The Secular Rabbi

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, Doris Kadish delves into Rahv’s complex and enigmatic character, his experience teaching Hebrew in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR; his attitudes toward class, race, and gender. Kadish positions herself in relation to Rahv in attempting to understand her own Jewish identity and perspective as a 21st century woman. The book draws on historical accounts, genealogical records, memoirs by Rahv’s friends and associates, interviews, and secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. Key components of Rahv’s Jewishness—appearance, voice, name, attitudes toward Yiddish and Zionism—are explored, as is his deep-seated faith in Marxism. Textual analyses of Rahv’s works are interwoven with analyses of writers whose works appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Rahv’s relations with writers who figured prominently in his life—most notably T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe—are explored. Events relating to anti-Stalinism, responses to the Holocaust, and alleged ties with the CIA, are discussed. Kadish sheds light on modernism, proletarian literature, and Jewish writing as well as movements that defined American political history in the 20th century: immigration, socialism, Communism, fascism, the cold war, feminism, and the New Left.

Conflicting Identities

This chapter traces Rahv’s role in forming the canon of 20th century Jewish writing: to use his words, works by writers of Jewish descent. It considers his championing of Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. The significance of modernism, Zionism, and Yiddish in their works is foregrounded. Their stories of Jewishness are interwoven with Rahv’s to illuminate his affirmation of Jewish language and culture, which was marked, however, with ambivalence and irony. To explain Rahv’s ambivalent Jewishness in the 1940s and 50s, this chapter considers what two of his closest friends and associates had to say about him: William Barrett and Mary McCarthy, whose satirical depiction of him in the 1949 “roman à clef” The Oasis provoked Rahv to initiate a law suit. The chapter closes with reflections on what Jewishness meant in Rahv’s world and my own during the 1950s.

A visão de Deus em A Cor Púrpura de Alice Walker e O Bode Expiatório de Bernard Malamud

Os ensinamentos religiosos que fazem parte da herança da humanidade estão constantemente sendo reinterpretados à medida que a realidade e os valores humanos vão mudando. Nesse processo, a literatura também dá a sua contribuição, questionando alguns valores e revelando o seu caráter de imposição e dominação social. Nesse trabalho, nós vamos analisar como isso acontece em dois romances de escritores norte-americanos, A cor púrpura, de Alice Walker e O bode expiatório (The Fixer), de Bernard Malamud. Sendo oriundos de grupos étnicos diferentes, esses escritores questionam a representação tradicional de Deus a partir da realidade de seu grupo social, Walker da perspectiva de uma feminista e ativista negra enquanto que Malamud o faz da perspectiva do judaísmo. O questionamento deles será determinado pelas injustiças que seus grupos sofrem enquanto minorias sociais. Ao final, veremos que, apesar de virem de meio sociais diferentes, na raiz do questionamento dos dois escritores está o ideal de luta pela própria liberdade que é um valor tão forte na cultura norte-americana. Assim, esse se torna o parâmetro e a medida para se questionar noções religiosas seculares nos romances desses autores.

DIASPORA TRANSITION-THE GERMAN REFUGEE BY BERNARD MALAMUD – INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS

Malamud emerged as a talented artist, depicting the life of the Jewish poor in New York. His creative works are appreciated for his allegory and mastery in the art of storytelling. Malamud was the son of Jewish grocers and he grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Some argue that this was the reason that he wrote stories "set in small, prisonlike stores of various kinds" Malamud explores the social realism and ethnic identity in most of his short stories – ‘The Jew Bird,’ ‘Black is my Favorite Color’, ‘The German Refugee’. Malamud's fictional works also include themes of compassion, redemption, new life, the potential of meaningful suffering and self-sacrifice, all of which can be found in “The German Refugee” "The German Refugee" concludes Bernard Malamud's second collection of short stories, Idiots First (1963). The setting is New York City in the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II.

Bernard Malamud Revisited: Portrait of the Post-Holocaust Jewish Hero in the Fixer

The primary focus of this article is concept of Jewish heroism in Bernard Malamud’s most celebrated novel, The Fixer (1966). In light of a truth-oriented historicist approach, my underlying argument is that Malamud’s protagonists are Jewish heroes who befit the post-Holocaust era. They are not schlemiels, unlike what many critics believe, and have three main missions: first, to remind the world of the suffering the Jews have endured throughout history, especially during the alleged Holocaust; second, to revive the qualities of Jewishness and Jewish tradition that no longer existed among the younger Jewish generation of the postwar America; and third, to help the Jews free themselves from their victim mentality, intensified after the Holocaust, through heroic acts of resistance and acceptance of responsibility toward their people. These protagonists neither share America’s postwar upheavals, nor resemble the least to the affluent Wall Street Jew financers. They are typical post-Holocaust Jewish heroes.

Tale Of A Pariah: Zoroastrian Worldview In Cyrus Mistry’s Chronicle Of A Corpse Bearer

The contribution of Parsee writers to the corpus of postcolonial discourse is singular. They are akin to the Jewish writers like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud who sought to express their ethnic identity in artistic terms. The Zoroastrian worldview, which is life – affirming, provides sustenance to the Parsee community. The Parsee system of the disposal of the dead is unique. This paper attempts to study Cyrus Mistry`s novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer which deals with the trauma of a nussesalar, a corpse bearer. Phiroze, the centre of consciousness represents the khandhias, the ostracized among the marginalized Parsee community. His tale gives us a peep into the abysmal and turbulent psyche of the khandhias. It is the account of a pariah who rejects the Zoroastrian worldview and leads a life of his volition.

Game On: Encounters with the Magic of Baseball in Japanese Postmodern Fiction

Chapter 5 builds upon the foundation established in Chapter 4 by examining a particular approach to literature, Postmodernism, and describing how the postmodern literature that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Japan, indebted to postmodern baseball fiction in the United States, exemplifies the continuing appeal of baseball as a literary subject and of baseball’s capacity to adapt to cultural shifts. The chapter provides analyses of four baseball-themed works including fiction by the well-know postmodern novelists Murakami Haruki and Takahashi Genichirō, and more recent works by Nagao Seio and Enjō Tō, to demonstrate the possibilities that baseball fiction offers for avant-garde literary experimentation, possibilities exploited in American literature by writers from Philip Roth to Bernard Malamud. This chapter also charts how, ironically, Nagao Seio in his novel Shiki and Sōseki’s Big Game, achieves a remarkable pastiche in which one of the protagonists is none other than Masaoka Shiki with whom this survey of cultural representations of baseball in Japan begins.