Explores how Jewish immigrant authors writing in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew developed innovative narrative forms as a form of cultural resistance.

Translational Encounters examines how Jewish immigrant authors transformed modern American writing by making translation itself into a narrative technique for representing consciousness. Focusing on authors who wrote in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew during and in the aftermath of the mass migration era, this book offers a new historiography of Jewish-American literature, one that challenges monolingual canons and demonstrates how narrative form itself became an instrument of cultural resistance. Through close readings of works by Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Grace Paley, Lamed Shapiro, Y. D. Berkovitz, L. A. Arieli, and neglected voices from the American Yiddish theater, Danny Luzon shows how these writers use "translational narration"—narrating events that occur in one language but are perceived in another—to capture the immigrant mind as it moves between languages, cultural norms, and habits of perception. Drawing on extensive archival research and engaging with current trends in translation studies, modernist studies, and Yiddish studies, Translational Encounters provides scholars and students with a new framework for understanding how multilingual literature may shape new political imaginaries through its epistemological multivocality.