American Born Av Rachel M. Brownstein

An incisive memoir of Rachel M. Brownstein¿s seemingly quintessential Jewish mother, a resilient and courageous immigrant in New York. When she arrived alone in New York in 1924, eighteen-year-old Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. Reisel had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, ¿American born.¿¿The distinguished biographer and critic Rachel M. Brownstein began writing about her mother Reisel during the Trump years, dwelling on the tales she told about her life and the questions they raised about nationalism, immigration, and storytelling. For most of the twentieth century, Brownstein¿s mother gracefully balanced her identities as an American and a Jew. Her values, her language,