scholarly journals Spatial movement as a resistance strategy in a holocaust novel A Blessing on the Moon

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Sri Sumaryani
Keyword(s):  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Coping Mechanism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Spatial Movement ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
Spatial Locations

Exploring Jewish resistance in relation to the Holocaust has become one major topic widely discussed in the Holocaust novels written by the second or third generations of Holocaust survivors. The fact that these writers primarily have no direct experience with the event somewhat shows that the paramount effects of the tragedy expand generations and leave trauma that lingers. To cope with the narration of atrocities, resistance strategy is often employed by the Holocaust writers and to a certain point has a function to represent the struggle of the survivors. Joseph Skibell as the third-generation writer deploys a strategy of spatial movement as a coping mechanism and resistance against atrocities in his magical realist novel A Blessing on the Moon. Using Sara Upstone�s spatial politics perspective, this research aims to investigate the spatial movement performed by the main character and to explain how it produces the resistance strategy. In doing so, it will also further examine the scale and characteristics of various spatial locations used in the novel as a means of resistance. As it goes along, the issue of trauma and identity of the Holocaust survivors and their descendants is also explained.

Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-229
Author(s):  
Ayelet Kohn ◽  
Rachel Weissbrod
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
World War ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
Resistance Movement

This article deals with Kovner’s graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (2015) as a case of remediation and hypermediacy. The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve the transformation of the original work into another medium. While some adaptations strive to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its unique blend of artistic materials adapted from different media. The author, Michael Kovner, uses his paintings to depict the story of Ezekiel – an imaginary figure based on his father, the poet Abba Kovner who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement during World War II. While employing the conventions of comics and graphic narratives, the author also makes use of readymade objects such as maps and photos, simulates the works of famous artists and quotes Abba Kovner’s poems. These are indirect ways of confronting the traumas of Holocaust survivors and ‘the second generation’. Dealing with the Holocaust in comics and graphic narratives (as in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is their use as a means to deal with trauma; what makes this graphic narrative unique is the encounter between the works of the poet and the painter, which combine to create an exceptionally complex work integrating poetry, art and graphic narration.

scholarly journals Yiddish, or Jewish German? The Holocaust, the Goethe-Institut, and Germany’s Neglected Obligation to Peace and the Common European Cultural Heritage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kamusella
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Common ◽  
Main Language

The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe’s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany’s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.

scholarly journals Trauma and Escapism: The Dual Faces of Holocaust in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Nicky Victor ◽  
Dr Cynthia Catherine Michael
Keyword(s):  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Holocaust Literature ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Traumatic Bereavement ◽  
Power Of Words

Markus Zusak’s novel, The Book Thief wholly recaptures the trauma induced by war-torn Germany upon its inhabitants. This study serves the purpose of juxtaposing the traumatic bereavement of the Holocaust survivors with their various escaping tendencies. The chief protagonist of the novel, Liesel is representative of the entire traumatized community who faces the darkest moments of their life and still survives. Her story as part of the developing canon of Holocaust literature thus exposes the destructive trauma and affirms the importance of community in the rehabilitation of the traumatized. The power of words as an escaping force amidst all the upheaval provided much impetus to the distressed souls of Nazi Germany. Books emerged as an escaping force in the lives of many in times of all treachery and destitute. Trauma and escapism hence, binds together the traumatic experiences and the escaping strategies which the characters share among themselves under a dictatorial setup.

Searching for Justice After the Holocaust

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
European Parliament ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Insurance Policies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
Property Restitution

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.

Thérèse Raquin

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere ‘human beasts’ who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalized by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to undermine not only the moral values of a deeply conservative society, but also the whole code of psychological description on which the realist novel was based. Together with the important ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ in which Zola defended himself against charges of immorality, Thérèse Raquin stands as a key early manifesto of the French Naturalist movement, of which Zola was the founding father. Even today, this novel has lost none of its power to shock. This new translation is based on the second edition of 1868. The Introduction situates the novel in the context of Naturalism, medicine, and the scientific ideas of Zola's day.

