Jewish American literature? The term conjures up images of Philip Roth and maybe Jonathan Safran Foer or Nicole Krauss. These are U.S.-born writers for whom whiteness is a given, migration is a thing of the past, as is Eastern Europe. But what happens to these dominant themes when they are approached from the perspective of immigrants from the former USSR? Their 21st-century writing often stages strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, and finally, migration. The novels by writers such as Gary Shteyngart, Sana Krasikov, Boris Fishman, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya demonstrate how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.

Karolina Krasuska is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, Poland and the founding director of the research group Gender/Sexuality at the ASC. Her interests include 20th- and 21st-century transnational literature, including Jewish American writing, memory studies, gender/queer theory. Recipient of multiple scholarships and grants, she is currently a part of the Polish-German grant team “QueerIt: Queer Theory in Transit” and the PI on the grant “Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women's Rhetorical Strategies, 1970-2020.” She is the author of a Polish-language monograph, Płeć i naród: Trans/lokacje (Gender and Nation: Trans/locations) (2012), which examines modernist texts from a transnational, gender-oriented perspective, and a co-editor of Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (2015). She also translates gender/queer theory into Polish, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (2008). Her book Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in July 2024 (available open access). Twitter/X: @karolinakrasusk