The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

Abstract

HE AM BIDGE HTORY OF EW SH AM EICAN LITATURE of the Cambridge History hints strongly at this idea. As she calls our attention to the difference between “geography” and “ideology” in her introductory discussion of Lazarus’s celebration of the “virgin world” of the United States in her poem “1492” (1), Hana Wirth-Nesher reminds us that the land we inhabit will never be as Jewishly numinous as the meanings we have sometimes been tempted to foist upon it.