Yakov Bok Alienation

We all deal with alienation, both internal and external, throughout our lives: it is an unavoidable condition that universally afflicts all humans. However, oftentimes we can alienate ourselves from other people more than is necessary, putting a divide between us and the rest of humanity by no fault but our own. Both John and Amir in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner face great internal struggles with alienation throughout their whole lives, many times making things worse for themselves than is needed, and forging their characters by fire; yet the natures of their hardships are inherently different, leading the protagonists down two disparate paths: one to personal triumph and the other to tragedy.

Day by day the Nazi’s would come and take people off the streets and they would disappear and never return. Adolf Hitler had been in power and declared that Europe would be Jew free. From this point on, Yanek and the rest of the Jewish population in Europe had been hiding, in fear of the Nazi’s.

Intro: This book is about a Jewish boy named Yanek. This gives an inside look of what happened to Jewish people in the 1940s. He had a very hard life in the 6 year time duration he spent in the ghetto and concentration camps.

Lamed Shapiro’s “The Cross” tells the story, in vivid and disturbing detail, of a Russian Jewish man who is attacked in a pogrom, alongside his estranged mother, and is branded on the forehead with a cross by his attacker. Blume Lempel’s “Images on a Blank Canvas” tells another story, in equally vivid and disturbing detail, of a woman mourning the death of her friend, a prostitute who committed suicide. In these two stories, there is one striking similarity: The survivor is portrayed by the non-survivor. In “The Cross,” the Russian Jew is depicted by his mother as the brutally murdered non-survivor of a pogrom. In “Images on a Blank Canvas,” Blume Lempel, the survivor, is depicted by her fallen friend Zosye. Through the depictions of survivors by non-survivors, Shapiro and Lempel are able to unpack the trauma stemming from a pogrom and a suicide and its effects on the survivors.

We formed a special bond with Nabokov despite the difficulty of his prose. This went deeper than out identification with his themes. His novels are shaped around invisible trapdoors, sudden gaps that constantly pull the carpet from under the reader’s feet. They are filled with mistrust of what we call everyday reality, an acute sense of that reality’s fickleness and frailty (293).

There are very few people in the world who are willing to go against the popular trends and do what they feel in their hearts is correct. But Yevgeny Yevtushenko is one of those people. In his poem Babi Yar, he tells the story of the modern persecution of the Jews, focusing on atrocities like those of the massacre at Babi Yar and the pogroms at Beilostok, and also the general anti-Semitism that killed men like Dreyfus and pervades the entire Russian people. The poem uses many literary devices, such as graphic imagery and contrasts, while painting a very clear picture of the scenes of pure horror.

Aleksandar Nikitenko was among one of the serfs who served in Russia during the early 1800s. He was born from Ukraininan parents in Voronezh Province. His parents, soon along with Aleksandar, were serfs of the immensely wealthy Sheremetev family. Nikitenko’s father was chosen at a very early age to go to Moscow to sing in Count Sheremetev’s choir. While there, he received an education that allowed him to pursue intellectual interests. Nikitenko looked up to his father and believed that having to be kept in bondage despite his knowledge was entirely unfair. Throughout his life, Nikitenko is accepted by intelligent teachers for being quite knowledgeable. However, he is time and time again held inferior because of his social status. His family, had it not been for serfdom, would have probably been a part of a provincial middle class because of their associations with nobles and merchants.

Babi Yar, a poem written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, tells the story of the Nazi invasion into a small part of Russia, in which, throughout the duration of World War II, over one-hundred thousand Jews, Gypsies and Russian POW's were brutally murdered. However, what is unique about this particular perspective is that the narrator is not a Jew, but a mere observer who is aghast at the atrocities that took place during the Holocaust. It is through allusions, as well as other literary devices, that Yevtushenko elucidates caustically the absurdities of the hatred that caused the Holocaust, in addition to the narrator's identification with the Jews and their history of oppression.

