Thesis (Ph.D.)--Temple University, 2004. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-195). Also available on the Internet.

Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

Abstract The Russia in which Isaak Babel (1894-1940) wrote was one of deep seated anti-Semitic philosophies and prejudices, a place of pogroms and segregation. Literature of this era painted the Jew as a villainous, dishonest, and feeble minded foreign being within society. Traditionally, Russian literature used the Jew as a national scapegoat or a comical stock character ripe for ridicule. Babel’s contemporaries considered him to be a born writer with a gift for minimalism without the sacrifice of vivid description. His was an evocative style of brutal humanism, showing both character flaws and character virtues. The Odesskie rasskazy (Odessa Tales) epitomized this honest approach to human portrayal. The Jewish community of the Odesskie rasskazy boasted a variety of characters from all walks of life, rejecting the previously perpetuated stereotype. The Jew, as shown by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov, was simply a caricature. Such characters were restricted to the role of the fool, the thief, and the opportunist. When Babel first described the community, people, and culture of his native shtetl, the previous stereotype of the Russian Jew became an antiquated relic of the past. This thesis will explore some examples of earlier depiction of Jews in literature and the humanized image of Russian Jewry that Babel created in his Odesskie rasskazy. The analysis will discuss how these depictions created a new, three dimensional characterization of the Jew.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Samir Naqqash (1938-2004) is best known as one of the last holdouts among Jewish Israeli authors from Iraq, continuing to write in his native Arabic in Israel despite immense social and market pressures to switch to Hebrew. This thesis reads Naqqash's last novel, Shlomo Al-Kurdi, Myself and Time in light of theories of trauma, specifically Cathy Caruth's structure of trauma, Dori Laub's notion of belatedness of trauma, and Dominick LaCapra's foundational trauma. It posits that the novel employs a poetics of the black hole, manipulating trauma, memory and language in order to narrate the forgotten fate of the protagonist's hometown of Ṣablākh, in Iranian Kurdistan, during World War I. Like a black hole, the texture of the novel's prose possesses an infinite density of traumatic affect as the characters are haunted by the ahwāl, or terrors. Also like a black hole, there is no way to measure the novel's mass, no way to authoritatively and thoroughly grasp the details of its plot since said details remained sequestered deep within. The structure of trauma in the text depends both on trauma's repeated returns in the first part of the novel, and a type of prophetic projection that speaks of the approaching moment of calamity in the second. Each of these two parts end where the other begins, creating an infinite loop where traumatic memory and prophecy alternate towards infinity, each awaiting the arrival of the other in a dizzying dance that contributes to the black hole's gravitational pull. The presence of three narrators allows the text to employ chronicle, affect, and artifice at one and the same time. Language, namely a rich allusive fabric, allows Shlomo to inscribe himself in the wandering minstrel position of the Islamicate tradition, casting himself as the most articulate Shahrazād of the Thousand and One Nights and the most adventurous and mobile Sindibād the sailor. In this way, Shlomo is able to recover the (non-Hebrew-) speaking subject position, and mobility in the Islamic(ate) world canceled by virtue of the restrictions placed upon holders of an Israeli passport. Similarly, by staging visitations by well-known apparitions -- a ghūl in Ṣablākh and the Prophet Nahum in Qosh, the text inscribes these sites of speechlessness within the larger cultural geography of the Islamicate literary tradition. At the same time, by selecting the unraveling of Ṣablākh as foundational trauma for all that follows, Shlomo confounds the genealogies of trauma of both Zionism and Arab Nationalism(s). And with Ṣablākh, Shlomo also mourns the collapse of the city's multi-confessional social fabric. What was once a testament to the possibility of a home that flies the banner of humanity is now nothing more than a haunting memory, lost but not forgotten within the depths of the black hole. / text

