Babel' in Context

Sicher, Efraim

doi:10.2307/j.ctt21h4wc7

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Babel has vividly portrayed these pogroms in his literary works. Efraim Sicher (2012) argues that Babel "revisits Jewish cultural identity with the hindsight of Civil War pogroms," a move that enraged ideologues because it is a return to the prerevolutionary past without the correct political revision of history (p.49). He maintains that Babel signals an attempt to resolve "the contradiction between the desired identity of a budding Russian writer and the reality of pogroms in which, as a Jew, he is himself the victim" (p.51).…”

Section: Babel's Representation Of Pogroms In Tsarist Russiamentioning

confidence: 99%

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

Amrieh¹

2022

IJAES

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This paper aims at investigating how Arab American writer Randa Jarrar’s short story “The Story of My Building” (2016) appropriates events, themes, tropes and motifs employed by Russian writer Isaac Babel in his short story “The Story of My Dovecote” (1925) to portray the hard conditions and circumstances that Palestinians endure due to recurrent Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip. Jarrar’s story alludes to anti-Semitic violence, known as pogroms, that marred the lives of Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through strategic employment of intertextuality, Jarrar’s story vividly portrays how a child’s dream of building a dovecote has turned into a nightmare due to the demolition of his house by Israeli tanks. Borrowing certain episodes from Babel’s story, Jarrar sets up a link between her story and Babel’s, creating a parallelism between Palestinian people’s aches and anguishes at the hands of Israeli military forces at the start of the twenty-first century and Russian Jews’ sufferings and torments at the hands of pogromists almost a century ago. The connection between the stories is made even stronger as each story is narrated by a smart ten-year-old boy who is traumatized by the pillage and carnage he witnesses and experiences. In Jarrar’s story, Israeli tanks destroy the protagonist’s house and kill civilians; similarly, pogromists loot the protagonist’s house and murder his grandfather. Eventually, the two boys are reunited with their families who have taken refuge at a friend’s house. Yet, while Babel’s protagonist does not lose his house, in Jarrar’s story the protagonist’s family along with several other Palestinian families become homeless and displaced.

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Section: Babel's Representation Of Pogroms In Tsarist Russiamentioning

confidence: 99%

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

Amrieh¹

2022

IJAES

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“…74 It also makes a statement about cultural identity (just as, at the close of "Karl-Iankel," the narrator looks out the window at Pushkin Street diverging from the Russian-Jewish symbiosis on Malo-Arnautskaia Street, where Bialik used to live). 75 In "Di Grasso," the Italian tragedian's passionate performance provides the opportunity for the young boy to discover the meaning of true art. The story ends, significantly, not with an evocation of Odessa's cosmopolitan past, typified by the Sicilian tragedian Giovanni Grasso's Russian tour in 1909, nor with fond memories of Odessa's unforgettable Jewish characters, but with an artistic inspiration totally identified with the legendary founder of Russian literary realism:…”

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Isaak Babel's “Odessa Tales”: Inventing Lost Time and the Search for Cultural Identity

Sicher

2018

The Russian Review

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Babel's “Odessa Tales” have not been previously analyzed as a cycle of all nine stories (rather than the four included in Soviet collections of the writer's work). This essay examines the entire cycle in their historical context, disentangling the stories from the Odessa myth, of which they have become an integral part. I argue that the “Odessa Tales” should be seen as contributions to an already existing “Odessa text,” and that Babel manipulates cultural memory to form a postrevolutionary cultural identity. I follow the writer's development from nostalgia for a vanished past in the early stories to accommodation with Soviet reality in the final stories, showing how the concept of Time changes over the years from 1921 to 1937.

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Proglomena: Globalisation, Cultural Identity and Diversity

Ozoliņš

2016

Sophia Studies in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures

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Babel' in Context

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

Isaak Babel's “Odessa Tales”: Inventing Lost Time and the Search for Cultural Identity

Proglomena: Globalisation, Cultural Identity and Diversity

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