Days Of Awe Research Articles

They Don't Tell You

They Don't Tell You

Book Review

Book Review

Reading “Days of Awe” through Queer Soviet Jewish Immigrant Barbarism

Reading “Days of Awe” through Queer Soviet Jewish Immigrant Barbarism

Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, by ATALIA OMER

Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians, by ATALIA OMER

Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians. By Atalia Omer

Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians. By Atalia Omer

절기를 위한 유대교의 선지서 성구집: 유월절과 경외의 날들의 관점에서 본 오순절

절기를 위한 유대교의 선지서 성구집: 유월절과 경외의 날들의 관점에서 본 오순절

Beyond the Latina Boom: New Directions within the Field of US Latina Literature

This article aims to identify a lesser-known generation of female writers that has given a new direction to US Latina literature in the twenty-first century. Beyond the significance of the Latina boom that marked the 1980s and 1990s, the latest generation differs from their predecessors in important ways, amounting to a paradigm shift in US Latina literature that needs to be thoroughly explored. To carry out this task, I have selected three canonical Latina boom novels: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992). These texts will be contrasted with Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001), Achy Obejas’s Days of Awe (2001) and Felicia Luna Lemus’s Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties (2004). My contention is that while the US Latina literary boom might have sought synthesis or the creation of a third space, associated with Gloria Anzaldua’s consciousness of the borderlands , these twenty-first century female writers offer representations of nonnormative sexualities that take indeterminacy and ambiguity to a limit that defies all resolution. Keywords: US Latina literature; Latina boom; borderlands; new generation; nonnormative sexualities

Marcus Borg, Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century

Marcus Borg, <i>Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-first Century</i>

Poems Read Us

Poems Read Us Anne Whitehouse (bio) Capture Theory Joy Gaines-Friedler Kelsay Books www.kelsaybooks.com 64 Pages; Print, $14.00 In the introduction to Capture Theory, her recent poetry collection, Joy Gaines-Friedler explains the meaning of her title: a political term used to explain the way in which regulatory agencies have been captured by the very industries they were established to regulate. It is also a now debunked theory of how the moon was captured by the earth's gravitational pull. The term is, of course, being used here metaphorically. In her view, our life experiences are "captured" within us, and at propitious moments, they resurface. The idea is a variant of Proust's concept of involuntary memory, which is true memory because it appears of its own volition sparked by an association or sense perception. In the first poem, "Touch," capture theory is expressed by the image of a chickadee perched on the speaker's hand, encompassing opposites: You don't hold it. It holds you. It is a kiss, both hard & soft, both lips & bone. Gaines-Friedler teaches creative writing in the Detroit area, and she has worked with the incarcerated, an experience which has affected her worldview. She has a natural sympathy with those who live at the margins of society, the disenfranchised or otherwise unheard, whose voices are ignored in our national conversation. Included are those who are no longer able to speak for themselves, like Gaines-Friedler's mother, institutionalized with late-stage dementia. Gaines-Friedler divines a kind of holiness in the images of her mother and the other women lined up in their wheelchairs: Tonight I willcall my mother, ask if she's eatenor spoken with friends.I will wade through her silence while she tries to remember. Like the half-moonlit & unlit, present & concealed,we are known & unknowable. "Days of Awe" My mother's in a wheelchair by the window.Aides sweep crumbs from the tables around her.She's lost the map to wordsbut smiles when she sees me. There are flowers on the slip-on shoes I've brought her.Two-dimensional violas. She stares down at them.I find myself seeking language for her. "Lack of Memory Floor" In "Over the Rainbow," she locates her mother in the past and herself in her mother's last days, the differences between them contrasted as light and darkness: The difference between usis not what we see but how we see it. It's the rainbow she tried to capture—all that yearning for somewhere else— without noticing the darkit shows up against. "Over the Rainbow" Loss is an anthem bracketing the collection: The deaths years ago of two close friends, one to AIDS and one killed by her husband, continue to haunt Gaines-Friedler. "When the World Converted to Acronyms" poignantly recalls the feeling of living in the midst of the AIDS epidemic: We began talking in code:HIV, AZT, AIDS. The pipes shifted in the walls as the heat came on.The crows left to seek safer neighborhoods. The screaming ambulances gave wayto holes of silence & families began to count their living."When the World Converted to Acronyms" The speaker's continued grief for her murdered friend and her guilt for not having prevented her death is the subject of "Home Repair." The poem takes the speaker and her friend back to a time of innocence, before sexual relationships complicated their lives, and then dissolves this Edenic vision: The still-remaining moonlight drains its gold-platingonto the front lawn—like that morning, & others,when you & I, without boyfriends, finally made it home after watching the headlights dimthrough the window of our favorite all night diner.Moonlight is a façade.A front. A disguise. A veil. "Home Repair" By distilling a painful experience into an image, by expressing it in order to foster connection and understanding, poetry becomes a means of survival—perhaps the means of survival. "Grab Hold" evokes the speaker's long-ago miscarriage and her regret that she never became a mother: As my knees hit the floorI threw my arms around you...