Scholarship on the founder of modern Jewish literature, Sholem Abramovitch (1836-1917), is a rich field of study, yet it has been largely abandoned today, and the author has hardly been studied at all in nineteenth-century comparative European context. This study uses an unprecedented comparison between Abramovitch and his contemporary, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), to reveal the complexity with which Abramovitch pioneered the integration of European and Russian literary trends into Jewish literature. These writers came from very different cultures and literary situations; however, they also shared many of the same influences due to their shared location in Tsarist Russia in the mid nineteenth century. During this time, the cultural sources and social preoccupations of their intelligentsias increasingly converged, producing a shared zeitgeist which – in combination with their similar early experiences and tendencies for dialogism (contradictory duality) – led to their many literary intersections. A comparison of their oeuvres reveals similar replacements of Gogol’s condescension toward poor protagonists with compassion, subversions of the feuilleton in the service of social critique, unprecedented uses of the “dialogic word,” new variations on the European theme of the “fantastic city,” applications of contemporary concepts such as “necessary egoism” and “free will” to the psyche of the downtrodden, enlistments of the Devil to warn against the dangers of Utilitarianism, and literary efforts to bridge the gap between the classes which include a convergence between romanticism and religion. Though Abramovitch has been designated as a satirist and realist, this study shows how he also pioneered the integration of romanticism into Jewish literature through, psychological penetration of the poor, and themes such as: the truth inherent in emotion, the subconscious and folklore, the transcendent wisdom of the people, and the divine meaning of nature. Abramovitch has been compared on isolated themes with other Russian writers, such as Turgenev, Shchedrin and Gogol; however, only a comparison with Dostoevsky can reveal the nuance and complexity of his many formal and thematic achievements. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Os objetivos principais deste trabalho são: o resgate do autor Mosseh Rephael dAguilar e sua obra, a constatação de que foi ele um dos precursores da literatura judaica em português durante o período colonial holandês no nordeste brasileiro e, por fim, a transcrição da única obra da qual se tem a certeza de haver sido produzida no Brasil em sua estadia entre 1642 e 1654. Para tal, foram analisados manuscritos, publicações e documentos situados na Biblioteca Ets Haim Montezinos, Arquivo Municipal da Cidade de Amsterdã, cemitério português de Ouderkerk e coleção Rosenthaliana da Universidade de Amsterdã. Encontramos inúmeros documentos que revelam detalhes sobre sua biografia e a relação com o sobrinho Isaac de Castro Tartas, bem como os postos comunitários ocupados na sua trajetória profissional. Foi atuante durante quarenta anos como rabino, filósofo, autor, professor, tradutor, gramático e filólogo, membro do Beth Din (corte rabínica) em Amsterdã, e rosh ieshivá (chefe de Academia Talmúdica). Procuramos elencar sua obra, que abrange um variado leque incluindo responsa de temas haláchicos (legais), tratados de lógica e retórica, manual de abate ritual de animais, homilias, discursos, índex para estudo do Talmud, interpretações de fontes canônicas, poesia e ascamot (autorizações). Poliglota de biblioteca vasta e interessado além dos muros da sua própria comunidade, teve duas de suas obras publicadas, mas descobrimos milhares de páginas que ainda aguardam catalogação e publicação. Mostramos que não foi somente um acompanhante do célebre rabino Isaac Aboab da Fonseca em seu curto intervalo no Recife, mas produziu aquele que consideramos um dos textos pioneiros da literatura judaica em português produzida em solo brasileiro. Seu texto Explicação do Capítulo 53 de Isaías feita no Brasil, tem transcrição inédita neste trabalho. / The main objectives of this work are: the rescue of the author Mosseh Rephael d\'Aguilar and his work, the realization that he was one of the forerunners of Jewish literature in Portuguese during the Dutch colonial period in the northeast of Brazil and, finally, the transcription of the only work that is certain to have been produced in Brazil during his stay between 1642 and 1654. For that, manuscripts, publications and documents have been analyzed in the Ets Haim Montezinos Library, Municipal Archives of the City of Amsterdam, Portuguese Ouderkerk Cemetery and Rosenthaliana collection of the University of Amsterdam. We found numerous documents that reveal details about his biography and the relationship with his nephew Isaac de Castro Tartas, as well as the community posts occupied in his professional career. He worked for 40 years as a rabbi, philosopher, author, teacher, translator, grammarian and philologist, member of the Beth Din (rabbinical court) in Amsterdam, and rosh ieshivá (head of the Talmudic Academy). We have sought to list his work, which covers a wide range of subjects including halachic (legal) themes, treatises of logic and rhetoric, manual of ritual slaughter of animals, homilies, speeches, index for Talmud study, interpretations of canonical sources, poetry and ascamot (authorizations). Polyglot and owner of a large library and interested in subjects beyond the walls of his own community, he has had two of his works published, but we have discovered thousands of pages that still await cataloging and publication. We have shown that he was not only an escort of the celebrated Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca in his short interval in Recife, but produced what we consider to be one of the pioneering texts of Jewish literature in Portuguese produced on Brazilian soil. His text Explanation of Chapter 53 of Isaiah made in Brazil, has unpublished transcription in this work.

