Efraim Sicher
Biographic Data
| ID | 1004743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Efraim Sicher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Efraim |
| FAMILY NAME | Sicher |
| SIGNATURE | SICHER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5067-8379 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Home as a Place of No Return
A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets
Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is b…
Written on the body
This essay explores contemporary Jewish feminist artists’ engagement with the tensions between sexuality and sanctity of the female body in Jewish spaces and religious practices. The attempt to reclaim subjecthood within these spaces and practices rescues the female body from abjection. I have selected Jewish spaces and practices that are especially embodied (such as the mikveh or tefillin) in order to track common threads of a dialogue, although…
Isaak Babel's “Odessa Tales”
Babel's “Odessa Tales” have not been previously analyzed as a cycle of all nine stories (rather than the four included in Soviet collections of the writer's work). This essay examines the entire cycle in their historical context, disentangling the stories from the Odessa myth, of which they have become an integral part. I argue that the “Odessa Tales” should be seen as contributions to an already existing “Odessa text,” and that Babel manipulates…
Odessa time, Odessa space
Seventy years of communist rule repressed a complex history of Odessa’s multiple cultural spaces and a trilingual cultural system that operated among its Jews. This essay shows the multiethnicity of Odessa’s cultural history and raises issues of determining the ethnicity of cultural spaces, issues that have been obscured by a mythologized narrative. The ‘Odessa myth’ tends to define Odessa culture as exclusively Russian or as Hebrew, but history …
Referenz, Inter-Referenz, Interferenz
This article analyzes the Russian prose of Isaac Babel (1894–1940) as an example of Yiddish linguistic interference that introduces variant readings into the subtext. Such interference was characteristic of the Russian Jewish cultural polysystem and was particularly versatile in the Soviet period in referring to repressed or erased Jewish identity. The article discusses the implications of Yiddish linguistic interference for cultural identity and…
Under Postcolonial Eyes
In the Western literary tradition, the “jew” has long been a figure of ethnic exclusion and social isolation—the wanderer, the scapegoat, the alien. But it is no longer clear where a perennial outsider belongs. This provocative study of contemporary British writing points to the figure of the “jew” as the litmus test of multicultural society. Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse examine the “jew” as a cultural construction distinct from the “Jewishn…
Race, Color, Identity
Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race,…
The Holocaust Novel
The first comprehensive study of Holocaust literature as a major postwar literary genre, The Holocaust Novel provides an ideal student guide to the powerful and moving works written in response to this historical tragedy. This student-friendly volume answers a dire need for readers to understand a genre in which boundaries and often blurred between history, fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Other essential features for students here include an …
Babel' in Context
Isaak Babel (1894?1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was?an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture and all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem.This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel?s work. It looks…
The Jew's passage to India
This article focuses on the figure of the ‘jew’ in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Both authors mourn the loss of multiculturalism in twentieth-century India and invoke the ‘jew’ to question concepts of globalised hybridity, as well as issues of race and stereotypes, while gleaning lessons of global diasporism and racial violence from the Jewish historical experience. In both texts, the figure of the …
The Body of the Jew in Russian Literature
The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse in the Early 21st Century
The essay looks at three spheres in which ideological bias and political activism work to delegitimize the State of Israel by maligning Israel and Zionism in mainstream British public discourse. Postcolonial theory is one weight against any objective treatment of the Jewish state. The demonization of Israel in the press draws on conspiracy theories and stereotypes familiar from anti-Semitic tropes. British Jews are fairly supportive of Israel, th…
Tancred’s Wound”
A recent debate over trauma theory in Holocaust studies has implications for writing by the “generation after.” This article looks at Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and the 1998 movie Left Luggage (based on a novel by Carl Friedman), as well as David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1985), as examples of how traumatic knowledge is accessed through literary narratives and the imagination, rather than the historical events. In particular, the trope o…
Kafka’s Panther and Rabbi Nachman’s Turkey
The parable of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” has defied interpretation. This essay suggests this is less problematic if we place Kafka’s writing within a Jewish hermeneutic model, such as the parables of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and consider the effect on interpretation of the spiritual and historical crisis of modernity. The parable of the parable is not that there is no meaning in the text, but that the keys to meaning may have been l…
The Scandal of the Holocaust
The Trials of Isaak
Isaak Babel was a notorious hoaxer who enjoyed mystifying both in real life and in his fiction.1 He was doubly ambiguous and ironical when it became politically unsafe to speak his mind. He turned his natural secretiveness to advantage whenever faced by attempts to discredit him, claiming that he was more Soviet than the Soviets, and that he was silent because he was working hard at proving his loyalty in literary form. The secret of Babel's secr…
Isaak Babel
The last utopia
(1991). The last utopia: Entropy and revolution in the poetics of Evgeny Zamjatin. History of European Ideas: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 225-237
Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel
Binary oppositions and spatial representation
Maupassant en Russie
Dans le conte de B. : Guy de Maupassant , le narrateur integre l'univers de M. a sa propre experience de l'art et de la sensualite
The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse in the Early 21st Century
The essay looks at three spheres in which ideological bias and political activism work to delegitimize the State of Israel by maligning Israel and Zionism in mainstream British public discourse. Postcolonial theory is one weight against any objective treatment of the Jewish state. The demonization of Israel in the press draws on conspiracy theories and stereotypes familiar from anti-Semitic tropes. British Jews are fairly supportive of Israel, th…
