“Your Papers for a Tourist Visa”
A Literary-Biographical Consideration of
Isaac Bashevis Singer in Warsaw, 1923–1935
This article focuses on two aspects of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s life and work from 1923 to 1935. First, it outlines his early career in Warsaw, focusing on his essays and tracing his efforts to establish a literary career independent from that of his older brother, Israel Joshua. Second, it considers Singer’s emigration from Warsaw, with a focus on his brother’s efforts to get him out, as found in personal correspondence. The article delineates a tension between Singer’s establishment of a position within Yiddish literature in Warsaw distinct from his brother’s, and the need to leave the city in order to survive, adding Israel Joshua’s own voice to the testimony from this period.
European Journal of Jewish Studies, 15.2 (2021), 256-284
Idiocy and Irony
Plato's Dialogues and Dostoevsky's The Idiot
This article focuses on two concepts, irony and idiocy, as they appear in the works of Plato and Dostoevsky. In Plato's case, the article describes how irony is thematized in a rhetorical mode and also deployed as a dialectical method, creating dramatic tension that produces additional layers of significance.
Soundings, 104.1 (2021), 89-112
The Yiddish Roots of
Modern Jewish Writing
in Europe and America
Jewish literatures in Europe underwent tremendous tensions and pressures with- in the specific contexts of modernity. My case study focuses on Rabbi Nahman’s tales, which were told orally by him in Yiddish and subsequently written down by his disciples. . .
Disseminating Jewish Literatures (2020), 251-256
The chronicler‐narrator of Dostoevsky's Demons, Anton Lavrentievich
G—v, seems like an inscrutable and oscillatory storyteller. On the one hand he is profusely talkative and repeatedly justifies his position as narrator; on the other, he reports scenes that he did not witness and could not have direct knowledge about, including what people say and even think.
© Copyright David Stromberg