Tag: Jews in literature

1,765 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Frank Norris (1870-1902) was best known for MacTeague, a rough, unvarnished view of American life, although The Octopus (1900) demands attention as well. While Steinbeck wrote a memoir/paean to life in Salinas, The Octopus deals with ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Norris’s work, unlike Steinbeck’s careful imitation of Tolstoy, is exciting and more immediate than ever, concerned as it is with land and power. (more…)

4,358 words

Jerry Rubin
Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970

Much to my surprise, Jerry Rubin has exceeded my expectations. To some, he was the voice of a generation. To others, he’s a symbol of everything that went wrong with some of the Boomers, and in particular the faults of the hippy-dippy counterculture. (more…)

3,927 words

Part 1, Part 2

All this anti-Masonry and TradCath stuff; there was something familiar with all this, until at some point I exclaimed again, “You’ve seen these films before, haven’t you, my man!” It’s Baron Evola’s doppelganger!

Although to be honest, it may have been Will herself who clued me in. (more…)

Gertrude Stein.

6,991 words

Barbara Will
Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (Gender and Culture Series)
New York City: Columbia University Press, 2011

The joy of the body, the most honorable and fecund joy of all, reign[s] in America.

— Bernard Faÿ (more…)

5,026 words

Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (more…)

2,781 words

Within the field of literature, Jews have often complained about negative Jewish stereotypes. There is a Wikipedia page [1] dedicated to the subject, and scholars have dedicated much time to researching this phenomenon. For example, in his 2005 article “How Racist Was Oliver Twist?” novelist Norman Lebrecht actually counted (or relayed someone else’s count of) the number of times Charles Dickens referred to his Jewish villain Fagin in the first thirty-eight chapters of Oliver Twist as “the Jew.” It was 257. (more…)

1,722 words

You can always tell an enemy by the way he’ll attack you in the name of peace. He’ll claim he supports freedom, but will try to restrict yours in the name of freedom. He’ll speak loudly of universal standards, but will apply them only in a restricted manner. . . against you. (more…)

808 words

One of the problems with getting interested in Jews is that they are, well, verbose. Digging into primary texts can become a sandtrap for spare time. Marcel Proust is notoriously dense, Ayn Rand is unending, Bill Kristol is incredibly repetitive, Philip Roth absurdly prolific, and so on. Really plumbing the Jewish mind through their own fiction is, quite frankly, a timesuck. (more…)