The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin (review)

Reviewed by: The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times by Brewster Chamberlin David Wyatt (bio) Brewster Chamberlin, The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times (University Press of Kansas, 2015), 395 pp. “Friendship is what we have,” Stanley Plumly writes, in his exuberant new book about the immortal dinner hosted in London in 1817 by painter Benjamin Haydon and attended by friends Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, and other persons long since forgotten by history. The sentence came to mind when Stanley—his office is next to mine in Tawes Hall at the University of Maryland—informed me that he was listening to the audio book of Seán Hemingway’s “Restored” edition of A Moveable Feast, a book he admitted to having read in its original form “at least ten times.” The obvious pleasure Stanley was taking in revisiting Hemingway’s memoir of the days of awe in Paris struck me as touching, and a little counterintuitive, since one moral of Hemingway’s story is that friendship is what we lose. If love and work are the central concerns when telling the story of any great writer’s life—in Hemingway’s case, the four marriages and the ever-increasing count of “works” (as of this writing, the number stands at thirty-five, eighteen of which have been published posthumously)—then friendship is a kind of third force, a barometer measuring where the writer [End Page 608] thinks he stands in relation to the men he has allowed to get close to him. At the heart of male friendship, Hemingway’s story reveals, lies something deeply competitive, and, in Hemingway’s case, the intensity of the ambition, as well as the moodiness induced by his psycho-chemical make-up, made the effort of maintaining enduring friendship a challenging thing. These thoughts are induced by a reading of Brewster Chamberlin’s The Hemingway Log, an almost day-by-day chronology of “where he was and with whom.” What one looks for in a book of this kind are the long structures, and the one that stands out most, apart from the deepening mystery of the marriages, is the making and breaking of friendships. Bill Smith provides the first major instance. On page 8, under the year 1895, Chamberlin writes: “August 20: William Smith (Kate’s brother) is born in Saint Louis, Missouri.” Smith and EH meet on page 16, in July, 1916, at Horton Bay. They spend summers together and Ernest falls half in love with Bill’s older sister Kate. Bill is on hand for the summer of 1920, when Ernest, clearly at sea after his return from the wars in Italy, is ejected by his mother from the Windemere cottage after sneaking “out of the house for a midnight picnic.” Moving to Chicago, Ernest bunks with Bill’s brother Y. K., only to discover that Y. K. has a common-law wife named Doodles. Shocked by the arrangement, Ernest very explicitly uninvites Y. K. from his parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Four months later Bill sends “a letter to EH breaking off their friendship.” It is February 1922 now, and the newly-married Hemingway has moved to Paris. Bill and Ernest have ceased to correspond. Then, in April 1924, Y. K.’s “probable lover” shows up at his residence, fires a gun at Doodles, and kills Henry Manning, “an elderly building caretaker.” The shooter—a former Chicago assistant US attorney named Wanda Stoper— then poisons herself at the Hotel Statler in Detroit. On April 25, Ernest reads in a French newspaper about Stoper’s attempt on Doodles’s life. In December, “realizing that much of what EH said about his brother Y. K.’s quasi-marriage to Doodles was true, BS writes a reconciliation letter to his best friend.” Ernest writes at length to Bill in response and the friendship is resumed. In the next act in the story, Hemingway convinces Smith to travel to Paris where he promises to find him editing work. Bill referees a boxing match between Ernest and Jean Prévost but not before his friend asks him to shorten the rounds “in which he tired and Prévost...

