Judith Pearl Summerfield's Books

A Man Comes from Someplace

Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time. Second Edition

By: Judith Pearl Summerfield

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

A Man Comes from Someplace

Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time. Second Edition

By: Judith Pearl Summerfield

A Man Comes from Someplace is a story of a lost world, a story in history of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in Ukraine before WWI. As cultural study, the narrative draws upon the oral stories of the author’s father, family letters, eyewitness accounts, immigration papers, etc., and cultural research. The narrative becomes a transformative space to re-present story as performance, a meta-narrative, and an auto-ethnography for the author to reflect upon the effects of the stories on her own life, as daughter of a survivor, and as teacher/scholar. Summerfield raises questions about immigration, survival, resilience, place and identity, how story functions as antidote to trauma, a means of making sense of the world, and as resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence we know the past and remember those who came before. In 2011, she found her way back to the place her family came from in Ukraine. The book is now being read by students in their ESL classes in Novokoonstantinov, Ukraine.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

291

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004370978

ISBN 13

9789004370975

A Man Comes from Someplace

Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time

By: Judith Pearl Summerfield

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

A Man Comes from Someplace

Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time

By: Judith Pearl Summerfield

A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time is a cultural study of a multi-generational Jewish family from a shtetl in southwestern Ukraine before World War I to their international lives in the 21st century. The narrative, told from multiple perspectives, becomes a transformative space for re-presenting family stories as cultural performance. The study draws from many sources: ethnographic interviews with an oral storyteller (the author's father), family letters, papers from immigration and relief organizations of the 1920s, eyewitness reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, genealogy, and cultural, historical, and literary research. The book investigates the ways family stories can be collected, interpreted, and re-presented to situate story in history and to re-envision connections between the past, present, and future. Family stories become memory sites for interrogating questions of loss and displacement, exile, immigration, survival, resilience, and identity. Stories function as antidotes to trauma, a means of making sense of the world. Memory is an act of resistance, the refusal to be silenced or erased, the insistence that we know the past and remember those who came before.

Average ratings

N/A