This project has brought me into contact with a truly wonderful group of scholars in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean whose work in related areas has greatly enriched my own. I am grateful to Dalia Kandiyoti for her steady encouragement and for her inspiring scholarship and to Rachel Rubinstein and Jennifer Glaser, who showed me how it was possible to do Jewish studies differently. In addition, a number of colleagues offered valuable insights and advice and shared work that helped me to advance the research, including Judah Cohen, Stef Craps, Natalie Zemon Davis, Audra Diptee, Christine Duff, Shai Fierst, Rachel Frankel, Ainsley Cohen Henriques, Aliesha Hosein, Heidi Kaufman, Bénédicte Ledent, Tony MacFarlane, Joanna Newman, Jessica Roitman, Allan Ryan, Winfried Siemerling, Hyacinth Simpson, Barry Stiefel, Patrick Taylor, and David Trotman. I also thank Sailaja Sastry, who patiently read parts of the manuscript with her keen editorial eye.
I would like to express my gratitude to Janelle Duke at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Julie-Marthe Cohen at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and Michele Russel-Capriles, president of the Jewish Cultural Historical Museum of Curaçao, for their patient assistance with my queries. Also in Curaçao, Gigi Scheper offered an illuminating tour of Jewish heritage sites—thanks as well to Christine and Sarah for tagging along with me to all those cemeteries! In Suriname Cynthia McLeod graciously answered the questions that Ken Victor put to her on my behalf when family commitments prevented me from being there in person. Many thanks to Ken for all of his help.
I owe additional thanks to Anna Ruth Henriques, Caryl Phillips, John Biggins, and NourbeSe Philip for generously allowing me to reproduce artwork, photography, and poetry. The poem “St. Claire Avenue West” from Salmon Courage by M. NourbeSe Philip is quoted by permission of the author. I also thank Valentine Mitchell for allowing me to reprint in revised form my article “Calypso Jews: Holocaust Refugees in the Caribbean Literary Imagination,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2013): 1–26. The calypsos “Jews in the West Indies,” “I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again,” and “The Persecuted Jews” are in the public domain.
I am deeply grateful to Tony Kushner, Shirli Gilbert, and James Jordan at the University of Southampton for so warmly welcoming me into their discussions of postcoloniality and Jewishness in Cape Town and London. I also thank the members of the 2011 Posen summer seminar, and especially the organizers Rachel Rubinstein and Naomi Seidman, for their invaluable feedback. My thanks go as well to the participants in a workshop on Sephardic literary studies and comparative methodologies that I co-organized with Dalia Kandiyoti at CUNY in 2012 and to Jane Gerber for sponsoring the workshop. At a late stage in the project, crucial support and encouragement were offered by Bryan Cheyette, Jonathan Freedman, Michael Rothberg, and Rob Nixon, who continues to astonish me with his kindness and generosity.
I was fortunate over the course of writing this book to have the help of several very talented research assistants, Ebony Magnus, Gabrielle Etcheverry, and Sarah Waisvisz, whose enthusiasm and diligence helped me to keep going with the project when my own energy was flagging. I am also grateful to Aliesha Hosein for her help with all matters Trinidadian and to Ebony for sharing with me the story of her Jamaican grandmother, Eleanor Ann Levy, who had difficulty finding an apartment in 1950s Toronto because of her Jewish-sounding surname.
At Carleton I am blessed to be surrounded by warm and supportive colleagues, including Brian Johnson, Julie Murray, Franny Nudelman, and Jan Schroeder among many others. In particular, Ming Tiampo and Catherine Khordoc have offered a rare combination of friendship, intellectual companionship, and professional collaboration that has sustained me over the years. The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the Migration and Diaspora Studies Initiative at Carleton have provided a vital institutional context for my research. I also thank the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton, the Government of Ontario, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research awards and other financial assistance that made the completion of this book possible.
I am very grateful to the series editors, Rebecca Walkowitz and David James, for their support for the book; to Philip Leventhal, at Columbia University Press, for guiding the manuscript through the editorial process so expertly and so thoughtfully; and to Susan Pensak for her superb editing. I also owe a great debt to the two anonymous readers for the press, whose exceptionally astute and generous commentaries pushed me to refine a number of key points in my argument.
Finally, I thank my husband James for his unfailing support, patience, understanding, and good humor, and my children Harry, Isaac, and Miriam, for giving me much needed perspective. I am also indebted to my parents, Ruth and Mark Phillips, for offering so many different forms of assistance that they are simply too numerous to list here. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Avie and Harry Phillips—colonial Jews and lovers of literature whose lives were shaped by the struggle against racism in their native South Africa.