, dating back to the 1969 founding of the UVA Black Students for Freedom group.

“I hope visitors will also gain an appreciation for Charlottesville and the University’s deep, rich organizing tradition that has resulted in many victories in the past decades,” said alum curator Russell-Hunter. “It was really gratifying to articulate my experiences as a survivor — including observations and analyses that I have literally been thinking about for years — with the knowledge that it was going to reach a wide audience. I’m grateful to the Special Collections staff for giving us the space to create an honest narrative of the events of the summer of 2017.”

Robertson said she hope the exhibition is “a cathartic thing. That’s how we set up the space — it’s a place to move through another person’s experience and also to reflect on your own, whether you were there on Aug. 11 and 12 or not. We’re deeply grateful to the curators for entrusting us with their archives and their stories.”

Take a look at some of the objects in the “No Unity Without Justice” exhibit below.

 

 

“No Unity Without Justice” remains on view until October 29, 2022. See Library hours and parking information.

Press inquiries: Elyse Girard, elyse@virginia.edu.

 

 

University and Library personnel and construction workers and contractors gathered yesterday for a "topping-out ceremony" for the library renovation. The topping-out is when the last beam is placed atop a structure, and is a traditional milestone in a major construction project.

The beam was signed by Library staff, UVA facilities personnel, construction workers, and others involved in the project. Chris Rhodes, Skanska senior project manager; John Unsworth, the University librarian and dean of libraries at UVA; and Mark Stanis, director of construction for UVA, delivered remarks thanking the tradespeople involved. The remarks were translated into Spanish for the benefit of all by carpenter Alex Alverez.

The topping-out ceremony symbolically marks the transition in construction away from the exterior of the building and into a new phase as the structure is "closed up" and the interior work begins. The renovation/construction project, slated to be finished in the fall of 2023, will completely refurbish the historic envelope of the building and add new collections, research, and study space.

Read more and view photos of the topping-out ceremony from UVA Today.

Recommended by Sherri Brown, Research Librarian for English and Digital Humanities

“Antiquities” by Cynthia Ozick (Knopf, 2021)

Cynthia Ozick provides the reader with much to ponder in this compact novel. Readers get a glimpse into the thoughts of Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie through the guise of his attempt at writing a memoir. In some ways, Petrie’s attitude and escapades as he attempts to record a moment from his childhood at the Temple Academy for Boys in New York calls to mind a character befitting Donald Petrie’s 1993 film “Grumpy Old Men” or John Madden’s “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011). However, Lloyd Petrie is not a loveable character but an anti-Semite who fluctuates between his own self-aggrandizement and self-doubt. The novel questions the authenticity of memory, the significance of memoir, and the adoration of objects, all while Petrie reflects on a secret infatuation with an outcast among outcasts. One reading only scratches the surface of the treasure embedded in these pages.

“Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self” by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books, 2001)

Rebecca Walker is the daughter of famed novelist Alice Walker and civil rights lawyer Melvyn R. Leventhal. Her memoir captures the searingly harsh adolescent experience of growing up in the U.S., her childhood made particularly challenging by her multiracial heritage. Walker shares her struggle with finding her identity while feeling ever the outsider. A book that highlights both pain and resilience, this account delves into feelings of not being Black enough, not being white enough, and not being Jewish enough. While this was written more than twenty years ago, it still reflects the state of a nation that is uncomfortable with race and religion and the children who must learn to live with that discord.

“The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss (WW Norton, 2005)

I first read this book more than ten years ago and gave it three stars out of five on Goodreads. But I picked it up again this past winter, and wow, it really spoke to me this time around! This novel is written in several narrative voices. The chapters narrated by Jewish Polish American immigrant Leo Gursky alone make the book a must read. Leo is nearing the end of his life (or so he believes), and the way he sees the world and relates to it is alternately shocking, funny, sad, and touching. His loneliness is palpable — “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.” This is a book to be read slowly and contemplated to be truly enjoyed. I’m glad I came back to it. 

Recommended by Ashley Hosbach, Education and Social Science Research Librarian

“Burning Girls and Other Stories” by Veronica Schanoes (Tordotcom, 2021)

“When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.”

“Burning Girls” reclaims the fairy tale genre, viewed here through a Jewish feminist lens that subverts the Grimm brothers’ anti-Semitic tropes. Gripping and dark, Veronica Schanoes’ collection of short stories explores witchcraft, demons, and vengeance, a narrative driven by the fears and hopes of immigrants fleeing their home countries for a better life. However, Schanoes ultimately reveals that the true horrors are not the creatures lurking in the shadows, but instead are the sins of capitalism, the false promise of the “American Dream,” anti-Semitism, and the overwhelming cruelty of humanity.

Recommended by Eyal Handelsman Katz, English Ph.D. candidate at UVA

Handelsman Katz’s dissertation explores parental figures and their ties to feminist and ethnic movements and discourses in 20th and 21st century multiethnic American prose. In collaboration with the UVA Religion, Race & Democracy Lab, he recently produced a short documentary, Słabe Jajko, about his grandmother’s memories of the Holocaust.

