Sonia Goetschius

Gardner
English 0
7 November 2014
Annotated Bibliography
Kort, Carol. "Lahiri, Jhumpa." A to Z of American Women Writers, Revised Edition. New
York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 8 Nov. 2014.
Web.

Korts article gives insight to anyone willing to listen into Jhumpa Lahiris fascinating life
from her birth in 1967 in London, to where she resides in New York in 2007. The piece
gives background information about Lahiris parents, who are immigrants from Calcutta,
Bangladesh, and recently settled in London: her mother a teacher and her father a
librarian. Kort also touches on her life as an Indian- American, who often visited Calcutta
as a child with her parents but often struggled with her own cultural identity.

As Kort summarizes Lahiris life, especially her parents background and her childhood, it
is clear that The Namesake is a piece closely related to her own life. Gogol struggles
with his own cultural identity while being raised in New England, as Lahiri was, so the
article is almost like a reality check for the book. It conveys how real The Namesake is
for many immigrants, because though it is fiction, it is obvious that Lahiri struggled with
many of the same aspects of identity, isolation, and cultural nostalgia in her own life.