Language:
English
Year of publication:
2000
Titel der Quelle:
Parcours Judaïques
Angaben zur Quelle:
6 (2000) 147-154
Keywords:
Dreyfus, Alfred,
;
Rubens, Bernice.
;
Jewish literature History and criticism
;
Antisemitism History 1945-
Abstract:
Criticizes the 1999 novel "I, Dreyfus" by Bernice Rubens, whose late 20th-century Dreyfus is represented as an Englishman (i.e. an English Jew who was baptized) who is unjustly accused of murder by a cabal of neo-Nazis. Contends that Rubens depicts her protagonist as suffering from a paranoia that no Jewish child of the late 1950s would have experienced. Her Dreyfus is a self-abasing Jewish antisemite, with whom the author tries to make the reader sympathize. Faults Rubens for failing to recognize changes in the post-Holocaust world that require us to rethink the nature of antisemitism rather than be tied to outmoded images like that of Dreyfus. Even when the English Dreyfus finally acknowledges that he is a Jew, his Jewish identity is not life-enhancing: it is connected with the death symbolized by Auschwitz.
Note:
On Bernice Rubens' novel "I, Dreyfus" (1999).
URL:
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