Yiddish Language and Literature Commons^™

Survivor’S Guilt And The Ethics Of Remembering In Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave And Cynthia Ozick’S “The Shawl”, Ryne Menhennick

All NMU Master's Theses

The focus of this thesis is an analysis of post-Holocaust Jewish-American literature with a specific emphasis on texts set in Europe. In particular, I examine how Jewish-American authors who lived in the United States during the Holocaust address issues of trauma and survivor’s guilt through fiction. Informed especially by Theodor Adorno and Elie Wiesel, I examine the ethics of fictionalizing the Holocaust. Furthermore, this thesis considers both trauma theory and the psychology of grief to investigate the ways in which the Jewish-American community at large responded to the cultural destruction perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Chapter One analyzes …

“A Palace On A Mountaintop”: Building Isaac Bashevis Singer’S House Of Justice, Mia Rachel Schiffer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the early and mid twentieth century, as social and political movements fractioned Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, Isaac Bashevis Singer turned with singular focus to “the idols” of love and literature. Exploring the changing face of Jewish life through storytelling, he encountered the same questions of spiritual and social transformation, of continuity and dissolution at the center of political debate.

This project asks how morality and ethics function in the context of cataclysm in Singer’s work. By parsing the author’s personal history recorded in two autobiographies, "In My Father’s Court" and "Love and Exile," and his novels "Enemies, a …