Dennis Sobolev’s novel Legends of Carmel Mountain: Fourteen Stories about Love and Time consists of 14 stories with autonomous plots with the Haifa’s locus as a unifying factor. Some of them resemble urban or mountain folklore, e.g. about the dragon who inhabits Carmel Mountain or a ghost of the white monk in its tunnels. However, the author invented them and ignored actual local folklore. Haifa is at the same time very recognizable and fantastic. The plots contain numerous intercultural references to various male and female golems/dolls, transformations of humans into beasts as well as to necrophilia. Among them are medieval Jewish sources e.g. Solomon ibn Gabirol, Hebrew writer Shmuel Yossef Agnon, the Arabian Nights, Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Russian writer Andrei Bely etc., all of them are both sophisticated and partially misleading. The symbolical meanings of numbers (14 stories) are in fact connected to seven doubles from the Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah) meaning both the best and the worst things in the world. The stories are connected not by the
characters but rather by the symbolic meaning.

Na przykładzie twórczości izraelskich poetek (Alex Rif, Nadi-Adiny Rose) opisane są kulturowo-estetyczne wyznaczniki poezji hebrajskiej młodego pokolenia — tzw. generation one and a half — dzieci repatriantów z byłego Związku Sowieckiego. Szczególna uwaga poświęcona została zagadnieniu kulturowej spuścizny oraz tym poetyckim praktykom, w ramach których owa spuścizna znajduje swój wyraz. Jest to pierwsza część artykułu, następna — dotycząca twórczości Yael Tomashov i Rity Kogan — ukaże się w kolejnym numerze.

The article deals with the motif of the house, one of the main poetic ones in Dina Rubina’s prose. More precisely, this is a search for a house that has a clear geographical vector: from Tashkent to Moscow, and then to Israel — a search, at first subconscious, then fully realized, for a Jewish home. As a result, the house is found, but not in its material expression, but rather in mental, which is much more important for the Rubina’s heroes. The article considers the cultural and mythological context of the toponym One-year-old bitch, which played a tragic role in the novel Here comes the Messiah heroine’s fate.

The article is an attempt at presenting an inspiring writing of Zuzanna Ginczanka (Polina Gincburg) who was a Ukrainian-born Jewish poet writing in Polish. Due to her multifarious identity, it is in her poetry that one finds voices that reverberate from various nations and cultures, which makes an original polyphonic, geographic and mythological texture. Ginczanka’s poetics venerates the body since, in her view, contrary to the dogma of incarnation, it was the ‘flesh that was made word’. In her poems it is the Songs of So gs whose physicality more than metaphoricity inspires the poetic images. It is also nature that becomes an incentive for the poetic creation, which proves that poetry derives from the Greek word poiesis . In the times of the Holocaust atrocities, the language of poetry became for her the ‘house of poetic Being’ and several geographical places served her as security which, however, she had to constantly abandon in fear of Nazi repressors. Her monumental poems, chief among which is ‘The Fire-Bird’, due to its orchestration and almost sonorous imagery can compare with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet of the eponymous title. Her attachment to the earth and the living place, no matter how insecure, brought about that several geo-poetic images can be traced in her poetic works.

The article deals with the analysis of the Russian and Polish paremiological units which in their structure contain the first names of Hebrew origin. Upon the proper idiom material the author shows their diversity both in the morphological and word-formative respect especially in Russian language with a high
frequency of hypocoristic derivatives. The other respect is of functional and semantic character and it is reflected in the wide topical spectrum of proverbs containing Hebrew first names. Those proverbs describe not only a human beings’ character but also his behaviour, the phenomena of nature, extra-linguistic situations, customs and rituals.

According to historical data, Karaites, as an ethnic group and as a religious community, settled in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the Grand Duke Vytautas. Of their own free will or compulsion, the Karaites began to settle, first of all in Trakai, and then Vilnius, Galich and other places, as evidenced, in particular, by the recognition of privileges and their extension by subsequent Lithuanian princes, Polish kings and Russian emperors. Karaites never constituted a large ethnic group, both in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, and, after the partition of the Polish Commonwealth. In the western regions of the Russian Empire, especially since their number was in the 18th century, declined (the rebellion of the Haidamakas, and then due to the plague). In addition to the problem of Karaites, the article also pays attention to the (comparatively) legal, and not only, restrictions for the larger Jewish population.

Autor stawia sobie za cel porównanie trzech utworów wyjętych z angielskiej literatury późno-średniowiecznej i renesansowej, których wspólnym mianownikiem jest skrajnie negatywne przedstawienie społeczności żydowskiej lub indywidualnych jej przedstawicieli. Utwory te świadczą o silnych uprzedzeniach anty-żydowskich w okresie, kiedy to, w zasadzie byśmy się takich uprzedzeń nie spodziewali, gdyż nie było wówczas, poczynając od wygnania Żydów w 1290, żadnej gminy żydowskiej na terenie Anglii. O ile u Chaucera Żydzi występują jedynie jako niezróżnicowany barbarzyński żywioł, zdolny do instynktownych anty-chrześcijańskich ataków, to podejście Marlowe’a, a szczególnie Szekspira, świadczy już o chęci zrozumienia psychologicznego mechanizmu żydowskiego myślenia i bierze pod uwagę zjawisko anty-żydowskich uprzedzeń, a nawet prześladowań. Zresztą nawet w przypadku Chaucera istnieje, omówiona w niniejszym artykule, możliwość, że autor dystansował się do nazbyt jedno-wymiarowego przedstawienia problemu żydowskiego, który zawarł w opowieści przypisanej dość dwuznacznej postaci, jaką jest Przeorysza. Dla punktu widzenia Marlowe’a istotny jest problem tzw. makiawelizmu, który wiąże on, w sposób arbitralny, z mentalnością żydowską, podczas gdy Szekspir widzi swojego żydowskiego bohatera, czy raczej antybohatera, głównie w kontekście zjawiska lichwy.

review

In memoriam

In memoriam

Litteraria

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