Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud
In his article "Animals Speaking in the Fiction of Jin and Malamud" Matt Prater discusses "The Jewbird" by Bernard Malamud and "A Composer and His Parakeets" by Ha Jin as transcultural texts which involve non-human animals as major characters. Jin and Malamud examine differing representations of animal language and how these representations connect to the politics of both interspecies and transnational relationships. By applying critical animal studies and transnational discourse and by charting the interlinking of other-ings by theorists such as Carol Adams and Susan Kappeler, Prater attempts to show that animals figure into transcultural and transnational discourses in ways other than the symbolic
The Dynamics of Anti-Semitism in Bernard Malamud’s ‘The Jewbird’
Jews were forced to adopt ways of the West by European Journalists and other organisations and especially dominant Christians and also forced to develop a tenant mentality in order to achieve assimilation which will be acceptable to Europeans in order to allow Jews to stay peacefully. Any deviation from forced and acceptable norms will lead to trouble as is being faced by Schwartz in ‘The Jewbird’. They were contributing to the GDP of Europe but they were never thought to be a part of the nation. As a result, Jews always thought themselves as tenants as they were made to believe so by the Whites also. A tenant has to follow the rules and regulations in order to assimilate properly but sometimes this race for over assimilation is leading to self-hatred for their own community members among Jews. This is also anti-Semitism. So, anti-Semitism is working in many ways apart from the way it is generally understood. Antisemitism may be religious hatred, self-hatred or may be having its postcolonial dimensions. All these dynamics of antisemitism can be found in ‘The Jewbird’ by Malamud.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.