A Home Between Worlds

For more than a century readers and critics have debated what makes a work of fiction Jewish. Some have focused on the writer’s identity; others on language, religious themes, or historical setting. A Home Between Worlds offers a new perspective: Jewish fiction as defined not simply by who writes it or what it portrays, but by the distinctive imaginative world it creates – a literary home for a people whose history has so often been shaped by exile.
Drawing on stories by Jewish writers hailing from Canada and the United States – Lamed Shapiro, A.M. Klein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chava Rosenfarb, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, and Sigal Samuel – Jesse Toufexis explores what it means to write Jewishly in secular North American fiction. Rather than offering an essential definition of Jewish literature, he argues for a realm of possibilities in which the natural and supernatural converge. Across more than a century of writing, Toufexis traces the recurring presence of ghostly figures, dreams and visions, wandering strangers, hidden identities, and encounters with the uncanny as a way of exploring Jewish experience. Bringing together possible worlds theory and Jewish literary criticism, A Home Between Worlds shows how these stories blur the boundaries between the real and the more-than-real while reflecting the historical truths of diaspora, displacement, and cultural continuity.
At a time when questions of identity, belonging, and communal memory are increasingly urgent, A Home Between Worlds offers readers a fresh framework for understanding Jewish literature beyond traditional definitions.