Horror and ethnic identity in The Jewbird
1993; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)American Jewish Fiction Analysis
Resumoresemblance of Malamud's Harry Cohen in The Jewbird to Poe's narrator in The Raven, each with a desire to forget, is no coincidence. Malamud's interest in retracing Poe's nineteenth-century horror poem with his 1970 comic short story results from a desire to offer a twentieth-century redefinition of horror in Jewish ethnic terms.(1) story opens up a dialogue with generations of Jewish immigrants whose traditional ethnic and familial values have undergone a marked evolution, an evolution that was accelerating in 1963 when The Jewbird appeared. While critics have discussed story's anti-Semitism, particular historical changes pertinent to story and their relevance to Poe's poem have not been fully explored. As one recognizes actions from Poe's poem in Malamud's story, effect at first seems purely comic. Poe's stately Raven, described as an ebony with mien of lord or lady, is marked by the grave and stern decorum of countenance it wore (Poe 366). Malamud describes Schwartz as a skinny flying into Cohen family's kitchen on frazzled wings; black-type longbeaked bird - its ruffled head and small, dull eyes, crossed a little, making it look like a dissipated crow - suffers from breathing problems and rheumatism, and talks like an early vaudevillean (Malamud 144). What constitutes horror in The Raven, however, points to a more significant connection between two works. Byronic clement in Poe's American Romantic mind-set emerges in his presentation of an ego freed from earlier Christian hierarchical constraints and able to occupy center of his poetic cosmos. Poe's narrator's enlarged consciousness, once fulfilled by having found a female soul mate, becomes, after her death, vulnerable to hyperintense pain and psychological imbalance. From perspective of nineteenth-century American Romantic such a loss epitomizes an engulfing horror. After centuries of ethnic persecution and flight, and especially after Dachau and Auschwitz, Malamud finds horror in denial and suppression of one's ethnic self and all that loss of that ethnic identity entails. dispute between Schwartz and Cohen in The Jewbird over what it means to be a exemplifies Bakhtin's assertion that the in language lies on border between oneself and other. ... [it] is half someone else's (Bakhtin 293). word carries traces of its own social history; a procession of previous users of word have contributed to its meaning. Thus ensuing users find themselves in a dialogue with previous users. disputed word in Malamud's story is Jew. When Cohen's wife, Edie, asks Cohen what he has against Schwartz, Cohen answers, He's a foxy bastard. He thinks he's a (Malamud 147). Examining Cohen's objection to Schwartz's applying Jew to himself clarifies stakes in a dispute over fixing this word's definition. At one point Poe's narrator cries out, thy God hath lent - by these angels he hath sent thee (Poe 368). His accusation reinforces sense that Raven represents narrator's final fate. However, in The Jewbird is defined in more historical terms. Schwartz is in flight from persecutors. He finds an open window purely by chance: It's open, you're in. closed, you're and that's your fate (Malamud 144). inevitability of Raven's becomes luck of Schwartz's situation. Like many fleeing Jews before him, his will depend on charity of another. Schwartz immediately makes apparent his claim to being an orthodox and to being persecuted. His claim that he is chased by Anti-Semeets complicates issue. Schwartz names his persecutors as eagles, vultures, and hawks. And once in a while some crows will take your eyes out (145). Edie points that Schwartz appears to be a crow, making his persecutors his own kind. Such a significant distinction separates this story from literature of Gentile persecuting and places question of ethnic identity, of defining Jew, at center of story. …
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