In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature.

In the aftermath of the Shoah (Holocaust)—the mass murder of 6,000,000 Jews—Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Reflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), in which he concluded that the fate of the Jews, the fate of the individual non-Jew, and the fate of the entire world are inextricably and reciprocally intertwined. Building on Sartre's perception, Portrait of a Jew (1962) and The Liberation of the Jew (1966) describe what the author, Albert Memmi, terms "the universal Jewish fate": that of being the paradigmatic "colonized" Other—insofar as the Jews are a particularly oppressed minority, that is, their marginalization epitomizes the fate of all humanity. Further, Memmi argues both that "to be a Jewish writer is ... to express the Jewish fate" and that a "true Jewish literature" is necessarily one which revolts against the imposition and acceptance of this fate. Sartre's and Memmi's insights posit that Jewish consciousness acts upon both national and world consciousness. Memmi suggests that one means of expressing the Jewish consciousness is through literature. In their imaginative interpretations of the post-Shoah interconnections between the Jew, the nation, and the world, modern Jewish fiction writers of the Diaspora (dispersion) —at least those whose work foregrounds tropes of Jewish sensibility, incorporating Jewish characters and themes—often delineate a world which, in the aftermath of Auschwitz, is socially and existentially even more precarious than it was before the war. This study examines post-Shoah Jewish consciousness and its relation to national/world consciousness,as represented in the English-language Jewish fiction of Australia, South Africa, and Canada, Commonwealth countries whose diverse Jewish literatures have been overshadowed by the predominant English-language Jewish literary culture of the U.S.A. The structure of this study is bipartite. Part B is an indexed Bibliography enumerating primary works by Jewish prose fiction writers of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Part A is a critical commentary on Part B. The Introduction (Chapter 1) outlines the theoretical bases for the study. The three following chapters scrutinize Jewish Australian (Chapter 2), Jewish South African (Chapter 3), and Jewish Canadian (Chapter 4) fiction. Among the writers considered are Australians B.N. Jubal, Judah Waten, David Martin, Morris Lurie, Serge Liberman, and Lily Brett; South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, Jillian Becker, Antony Sher, and Rose Zwi; and Canadians Henry Kreisel, A.M. Klein, Adele Wiseman, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Majzels. Each of these three chapters follows a similar format: a description of the origin, history, and demography of the Jewish community; an outline of the important pre-World War II Jewish fiction writers and their work; an examination of representative post-Shoah works; and concluding remarks about the ways in which the works under consideration here contest and revise both the canons of nation and national literature and the very concepts of nation, canon, and canon-making. An Epilogue (Chapter 5) contextualizes the thematic patterns common to the Jewish fiction of the three countries and suggests ways in which this fiction can be located within the larger framework of Jewish Literature. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Univ., Diss.--Jena, 2002.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Wayne State University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 334-353). Also available on the Internet.

Philip Roth's parody of autobiography in the Zuckerman series is part of a larger debate concerning the problems of Jewish art. As Roth manipulates personal and personified autobiography, he both underlines and undermines Jewish traditions of reading and writing. To be sure, Zuckerman's struggle for artistic identity articulates a long-standing Jewish concern with the tensions of collective representation. It is from a culture consistently threatened by alienation and extermination that Roth finds his terms of reference. Zuckerman and his creator are subject to a whole discourse of Jewish textuality: to Jewish notions about the relationship between the individual and the group; between fact and fiction and between aesthetics and morality. / However, the Zuckerman books are at once part of a continuum of Jewish culture and a unique response to the pressures of contemporary American Judaism. Through his humorous manipulations of autobiographical fiction, Roth finally counter-turns the very compasses by which he has oriented himself. He offers a potent commentary on the fatuity of Jewish "facts" and on the fictitious nature of the collectivized Jewish voice. For Roth, it is not only the Jew's experience, but his/her imagination, his/her individual frame of understanding, that determines ethnic identity. In the end, Roth challenges the cohesion of the Jewish cultural text. He places himself in a house of mirrors, where life and art, self and group, Jewish reverence and Jewish rebellion, endlessly reflect off one another.

No description available.