In New York, United States a new wave of Jewish refugees is going to create a new American identity among society. To the skepticism of the grand percent of the Jewish community, America was indeed the gateway from dictatorship, prejudice, persecution, and death to Jews. An impressive 85% of Jews have experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic remarks at some point in their lives, according to a poll by the World Zionist Organization’s International Center for Countering Anti-Semitism. During the early 20th century, Jews are going to experience hardships in their daily life that will force them to evacuate or adapt to new rules. Peter Knight expresses in his book that during the nineteenth century American Jews “rarely [experienced]

By analyzing Rose Cohen’s autobiography, “Out of the Shadow”, it uncovers the various social and economical hardships that Russian-Jews faced living in America. Even though adapting to a new life in America came with many obstacles for Jews, Rose’s story shows that many of them made it through their hardships and ultimately overcame their adversities. Rose Cohen’s autobiography serves as a great resource as to what Jewish life was in everyday America during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

The authors classify the second response to the ultimatum as an assimilationist response; it is the negotiation of the Jewish difference. The creation of the new nation-state allowed Jews to privatize their religious differences, which meant Judaism would be tolerated as long as it was an individual’s personal faith. Powers states that the term “assimilationist” can be better understood as “adaptationism.” This is the impulse of Jews to rid or hide any differences in order to adapt into society. “The unending need to identify, vilify, and ultimately negate threatening Jewish difference is the key distinguishing marker of assimilationism as an active, politically salient ideology (Powers, 114).

The Romanov Dynasty that ruled Russia from 1613 until 1918 was subject to the period seismic shifts of increasing connection, modernization, and technological advancement that shook the rest of Europe during the same timeframe. The Tsars of this dynasty faced this challenge directly through foreign military conquests and economic and political reformation, yet a distinctive foundational element stayed true throughout their reign. Tsars of Russia consistently used a reverence for Orthodoxy to establish a continued persecution of minority religious groups within their control. The Jews bore the brunt of this persecution as they experienced strict laws governing their rights and constant threats of violence. Tsars throughout the Romanov history acted to strengthen their Orthodoxy by punishing the Jewish population in order to drum up support for their own regimes and domestic and foreign policies.

Life for the Russian Jewry from the period of 1880 to 1920 was not a life desired by anyone. The Jews were forced to live in harsh conditions, lost their ability to have certain jobs, and faced extreme violence from their neighbors, the Russian peasantry. Escaping to America was the only way they could ever live normal and safe lives. Jews were forced to live in the area known as “The Pale of Settlement.” The Pale of Settlement was overcrowded and created poverty among the Jews. These sources show how the immigrants changed the way ethnic groups were, made the societies become equal and diverse, and influenced many cultures

Imperial Russian society during the time of serfdom was characterized by constantly changing social order. The society experienced a complex social change at the threshold to emancipation. It was undergoing many changes with increasing westernization and serfdom culture that gave rise to formation of new classes (raznochintsy) during the nineteenth century. Many authors have reflected and emphasized this component of change in the structure of pre-emancipation Russian society. This paper will examine how two writers: Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev, in their novels, Dead Souls and Fathers and Sons depict the society’s constantly changing nature through the relationships between their characters and the development in their beliefs and ideas. Although both the novels explore societal change during the pre-emancipation of serfs, the emphasis of change is different in both the novels. In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev oversees shifting values prevalent in the society. He explores the shift in generational values by depicting the difference in beliefs of characters like Bazarov and Nikolai. On the other hand, in Dead Souls Gogol focuses on issues of morality in society. He depicts a struggle for morality and portrays a corrupt society through the landowners and the protagonist, Chichikov, in his book.

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a modern lawman whose sudden mortality forces him to evaluate the worth of his life and the life choices he has. Throughout the novella, Tolstoy reveals social norms and practices blindly followed by those in the upper-middle class. These norms bring to light modernity’s core values, which Tolstoy critiques through the actions Ivan Ilyich takes before his death, Ivan Ilyich’s revelation as he lies on his death bed, and the way Ivan Ilyich’s family, friends, and colleagues react to his illness and eventual death. In fact, The Death of Ivan Ilyich provides a critique on modernity as a whole; Tolstoy condemns the shallow, superficial lives the higher-ups in society lead, spurred on by the idea of modernity.