A Ritual Dismantling of Walls

A Ritual Dismantling of Walls

On the Margins and Other Impossible Spaces

On the Margins and Other Impossible Spaces Naomi Seidman (bio) My friend tells an old Yiddish joke about a rabbi who comes into the synagogue during the Days of Awe, prostrates himself in front of the Holy Ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” A few minutes later, the chazn (cantor) walks in, prostrates himself in front of the ark of the Torah and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” After yet a few more minutes, in comes the lowly shammes (synagogue sexton), who prostrates himself in front of the ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” Hearing this, the rabbi sits up, pokes the chazn, and, pointing to the shammes, says: “Look who’s a nothing!” (ze nor ver s’iz a gornisht). On the Margins of Modernism1 If the students of Chana Kronfeld form a Wittgensteinian rope, which “consists of fibres, but . . . does not get its strength from any fibre which runs through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that there is a vast number of fibres overlapping,”2 then the fiber that constitutes my own part in the cohort of Chana’s students twists its frizzy way near the top of that rope. If we are rather a braid—Chana’s more feminine and Jewish term for a complex interweaving of periods and trends connected through partial overlap and complex “family resemblance”—I am down near the bottom, in the narrowest part just beyond the hair band. What I mean by these elaborate metaphors is that I was there at the very beginning of Chana’s teaching career at Berkeley, having arrived as a doctoral student in the fall of 1984, the semester before Chana started. The first seminar she taught, if I remember correctly, was held around her living room sofa since Chana, pregnant with Maya, was on bed rest. Somehow we discovered that she was craving loquats, and we brought her bags of the fruit, a curious twist on the way American students, back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, brought their lady-teachers a red apple. I had never tasted a loquat before, nor had a teacher anything like Chana Kronfeld. We all became aware soon enough of Chana’s breadth of knowledge, clarity of mind, and methodological rigor. But along with all that came a sense of her particular and even peculiar tastes and enthusiasms, not only for certain hard-to-find fruits and one particular color (purple) but also for specific writers (David Fogel, Dvora Baron, Yehuda Amichai), biblical texts (Genesis 22, the Song of Songs), literary movements, trends, or schools (modernisms of all [End Page 9] stripes), musicians (Leonard Cohen), films (Monty Python’s The Life of Brian) and jokes (the one cited in the epigraph above, to which we were introduced in Bluma Goldstein’s Yiddish rendering.) These enthusiasms were illuminated but hardly exhausted by close reading, just as Chana’s fierce disdain for gossip masquerading as literary criticism was explained by, but also somehow exceeded, her neo-formalist training and inclinations. To the range of fallacies inherited from the New Critics, the intentional, the natural, and—my own personal favorite—the pathetic, we learned another Kronfeldian set: the religious fallacy (particularly prevalent among organizers of solemn national-memorial events in need of poetry that could be misread as pious) and its cousin, the Jewish fallacy, to which American Jews were particularly and embarrassingly prone. The study of Baron led us to a new set of fallacies, the ethnographic and the biographical, which were especially egregious not so much for their wrongness as for their favored target: women writers. It was with Baron, perhaps, that we recognized that close reading was not only rigorous academic practice, but also a cultural recovery mission, in which a long-undervalued woman’s voice was not only recovered (and translated into English) but also shown to contain complexities diminished by the purely biographical view. Alongside such pitfalls as the biographical and religious, into which I found myself habitually stumbling, we also acquired the sense that there were entire subjects...