The Jew's passage to India
This article focuses on the figure of the ‘jew’ in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Both authors mourn the loss of multiculturalism in twentieth-century India and invoke the ‘jew’ to question concepts of globalised hybridity, as well as issues of race and stereotypes, while gleaning lessons of global diasporism and racial violence from the Jewish historical experience. In both texts, the figure of the …
Maupassant en Russie
Dans le conte de B. : Guy de Maupassant , le narrateur integre l'univers de M. a sa propre experience de l'art et de la sensualite
Binary oppositions and spatial representation
Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel
The last utopia
(1991). The last utopia: Entropy and revolution in the poetics of Evgeny Zamjatin. History of European Ideas: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 225-237
The Trials of Isaak
Isaak Babel was a notorious hoaxer who enjoyed mystifying both in real life and in his fiction.1 He was doubly ambiguous and ironical when it became politically unsafe to speak his mind. He turned his natural secretiveness to advantage whenever faced by attempts to discredit him, claiming that he was more Soviet than the Soviets, and that he was silent because he was working hard at proving his loyalty in literary form. The secret of Babel's secr…
Isaak Babel
The Scandal of the Holocaust
Kafka’s Panther and Rabbi Nachman’s Turkey
The parable of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist” has defied interpretation. This essay suggests this is less problematic if we place Kafka’s writing within a Jewish hermeneutic model, such as the parables of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, and consider the effect on interpretation of the spiritual and historical crisis of modernity. The parable of the parable is not that there is no meaning in the text, but that the keys to meaning may have been l…
Tancred’s Wound”
A recent debate over trauma theory in Holocaust studies has implications for writing by the “generation after.” This article looks at Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996) and the 1998 movie Left Luggage (based on a novel by Carl Friedman), as well as David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1985), as examples of how traumatic knowledge is accessed through literary narratives and the imagination, rather than the historical events. In particular, the trope o…
The Image of Israel and Postcolonial Discourse in the Early 21st Century
The essay looks at three spheres in which ideological bias and political activism work to delegitimize the State of Israel by maligning Israel and Zionism in mainstream British public discourse. Postcolonial theory is one weight against any objective treatment of the Jewish state. The demonization of Israel in the press draws on conspiracy theories and stereotypes familiar from anti-Semitic tropes. British Jews are fairly supportive of Israel, th…
The Jew's passage to India
This article focuses on the figure of the ‘jew’ in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Both authors mourn the loss of multiculturalism in twentieth-century India and invoke the ‘jew’ to question concepts of globalised hybridity, as well as issues of race and stereotypes, while gleaning lessons of global diasporism and racial violence from the Jewish historical experience. In both texts, the figure of the …
The Body of the Jew in Russian Literature
Babel' in Context
Isaak Babel (1894?1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was?an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture and all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem.This is the first book in English to study the intertextuality of Babel?s work. It looks…
Under Postcolonial Eyes
In the Western literary tradition, the “jew” has long been a figure of ethnic exclusion and social isolation—the wanderer, the scapegoat, the alien. But it is no longer clear where a perennial outsider belongs. This provocative study of contemporary British writing points to the figure of the “jew” as the litmus test of multicultural society. Efraim Sicher and Linda Weinhouse examine the “jew” as a cultural construction distinct from the “Jewishn…
Race, Color, Identity
Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race,…
The Holocaust Novel
The first comprehensive study of Holocaust literature as a major postwar literary genre, The Holocaust Novel provides an ideal student guide to the powerful and moving works written in response to this historical tragedy. This student-friendly volume answers a dire need for readers to understand a genre in which boundaries and often blurred between history, fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Other essential features for students here include an …
Referenz, Inter-Referenz, Interferenz
This article analyzes the Russian prose of Isaac Babel (1894–1940) as an example of Yiddish linguistic interference that introduces variant readings into the subtext. Such interference was characteristic of the Russian Jewish cultural polysystem and was particularly versatile in the Soviet period in referring to repressed or erased Jewish identity. The article discusses the implications of Yiddish linguistic interference for cultural identity and…
Odessa time, Odessa space
Seventy years of communist rule repressed a complex history of Odessa’s multiple cultural spaces and a trilingual cultural system that operated among its Jews. This essay shows the multiethnicity of Odessa’s cultural history and raises issues of determining the ethnicity of cultural spaces, issues that have been obscured by a mythologized narrative. The ‘Odessa myth’ tends to define Odessa culture as exclusively Russian or as Hebrew, but history …
Isaak Babel's “Odessa Tales”
Babel's “Odessa Tales” have not been previously analyzed as a cycle of all nine stories (rather than the four included in Soviet collections of the writer's work). This essay examines the entire cycle in their historical context, disentangling the stories from the Odessa myth, of which they have become an integral part. I argue that the “Odessa Tales” should be seen as contributions to an already existing “Odessa text,” and that Babel manipulates…
Written on the body
This essay explores contemporary Jewish feminist artists’ engagement with the tensions between sexuality and sanctity of the female body in Jewish spaces and religious practices. The attempt to reclaim subjecthood within these spaces and practices rescues the female body from abjection. I have selected Jewish spaces and practices that are especially embodied (such as the mikveh or tefillin) in order to track common threads of a dialogue, although…
A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets
Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is b…
Home as a Place of No Return
Art (13 works) · History (10 works) · Literature (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)