15 - Writing and Remembering Jewish Middle Eastern Pasts

Summary

This chapter addresses a part of rich cultural production by analyzing recent prose narratives of Jewish Egyptian and Iranian worlds published in the United States. The stories of Middle Eastern Jews present a way of rethinking perceptions of intractable historical conflict and irremediable difference that help perpetuate conflict. Lucette Lagnado exposes the complexity of affiliations and politics in telling vignettes throughout her two books but withdraws it in such observations that reduce global and national politics to colonial differences and clashes of civilizations. The Jewish narratives need to be viewed in the context of the cultural production, from poetry to television, cinema, and digital storytelling by other Iranian Americans of the past decade. Jewish Middle Eastern writing enriches the U.S. literary canon with the relatively rare and skillful portrayal of Jewish-Muslim confluences, a topic on which there is very little research and that merits a lot more attention.