Genesis

September–October 2013 • 43 photo : kaloian Genesis Achy Obejas The first time I saw your father, I stared back into the pool at your reflection while he waded through, the water moving in gentle circles away from us. The first time, I thought it was the Nile we’d dipped our heads into, the water thick with primordial cells, parthenogenesis producing near identical beings: his skin, your chin, the way your lips pull back to reveal teeth, the slope of his nose. I thought the water was playing tricks with the light, obscuring the line at the horizon, a ribbon of black and white DNA shimmering like schools of fish. I thought perhaps I’d confused which side of the reflection you – or he – was on, my heart sealed up in a tank instead, with two inches of water and a ton of salt, hallucinating in an imaginary womb, looking for you – I’m sure of that: I was looking for you – his co-joined daughter, my hermaphroditic lover. I dreamt I made love to your father, straddling his hips, taking the soft flesh of his waist in my hands and kneading it between my fingers until it came loose. I make love to you, our bodies red as newborns, loud and fierce, two amphibian women choosing to breathe, splashing the water as madly as an ancient god might have at our emergence. Achy Obejas is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Ruins, Days of Awe, and three other books of fiction. Her poetry chapbook, This Is What Happened in Our Other Life, was both a critical favorite and a best-seller. Also a translator, her Spanish translation of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a finalist for Spain’s Esther Benítez Translation Prize. Born in Havana, she currently lives in Chicago with her wife, Megan Bayles, their son, Ilan, and too many cats. During an email exchange, Nicholas YB Wong told me that he feels “linguistically inferior ” because he is a Chinese poet who lives in China but publishes in English in the United States. Wong’s anxiety about writing in a foreign tongue is misplaced. His poetry displays a linguistic command that few poets achieve. When I asked what poets he admired, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he read gay poet D. A. Powell—surprised because other than sharing a neoformalist and elliptical aesthetic, Wong’s unerotic verse has little in common with Powell’s homoerotic poetics. In “corydon & alexis,” Powell invokes at once Virgil’s second eclogue and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”: shepherdboy? not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available. unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain: a reference already escaping. I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd. According to Wong, “Inside America” (page 47) evokes “America as an interior space housing the narrator who is trapped between the impulse to leave and the obsessive, fetishistic attention to details of the ‘house.’” Instead of an erotic poetics, however, Wong constructs poetics of place and belonging. The poem’s primary moment occurs when Wong exhorts the reader, “Call me faggot,” an echo of Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” in which faggot, like Ishmael, serves as a metonym for the Other. This imperative not only marks a shift from first to second person, establishing the reader as interlocutor, it also functions as an act of selfnaming , a positive declaration of queer identity. I began this essay by saying that I never wanted to be called queer. Today I welcome it. Like the writers featured in this issue, my queerness informs who I am and how I see the world. It’s been a long journey from reading The Front Runner in 1977 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, to writing about queer lit for World Literature Today. Just as I have found my place here, the writers featured in this issue have taken their place alongside a long list of notable world authors. Dallas, Texas cover feature ...

