John Z. Guzlowski is a Polish American poet and fiction writer, whose writing has appeared in Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other journals in the US and abroad. His recent memoir ...Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded (2016), which won the Eric Hoffer Award for most thought-provoking book in 2017, comprises poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. He is also the author of the Hank and Marvin mystery novels and a colu...
A cultural critic of extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, and boundless curiosity, Ilan Stavans, an Ashkenazic Jew who grew up in Mexico, negotiates wildly varied topics as effortlessly ...and deftly as he manages the multiple perspectives of a dual national, religious, and ethnic identity. In Singer's Typewriter and Mine, a follow-up to The Inveterate Dreamer (Nebraska, 2001), Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers, past and present, to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation. Juxtaposing the personal and the analytical, these essays and conversations take up the oeuvres of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Mario Vargas Llosa, translation and God's language, storytelling as midrash, anti-Semitism in Hispanic America, Yiddish and Sephardic literatures, the connection between humor and terror, impostors as cultural agents, the creators of the King James Bible, and the encounter between Jewish and Latino civilizations, to name but a few of Stavans's topics here. Funny, engaging, and provocative, this collection continues Stavans's project of opening new vistas in our cross-cultural understanding of language, literature, and life.
The chapters are "Animal Intelligence," a consideration of their cognitive abilities in Bava Qamma 34b-35a; "Animal Morality," on whether an animal can be held accountable or subject to law for ...bestiality, focused on Sanhedrin 55a-b; "Animal Suffering," on Bava Metzi'a 22a-23a; "Animal Danger," or the concept of animals as threats, in Bava Qamma 80a-b; and "Animals as Livestock," on animals as ownable "things" in Sukkah 22b-23a. The prefix also links her method of reading to the phenomenon of micro-aggressions, a form of pathologizing social interaction that reproduces social bias on a personal level. In these passages, the rabbis weigh competing interests: the animal's discomfort, the Jewish owner's financial needs, and his relationship to Jews and non-Jews. Rather, over the past two millennia a vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, and so on) has been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews.
This article is an attempt to understand Isaac Bashevis Singer's blatant preoccupation in his stories with offensive and outrageous characters and actions that can simply be defined as vulgar. It is ...best exemplified in stories that depict a recurring theme in his fiction: the expulsion of the female outcast from and by her patriarchal community. Even though the vulgar characteristics of these female outcasts were construed by several Yiddish-speaking intellectuals as an assault both on Jewish women and on Yiddish language and culture, Singer's stories utilize their vulgar style and crude content as a direct attack on the Jewish Maskilim and their twentieth-century successors. This essay discusses his short story “Di makhsheyfeh” (“The Witch”) from a feminist perspective, specifically in accordance with Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject, in order to address Bella Zilberstein (the witch) as an allegorical affirmation of the same vulgar qualities that were projected upon Yiddish since the formation of the Haskalah movement in the eighteenth century. In identifying Yiddish as an abject source of shame on behalf of modernized Jews, Singer deliberately creates an “ugly” story about an “ugly” character. “Di makhsheyfeh” and its outright vulgarity will therefore be discussed both as a critique of the self-destructing delusion of modern Jews in their assimilatory ambitions, and as a celebration of Yiddish folklore characteristics, a passionate embrace of its irrational and “disgraceful” virtues.
As you probably know, the festival "Following Singer's Traces" will not take place this year in a traditional form. However, we want to mark our presence in Internet. We need your help. Share your ...memories with us. Regards Witek Dąbrowski
Jak zapewne wiecie, tegoroczny festiwal "Śladami Singera" nie odbędzie się w tradycyjnej formie. Chcemy jednak zaznaczyć swoją obecność w necie. Potrzebujemy Waszej pomocy. Podzielcie się z nami swoimi wspomnieniami. Pozdrawiam Witek Dąbrowski
To już ostatnie z odwiedzanych przez nas miast. Mamy wiele pięknych fotografii, przedstawiających dzielnicę żydowską w Lublinie. Z sympatią pisał o niej sam Singer.
