Abstract
Rachel Lichtenstein’s books, along with her multimedia art, represent her explorations of her British Jewish identity and her place in British Jewish culture as an imaginative odyssey. Her work represents research, stories, and traces from London’s Jewish past and multicultural present as well as from Poland and Israel, her family’s accounts, and the testimony of recent immigrants and long-time residents. Lichtenstein is a place writer whose artistic projects subject her relationship to the Jewish past and East End to critical interrogation through a metaphorical method composed of fragments that represent varied segments of Jewish history and memory as well as wandering as a narrative of personal exploration.
Highlights
British Jewish cultural life appears to be thriving
British Jewish artists and writers are no longer afflicted with “reticence and self-censorship born of anxiety and embarrassment”, there is no longer a “need to justify [ . . . ] the focus on a relatively small minority group in a society and culture still coping with ethnic pluralism” (Kushner and Ewence 2012, p. 6; Gilbert 2012, p. 275)
As Hannah Ewence and Tony Kushner proffer, the study of British Jewish history and culture has moved beyond the nation, directing attention to “global influences in national Jewish cultural production” (Kushner and Ewence 2012, p. 6)
Summary
British Jewish cultural life appears to be thriving. According to scholars in the field, because. A multimedia example of reconfiguring British Jewish wandering in relation to contemporary British Jewish identity is the art and writing of Rachel Lichtenstein. Along with her multimedia art, represent her explorations of her British Jewish identity and her place in British Jewish culture as an imaginative odyssey. Lichtenstein’s writing falls within the genre of creative non-fiction while she identifies as a place writer She explains her combination of imaginative and investigative narratives on the first page of On Brick Lane by declaring that she translated her grandparents’ histories of migration and “rich cultural and intellectual life” into a “mythical landscape” Lichtenstein assigns her art and writing derive from an indeterminate search and construction of the Jewish legacy she will claim as the pathway to her British Jewish identity. Her multidirectional itineraries explore the unsettled past and present to build a multifocal narrative that expresses her British Jewish identity as an autobiogeographical chronicle
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