The Hdden Children Survived by the Holocaust. Injury and Mourning. Retrospective Research

Diogenes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lazar Admadhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Retrospective Study ◽  
Retrospective Studies ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Therapeutic Group ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Jewish Children

“Hidden Jewish children”, Holocaust survivors. Traumatisms and mourning. Retrospective studies. This contribution concerning traumatism and the mourning of Jewish children, holocaust survivors hidden in France during WWII, is a retrospective study on the psychological consequences in a situation of genocide in childhood. In this article two different types of research, carried out in France, will be underlined. The first concerns a group of former hidden children who created an association, more than half-century after the end of the war, to establish a self-therapeutic group. The second research studies former hidden children who have remained isolated and generally have had difficulties in metabolizing their traumatic experiences.

Antisemitic or Bordering on Antisemitic? Grey Areas in Romanian Fake News Discourses in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Anca-Simina Martin
Keyword(s):  
Influenza Pandemic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Elie Wiesel ◽  
Working Definition ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.

Helping the novel: Neoliberalism, self-help, and the narrating of the self in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelia Poon
Keyword(s):  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Contingency ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Vantage Points

Self-help books sell the myth of self-determinism, empowerment and the eternal hope of reinvention, reasons no doubt for their enormous popularity. In this article, I examine Pakistani-born Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) which, with its catchy, hyperbolic title signalling its masquerade as a self-help book, openly and ironically advertises itself as a satire. The object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an overweening sense of control and complete agency. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the care and transformation of the self in order to take best advantage of a market economy, since the means to achieving material affluence is seen simply as a matter of individual choice and personal will. In the novel, Hamid brings into productive tension the conventions and assumptions of the self-help genre with those of the more traditional realist novel in order to interrogate not just the neoliberal self but the very ways in which the self is narrated and constructed. Engaging in particular with the affordances of technology in his novel as a thematic, Hamid appropriates the vantage points and perspectival positions made possible by modern technology to undermine the solipsistic self of the self-help book. He further exploits the narrative energies of the novel form to foreground a sense of historical contingency to lay bare various modes of self-constitution and self-narration. Through his use of metatextual narrative strategies, Hamid raises fundamental questions about the genre of the novel itself and the ways in which it is intimately invested in the insinuation of the development of a self. These questions, I argue, ultimately underline his affirmation of the novel’s important place and the ethical role it can play at this contemporary moment of late and global capitalism.

scholarly journals References to Gauguin paintings in Somerset Maugham’s The moon and sixpence

Literator ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Wright
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Public ◽  
Paul Gauguin ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Verbal Descriptions

It has not before been noticed that in describing works of art painted by his fictional anti-hero,Charles Strickland, in the novel The moon and sixpence, which is loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin, Somerset Maugham drew on actual works by Gauguin in his verbal descriptions. Sometimes the references are to specific paintings, at others to phases in his work. For readers familiar with Gauguin’s artistic output, his writings on art and his biography, the effect of this insistent visual ‘quotation’ is to create a disturbing sense of aesthetic dissonance, in that it becomes difficult to accept the inarticulate, surly, impassioned but utterly grim and joyless figure of the fictional Charles Strickland as the source of these vivifying paintings, which possess their own real history and provenance. There is nothing in Strickland of Gauguin’s child-like zest for life, his exuberance, his fantasies, his extrovert willingness to explain his art to friends and the public through fascinating if deeply unreliable writings. The reader must either attempt to blot all knowledge of Gauguin and his art from consciousness, there by denying that Maugham is ‘quoting’ Gauguin’s oeuvre, or else submit to an intolerable level of fictional incredulity and disbelief.

scholarly journals (Non)Places of Bangalore: Where the East Meets the West in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Izabella Kimak
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
Primary Location ◽  
Spatial Locations ◽  
The Impact

This essay constitutes an attempt at reading Bharati Mukherjee’s 2011 novel, Miss New India, through the prism of spatial locations depicted in it. Unlike many of the texts in the late South Asian American author’s oeuvre, which depict migration from the East to the West, Miss New India is located exclusively within South Asia. This notwithstanding, the novel focuses on the impact the West used to and continues to exert on the East. I would like to argue that through her depictions of places and non-places of Bangalore-the novel’s primary location-Mukherjee points to the spatial interconnectedness of the East and the West as well as to the temporal interconnectedness of the colonial past and postcolonial, late-capitalist present.

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