Law as Lyric, Lyric as Star Trek: A Reading of Kol Nidre

Law as Lyric, Lyric as Star Trek: A Reading of Kol Nidre Eric Murphy Selinger Some years ago, I decided to stop coming to Yom Kippur services—at least, to the services for adults. This wasn’t just a matter of scheduling or comfort, although I’ll admit that the 90‐minute children’s service I took up instead has a good deal to offer on both counts, including a live performance of the Book of Jonah, complete with a four‐foot cardboard fish and a pint‐sized female God in a cotton‐ball beard. I decided to stop coming because, frankly, I didn’t see the point. When the second intifada broke out, right in the middle of the Days of Awe, the responses I heard to it before Yom Kippur were just the same as those I heard after the holiday. Those who blamed the Palestinians before, blamed them afterward. Those who blamed Israel, blamed Israel. Those who didn’t know what to do, or say, or think, remained confused. For my friends, for “my people” as I saw them on the news, and, most of all, for myself, 25 hours of fasting and prayer hadn’t done a thing. At which point, bring on the cotton balls. My years among the kinderlach haven’t taught me much about politics. They have, however, let me step back from the text of the Yom Kippur services a while—let me see it freshly, and not through that scrim of disappointment. In this essay I want to look at one part of that service rather closely, the way I might look at a poem, with an eye to what it says and does and can teach us about how to make the holiday do its work. I want to look at “Kol Nidre.” The first thing to notice about Kol Nidre is, I think, how very strange it is—and strange in a variety of ways. Let’s start with the invocation, those first few lines we rise at, setting the stage: By authority of the court on high and by the authority of this court below, with divine consent and with the consent of this congregation we hereby declare that it is permitted to pray with those who have transgressed. Notice how, right from the start, we’re in the world of make‐believe, of performance, just as much as we would be at any children’s service. We rise and speak, and two courts appear: one visible, played by us, and one invisible, echoing our actions. These two courts, of heaven and earth, are in concord—neither sits (or stands) in judgment on the other. This is, then, not simply an invocation, but an incantation: a set of words that make things happen. “With the consent of XYZ” is, in fact, a common formula in Jewish folk religion, a start to exorcisms and other forms of counter‐magic. Joshua Trachtenberg, in Jewish Magic and Superstition, quotes several spells like this: By the authority of the Heavenly Court and by the authority of the Earthly Court, with the consent of the Holy One, blessed by He, and with the consent of Elijah…we release and annul and cancel all the oaths that have been sworn…by every angel and demon and all the angels of destruction and demonic winds against Israel, . . . With the consent of the heavenly and earthly courts, of our sacred Torah, of the great and small Sanhedrins, and of this holy congregation, we release N son of N from all the curses, maledictions, oaths, vows…uttered in his home or directed against him, be they his own curses or the curses of others against his person, etc. So: we start with magic. Not the binding of demons or dissolution of curses, or even the undoing of an oath; that will come later. Rather, we make a gesture of permission. “It is permitted to pray/with those who have transgressed.” What magic does this declaration perform? The first thing it does, at least to my suspicious mind, is raise a few doubts about the rest of you. What do I know, after all, about what you’ve...

These are the Days of Awe, and: I Grew Up in the Dust of Many Horses

These are the Days of Awe The hillside ritual of green is in its final hour. No one is criticized for caring how they look or for not caring. Wrongs turn into bread which we throw into the river or into anything else moving steadily away. If this is what it takes - four hundred men walking arm in arm up the side of a mountain, up and down until the lost hiker is found - how then, at a roadside stand picking over gourds and Indian corn, in a house newly disguised by a weight of leaves, peering into a darkened store window where dozens of birds sleep, each head pressed into a boulder of feathers, will we be found? I Grew Up in the Dust of Many Horses And with every disappearance something disappeared in me, though wise men say there is no leaving anything behind. The dust itself so often formed the cover - fine clouds like newborn insect swarms, [End Page 67] like river mist hung low on the hips of evening. We forgot what once had been by the time it lifted or, more often, we had gone to sleep, leather saddles still warm beneath us, jade pebbles cooling our sunburnt lips. Someone says this is the land of Genghis Khan. At this, someone laughs out loud. A mare stamps her feet above my tooled pillow. She is used to hearing the same men speak each night around the same green-gray fire of eyes. Will we see her there in front of us in morning when it is time to lift the saddles and ride?

Days of awe: The praxis of news coverage during national crisis

The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada (September 28–October 9, 2000). We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media (television news stations and newspapers) covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israel's Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse (mainly in concurrence with the politicians).

Next Year in the Diaspora: The Uneasy Articulation of Transcultural Positionality in Achy Obejas's Days of Awe

Next Year in the Diaspora: The Uneasy Articulation of Transcultural Positionality in Achy Obejas's Days of Awe

Days of Awe (review)