“Bread Givers” by Anzia Yezierska (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925)

When Anzia Yezierska’s family emigrated to the United States from the Polish part of Russia in the 1880s, they Americanized their name, calling themselves the Mayers, with Anzia becoming Hattie Mayer. Yezierska would become a celebrated author in the early 20th century, penning among other novels “Bread Givers” (1925), her most famous work. The novel is a coming-of-age story that follows Sara Smolinsky as she struggles against her caricature of a father and sets out to succeed on her own terms. While the narrative bears the expected tropes of early 20th century feminist writing that often links female independence with whiteness and Americanization, there is more to Yezierska and the novel than meets the eye. How do we reconcile Sara’s attempt to Americanize herself with the author’s resolve to market herself as an ethnic writer under her birth name? Modern readers will also appreciate some of the ways in which the novel predates familiar tropes in rom-coms of the 1990s. Yezierska herself found brief success in Hollywood before becoming ultimately frustrated by its shallowness and alienation.

“The Promised Land” by Mary Antin (Houghton Mifflin, 1912)

Mary Antin, like Anzia Yezierska, was a Russian Jewish immigrant who moved to the Lower East Side and contributed to a wave of early feminist Jewish writing. “The Promised Land” (1912) was a celebrated and controversial memoir in which she traced her experiences as an immigrant and her embrace of U.S. culture. Antin’s text serves as a key to understanding contemporary issues in Jewish culture: Her vision of Jewish heritage in racial (rather than strictly religious) terms. How do Jews identify themselves, or should they? The question provoked widespread debate in Jewish communities throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is clear in Antin’s memoir. Crucially, as with Yezierska, Antin offers an intersectional answer: she asks not just what does it mean to be Jewish American, but what does it mean to be a Jewish American woman?

“The Collected Stories” by Grace Paley (Farrar Staus Giroux, 1994)

Grace Paley’s “The Collected Stories” includes three of her excellent story collections: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (1974), and “Later in the Same Day” (1985). In reading these stories, we see the evolution of one of the 20th century’s most talented prose writers. From the youthful energy of her early work (particularly “The Loudest Voice,” wherein a young Jewish girl is given the starring role in her school’s nativity play) to the charmingly adolescent and poignantly existential second collection (including “The Long Distance Runner,” in which a young mother hides herself in her old family home, adopted by its new inhabitants) to her more political later work (such as “Listening,” where she offers a form of activism based on the power of small gestures we can do for each other), one cannot help but be seduced by Paley’s verve, gentleness, and humor.

“The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick (1980). Printed in book format by Knopf, 1989.

Theodor Adorno famously stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How can one write anything that aims to represent such atrocities? In other words, can or should the Holocaust be represented? Many authors have taken various approaches to writing about the Holocaust, from the purely factual to the comic and beyond. Cynthia Ozick’s famous short story, “The Shawl,” seeks to represent the Shoah not through fact, but through feeling. A deeply visceral story, “The Shawl” follows Rosa, a mother trying against all odds to survive the concentration camps, with Ozick’s magical realism serving as a way to navigate a reality so awful and tragic that it seems as if it could only be unreal (an approach not without detractors). Please check out Ozick’s sequel “Rosa,” which follows some of the characters as they attempt to live on in the aftermath of unshakeable trauma.

“Days of Awe” by Achy Obejas (Ballantine Books, 2001)

When someone told Achy Obejas that her surname suggested that she had Jewish ancestry, she was motivated to dig deep into her family history. Her discoveries led her to write “Days of Awe” (2001), which, while not autobiographical, allowed her to reflect on the history of what are known as “crypto-Jews” (Jews who secretly adhere to Judaism while outwardly professing another faith, especially Sephardic Jews who faced forced conversion in Spain). “Days of Awe” follows Alejandra, a Cuban American woman who, in her travels back to Cuba, uncovers her father’s secret Jewish heritage. Through Alejandra’s plight as a lesbian woman navigating what it means to be a Jewish Cuban immigrant in the United States, Obejas offers us a complex commentary on the very notion of ethnicity.

Recommended by Hannah Jane LeDuff, UVA alum

Hannah Jane LeDuff earned her Master’s degree in English with a concentration in World Religion and World Literature in 2021. She is currently an editor for a committee of the Mississippi Legislature.

“The Book of Separation: A Memoir” by Tova Mirvis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

Tova Mirvis’s memoir details her own journey of leaving her Orthodox Jewish marriage and community to explore the unmapped terrain of a world outside of the religion and tradition in which she was raised. This memoir inspires readers to live their lives true to themselves without the fetters of the expectations of others.

Also recommended by Hannah Jane:

• “A Letter to Harvey Milk: Short Stories” by Lesléa Newman (University of Wisconsin Press, Terrace Books, 2004)
• “The Ladies Auxiliary” by Tova Mirvis (WW Norton, 1999)
• And for children: “Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail” by Lesléa Newman (Charlesbridge, 2020)

Researchers can direct queries about Jewish American literature to Sherri Brown and research questions regarding Jewish Studies to Miguel Valladares-Llata, Librarian for Romance Languages and Latin American Studies, whose subject specialties include French, German, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.