A partir dos contos da literatura ídiche clássica que foram traduzidos para o português, Sabá de Shólem Yákov Abramóvitsh, A leitora de Itzhok Leibusch Peretz e O relógio de Scholem Rabinovitch, este trabalho pretende investigar a representação do Shabat no contexto de uma literatura característica do alvorecer da modernidade judaica. O estudo individual de cada conto aprofundar-se-á na análise dos modos de representação de um evento religioso que cada conto apresenta. Para tanto, o conhecimento da biografia de seus autores foi de vital importância para o exame das obras, pois estes imprimiram em seus textos literários os ideais da Haskalá, por meio de seus narradores fidedignos, termo proposto por Wayne C. Booth, na obra A retórica da Ficção (1980), o qual revela a posição ideológica de seus autores implícitos nos contos. Esses autores implícitos uniram com maestria o dicotômico conceito tradição versus modernidade com o propósito de iluminar, a partir de dentro da comunidade do shtetl, o pensamento do judeu simples, visando transformá-lo em um homem moderno. Cientes de sua função social, Abramóvitsh, Peretz e Rabinovitch utilizaram a língua ídiche e a cultura do judeu do Leste europeu para instaurar um novo momento da literatura e cultura ídiche. / Departing from three Classical Yiddish short stories that have been translated to Portuguese - Mendele Moikher Seforim\'s Sabbath, Itzhok Leibusch Peretz\'s The Reader and Scholem Aleichem\'s The clock - this dissertation aims to investigate the impact of modernity on literary representations of the Sabbath. The analysis of these writings will be conducted by comparing them to each other, highlight the differences in modes of representation on a same religious event. The biographies of these authors were extremely relevant to understand their work, since they expressed the ideals of Haskalah in their literary texts, through their reliable narrators. These authors have masterfully included in their production the dichotomized concept of tradition versus modernity in their texts, in order to illuminate the life of the shtetl community from within, and to portray the ways of thought of the simple Jew, while aiming at turning him into a modern man. Aware of their social roles, Abramóvitsh, Rabinovitch and Peretz have used Yiddish language and the culture of the Eastern European Jewish to establish a new era for the Yiddish culture and literature.

A partir dos contos da literatura ídiche clássica que foram traduzidos para o português, Sabá de Shólem Yákov Abramóvitsh, A leitora de Itzhok Leibusch Peretz e O relógio de Scholem Rabinovitch, este trabalho pretende investigar a representação do Shabat no contexto de uma literatura característica do alvorecer da modernidade judaica. O estudo individual de cada conto aprofundar-se-á na análise dos modos de representação de um evento religioso que cada conto apresenta. Para tanto, o conhecimento da biografia de seus autores foi de vital importância para o exame das obras, pois estes imprimiram em seus textos literários os ideais da Haskalá, por meio de seus narradores fidedignos, termo proposto por Wayne C. Booth, na obra A retórica da Ficção (1980), o qual revela a posição ideológica de seus autores implícitos nos contos. Esses autores implícitos uniram com maestria o dicotômico conceito tradição versus modernidade com o propósito de iluminar, a partir de dentro da comunidade do shtetl, o pensamento do judeu simples, visando transformá-lo em um homem moderno. Cientes de sua função social, Abramóvitsh, Peretz e Rabinovitch utilizaram a língua ídiche e a cultura do judeu do Leste europeu para instaurar um novo momento da literatura e cultura ídiche. / Departing from three Classical Yiddish short stories that have been translated to Portuguese - Mendele Moikher Seforim\'s Sabbath, Itzhok Leibusch Peretz\'s The Reader and Scholem Aleichem\'s The clock - this dissertation aims to investigate the impact of modernity on literary representations of the Sabbath. The analysis of these writings will be conducted by comparing them to each other, highlight the differences in modes of representation on a same religious event. The biographies of these authors were extremely relevant to understand their work, since they expressed the ideals of Haskalah in their literary texts, through their reliable narrators. These authors have masterfully included in their production the dichotomized concept of tradition versus modernity in their texts, in order to illuminate the life of the shtetl community from within, and to portray the ways of thought of the simple Jew, while aiming at turning him into a modern man. Aware of their social roles, Abramóvitsh, Rabinovitch and Peretz have used Yiddish language and the culture of the Eastern European Jewish to establish a new era for the Yiddish culture and literature.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p.267-285). Also available on the Internet.