Reviewed by: Days of Awe Sharon Solwitz Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas. New York: Ballantine, 2001. 371pp. $24.95. Days of Awe, Achy Obejas’s second novel and third book of fiction, centers on its Cuban American protagonist’s discovery of her family’s concealed Jewishness. At twenty-eight Alejandra San Jose believes both her parents to be loosely practicing Catholics. When she visits Cuba for the first time as an interpreter, ignorant of her Jewish roots, she is also dismissive and somewhat embarrassed by her Cuban heritage, [End Page 123] clinging to her difference from the natives, her superiority as an American woman. She “could care less about Cuba,” which to her is no more or less interesting than other countries she hasn’t seen yet. She flaunts her perfect American English, using body language to show her preference for the American speakers. Being Cuban, for her, is “an accident of timing and geography.” Then she meets the Menachs, old family friends who enlarge the boundaries of the known world for her—with regard not only to religion but sexuality, nationality, identity itself. The book’s title and central image, Days of Awe—the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which the Almighty is deciding who will be written up in the “Book of Life”—is the darkest period in the Jewish year, with its focus on sin and atonement. It is this sense of sin and the quest for atonement that fuels the book. Even in the United States where Judaism can be practiced for the most part without undesirable consequences, Alejandra’s father won’t admit to being Jewish, while in his dark basement, in tallis and tefillin, he davens, weeping. Alejandra, who could live a comfortable American life, is increasingly drawn toward Cuba with its increasing poverty and hopelessness, where, in the face of her friends’ anger towards those who flee or who are free to come and go, she must continually justify herself. Obejas’s linkage of being Jewish with being Cuban is intriguing. As an escapee from Cuba, Alejandra is also an exile, just as Jews are eternal exiles in the countries in which they reside, since their original exile from the Land of Israel. The equivalence is borne out in language as well, Miami Cubans referred to as the “Jews of the Caribbean.” Likewise Spanish and Hebrew lack words for certain aspects of the divine. “I like to think that our inability to express heaven is simply a measure of our respect for a higher power; that, like certain Orthodox Jews who insist on never pronouncing or writing the word for god, we have a deeper understanding. . . .” A gift to the reader, this perception of likenesses. If there is a weakness in the book, it is that it seems more interested, in the end, in ideas than story. Characters momentarily fascinate only to disappear entirely for such long stretches we have to thumb back to recall who they are. Some of the most beguiling events aren’t even referred to let alone woven into the book’s causal fabric. Said one annoyed Amazon customer reviewer: “There did not seem to be any continuity, it was hard to get a feel for the characters because they were mentioned so infrequently.” It isn’t hard to find the source of this reader’s complaint. The book makes use of characters, events, and ideas, but there is little fusion, the ongoing transmutation of idea into scene that one expects of even an unconventional novel. Interesting, though, is what happens to reading when expectations are altered. Let’s say the book is not a “novel,” despite the word emblazoned on the jacket, but a [End Page 124] meditation, Alejandra’s earnest, impassioned quest for an identity so complex that it’s quasi-impossible to dramatize. As an imaginary memoir Days of Awe offers insights that, like all true mitzvot, repair the torn fabric of the universe. Sharon Solwitz Department of English Purdue University Copyright © 2003 Purdue University

Deconstructing a Secret History: Trace, Translation, and Crypto-Judaism in Achy Obejas's "Days of Awe"

n her 2001 presidential address to The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Bonnie TuSmith argues for the importance of studying and teaching multi-ethnic literature but opens a debate about the ways in which scholars of multi-ethnic literature read and evaluate ethnic texts. She says that our approaches to ethnic texts often fall short of substantive critical analysis, and that if, as scholars, and teachers, read ethnically identified texts exclusively for their cultural content, their political message, their historicity, or whatever, are not really treating them as literary works of art-as artistic creations (8-9). In discussions following and prompted by these remarks, it became clear that scholars of multi-ethnic literature are facing a schism in terms of critical responses to texts. While TuSmith raises the point that we are quick to excavate and promote hitherto bypassed works from margin-

Days of Awe: September 11, 2001 and its Cultural Psychodynamics

Near the end of September 2001, my seven year-old son, Zev, came home from school with, among other papers, a pencil drawing he had made. Everyone in the second grade class had been asked to draw something about Halloween. His was a simple sketch. In the center of the 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper was a tall, thin rectangular boxy figure, flanked on either side by a couple of long, concave, petal-like strokes. I asked him what it was about—was there a story? He said, "It's a haunted tower, and at the bottom is the haunted basement." I did not ask him for the geographical reference or for an interpretation. Nor did I think I needed to.