B. Malamud started to publish his stories in the 1940s, a time which required Jews to take a standpoint, including even those had not grown up in Jewish communities or were not interested in their roots. B.Malamud was one of them. In his stories he tried to picture postwar America and show what it takes to be a Mensch and an outsider in America. The read his books, no deep knowledge of Judaism or Jewish culture is required. But the characters are marked by their cultural history, which Malamud uses symbolically as a drama of all mankind.
The aim of this study is to present and analyze how Bernard Malamud uses Jewishness as a means of fulfilling humanistic ideals within the American context. He was not primarily interested in presenting a realistic image of Jews, he tried to select the moral aspects of humanity from both the American and the Jewish experience.
TOC available here.
Univerzita Palackého Olomouc
1st ed., 2010, 130 pages, A5, paperback,
ISBN:978-80-244-2525-2
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