Greenhorns

Key Selling Points<br> 1. Audience<br> &bull; Will appeal to readers interested in immigration, in fact and literature: “Greenhorns” opens a window into the historical experience of Jewish immigration in the 20th Century, and the problematic process of assimilation. As such it connects to the current public and political interest in immigrants and immigration, with parallels between the successful integration of past immigrants and current patterns of Americanization. Immigration and assimilation has also been a major theme in contemporary fiction, in the works of Gish Jen, Amy Tan, David Bezmozgis, Jumpa Lahiri, and many others. <br> &bull; Jewish readers: The book deals with the experience of three generations of Jewish immigrants, people of the author&apos;s generation but also the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of American Jews now in their 30s and 40s.<br> &bull; Author has a reputation as a historian and historical novelist, and readers will be interested in the connection of this book to his earlier work.<br> <br> 2. Notable Author<br> &bull; recently cited in New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/movies/hostiles-review-christian-bale.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0 &bull; best known for an award-winning trilogy of scholarly books on the myth of the frontier in American cultural history. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan University Press; was a finalist for a National Book Award, and received the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, which cited it as “a turning point in the study of American intellectual history.” The second volume received the Little Big Horn Associates Literary Award. George Frederickson, writing in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>, called Fatal Environment “Without question . . . the most ambitious and provocative work in American studies to appear in recent years.” Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (Atheneum, 1992) was a Finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. The citation praised it as the culmination of a “magisterial multi-volume study of the myth of the frontier . . . cultural history at its best – well argued, richly supported, critically astute, and written with genuine craft.” <br> &bull; Other work links cultural history with military history: Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (Holt, 2005); No Quarter: The Battle of the Petersburg Crater, 1864 (Random House, 2009); Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution (Norton, 2012), etc.<br> &bull; Three historical novels. Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (Holt, 2000) was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction (2001) and the Salon.com Book Award (2000). The Return of Henry Starr (Atheneum, 1988); The Crater (Atheneum, 1980) was the first work of fiction to be adopted as a selection by the History Book Club.<br> &bull; Author has been awarded fellowships from the NEH and Rockefeller Foundation; was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians in 1986, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.<br> &bull; Serves as consultant and on-screen interviewee for media projects on violence, racism, popular culture, the Civil War, World War I and the American West. A 2013 episode of “Moyers & Company” was devoted to the author&apos;s book Gunfighter Nation. Recent projects include “The Great War” (PBS, 2017), “Clint Eastwood” (American Masters, 2000), “Colt: Legend and Legacy” (PBS/1998), «Big Guns Talk» (TNT, 1997), “Gunpower: One Nation Under Fire” (Discovery Channel, 1996), “Guns” (ABC Turning Point, 1994), “Last Stand at Little Big Horn,” (American Experience/ PBS, 1992).<br> <br> 3. The Competition<br> Unlike the work of other writers of new-immigrant fiction (David Bezmozgis, Gary Shteyngart), or Jewish-American writers like Philip Roth, “Greenhorns” roots the story of Jewish Americans in the primal experience of Jewish emigration, the passage from the Pale of Settlement &mdash; the bloody and impoverished Polish/Russian borderland &mdahs; to America in the early 20th Century. It sets the immigrant experience against the specifics of historical events, specifically the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and the Russian Civil War of 1919-23. It traces the effects of that heritage of trauma on later generations, again through particular historical moments &mdash; army life in WW2, and school and college life in the 1950s and early 1960s. <br>