This article characterizes diaspora writing as a kind of dream writing, through the reading of two autobiographical works by Mary Antin (1881—1949), a Russian-Jewish immigrant to America. It dreams of the possibility of a `dream shibboleth', a password through which to bypass the law of the tribal shibboleths which condemn migrants to the border and the never-ending process of self-translation. It is the immigrants' wish to survive and make a home wherever they happen to land that makes their nightly adventure a scene of dream writing, in which the scars of border-crossing magically turn themselves into rich and nutritious seeds which aid their journey.
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Bergland, B. (2000) `Mary Antin', in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 221: American Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920, ed. Sharon M. Harris, pp. 8-18. Detroit: Gale.
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Cixous, H. (1998) `Writing Blind', trans. Eric Prenowitz, in H. Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, pp. 139-52. London : Routledge.
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Derrida, J. (1992) `From Shibboleth: For Paul Celan', in J. Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, pp. 377-413. New York: Routledge .
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Roberts, S. (1994) `An Incomplete Replacing: The White South African Expatriate', in Angelika Bammer (ed.), Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, pp. 172-81. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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`Shibboleth' (1992) in Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5, pp. 1110-13. New York: Doubleday.
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Winter, M.C. (2007) American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
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Wirth-Nesher, H. (2006) Call it English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Zangwill, I. (1899) `Foreword', in Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston, 1st edn, pp. 7-8. Boston, MA: W. B. Clarke and Co.