Scholars of Jewish literature consistently ask what it means to "write Jewishly". Strangers in a Strange Land posits that eight short works of Jewish fiction by authors in different times and places construct a consistent narrative realm of possibilities. I employ Possible Worlds literary theory to argue for this hypothesis. I argue that the narrative realm of these eight short stories is defined by liminal zones and liminal figures, marked most intensely by an implied porousness in the veil between the natural and the supernatural. My argument is based on a close analysis of major liminal themes: transit and wandering; dreamstates and visions; darkness and night; (un)death; and others. I contextualize these themes in two ways: first, by connecting them to the genres of Fantastic and Paranormal fiction in non-Jewish Western literature; and second, by bringing earlier Jewish tales into the discussion, illustrating that they have been and remain present in Jewish writing, in some cases as distant temporally as the Israelite literature of the Hebrew Bible. This panorama of ambiguous zones and characters unable to find steady footing would contribute to discussions of the nature of Jewish literature and its ability to create a virtual literary Home for a population that has been dispersed across the continents.

This article explores how the Americanization of the Holocaust is in part responsible for the paradigm that the mention of the Holocaust is vital for a Jewish writer of postwar fiction to be taken seriously. In keeping with the need for people to find meaning in catastrophe, to derive humanity from inhumanity and order out of chaos, Jewish literature's apparent 'success' or international reach often depends on reflecting on the Holocaust as an empowering movement that pushed survivors and other Jews to feel a sense of unity and inclusiveness. By using the Holocaust to generate interest in audiences as opposed to educating the masses, the general perception of Jews as well as of the Jewish religion is reduced to nothing more than an acknowledgment of the traumatic historic event they endured. I argue that this perception of Jewish identity is disillusioned as well as destructive, and that survivor literature paints a more realistic image of what the Holocaust was like while still maintaining the Jewishness within the story. The aim of this article is to examine the trauma in Holocaust literature through the lens of Judaic studies, analyzing the way that it is written as well as providing an analysis of the trends in this postwar genre of writing from survivors and non-survivors. Being analyzed are the writings of Tadeusz Borowski and Cynthia Ozick; "This Way for Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen" and "Silence" by Borowski, and "Rosa" as well as "The Shawl" by Ozick. While Borowski's stories were developed based on his own personal experiences as a victim of the Holocaust, Ozick is an American-born Jewish woman whose stories correlate particularly well with Borowski's despite not having been through the traumatic experience herself. The goal in analyzing this type of literature is to bring to light the realities of the Holocaust and exactly how gruesome, inhumane and disturbing these events were and to contrast these images with more heavily edited and/or fictionalized literature, particularly the Americanized version of "The Diary of Anne Frank". When structured for entertainment purposes, fictional literature set in the time period of the Holocaust tends to develop unrealistic portrayals of the event itself and the Jewish population affected by it. The intention of this article to draw attention to the lack of Jewish identity and religion in postwar Holocaust literature, to challenge the accuracy in Holocaust retellings and to outline the destructiveness of both characteristics in this genre of literature to the general perception of Jewish people.

No description available.