Through the Bay Window: Harriet Lane Levy's 920 O'Farrell Street as Modernist Memoir.
This essay examines an understudied Jewish American autobiographical text, Harriet Lane Levy's memoir 920 O'Farrell Street (1947). Completed when she was eighty years old, the memoir uses modernist aesthetics to describe Levy's Jewish upbringing in late nineteenth-century San Francisco. Arguing that...
| Publicado en: | Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Vol. 39; no. 3; pp. 1 - 39 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Purdue University Press
Winter2021
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=154542774&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 154542774 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 08828539 6A0 jtl: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies issn: 08828539 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Winter2021 vid: 39 iid: 3 pid: 19334 pub: Purdue University Press artinfo: ui: 154542774 10.1353/sho.2021.0031 ppf: 1 ppct: 38 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 692KB tig: atl: Through the Bay Window: Harriet Lane Levy's 920 O'Farrell Street as Modernist Memoir. aug: au: Harrison-Kahan, Lori su: Memoirs Inner cities American Jewish history American Jews History of cartography Jewish women Twenty-first century Modernism (Literary period) San Francisco (Calif.) sug: subj: San Francisco (Calif.) Memoirs Inner cities American Jewish history American Jews History of cartography Jewish women Twenty-first century Modernism (Literary period) keyword: Jewish American autobiography modernism San Francisco ab: This essay examines an understudied Jewish American autobiographical text, Harriet Lane Levy's memoir 920 O'Farrell Street (1947). Completed when she was eighty years old, the memoir uses modernist aesthetics to describe Levy's Jewish upbringing in late nineteenth-century San Francisco. Arguing that 920 O'Farrell Street fills a significant gap in Jewish American literary history, I consider Levy's modernist memoir as an alternative to the established Jewish American autobiographical tradition, which has privileged the stories of working-class immigrants making their way from the ghetto into mainstream America. As I demonstrate through close analysis of the memoir, and in particular Levy's use of the Victorian house as a structuring device, 920 O'Farrell Street expands the parameters of Jewish American literary history by mapping Jewishness to the geographic and architectural sites of turn-of-the-twentieth-century San Francisco, and displacing the ghetto as the sole locus of Jewish life and literature in the United States. Further, Jewish American literary scholarship's New York-centrism and its privileging of the ghetto tale have obscured the pivotal role played by California Jewish women in the early stages of the modernist movement. As a corrective, I preface my close reading of the memoir with background on Levy, placing her in the context of a group of remarkable women—including Gertrude Stein, an Oakland resident in her youth, and Alice B. Toklas, Levy's O'Farrell Street neighbor—who moved between the middle-class Jewish communities of northern California and the expatriate salons of Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is the property of Purdue University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies holder: Purdue University Press dt: @attributes: year: 2021 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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