The American Jewish Intelligentsia, the Claims of Humor—and the Case of Lenny Bruce

Several major American Jewish scholars and intellectuals have addressed the vitality and the pertinence of Jewish humor, seeing in it an entrée not only into key characteristics of communal life but also into the texture of reality itself. These academicians and critics have exposed the encounter between stand-up comedy and the social and political peculiarities of Jewish life in the United States. No comedian attracted more sustained attention than Lenny Bruce, whose career enlarged the contours of what could explored in night clubs and on long-playing records. Perhaps no satirist took greater risks, or exposed himself to greater legal danger, in both subject matter and in language. No predecessor was more willing to flaunt his own Jewish sensibility, or to present with such cynicism the hypocrisies inherent in the codes of conduct by which respectable America professed to live—which is what made Bruce the object of serious interest.

“A greisse shishke has arrived”: Jewish Humor as a Key to Understanding Social Change in A. Mryi’s Novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes”

The paper is dedicated to the representations of Jewish humor as a space of developing an understanding of the social experiments of the social change of the 1920s as depicted in a satirical novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes” written by a Belarusian writer A. Mryi in 1929. The novel’s main character, an ambitious civil servant, simultaneously naïve and unscrupulous, struggles to grasp the ever elusive spirit of the times and discerns its clearest shile also the most painful manifestations in the humor expressed by his Jewish neighbors as a reaction to his endeavors. The novel shows how the Jewish humor is intuitively understood by Jews and Slavs alike, even to those who are being laughed at and who are otherwise immune to any kind of critique directed at them. In this regard, the Jewish humor appears simultaneously a mode of mutual understanding between the Jewish and Slavic parts of the population and shared understanding of the social transformation, because it unmasks the often invalid claims of novelty in the agents of the local implementations of the social experiments of the 1920s. At the same time, this understanding gives limited yet quite reliable ways of checking the consequences of these experiments and recreating, even beyond the façade of the radical social transformations, of the former unity of collective and individual identity.

Neopicaresque, Jewish Humor and Denunciation of Cosmopolitanism in Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

The neopicaresque novel is a nascent genre that was invigorated in the aftermath of World Wars I and II in Britain and the United States. Contemporary studies of neopicaresque depict the image of the picaro as the “alienated”, “the outcast” and the “rebellious” character. This study is an attempt to redefine the Jewish neopicaresque novel and proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitanism are indispensable aspects that need further investigation. It endeavors through these two aspects to comment on the Jewish exilic experience in cosmopolitan America. Further, the study proposes that Jewish humor and denunciation of cosmopolitism unearth the inability of the ghetto-minded Jewish immigrant to fathom the traumatic and rapid social and political vicissitudes that lead him to escape this chaotic life. These propositions are expounded through a close reading of Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man who Disappeared (1914) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953). These Jewish travel narratives are discussed as Jewish neopicaresque novels that demonstrate the exodus of Eastern Jewish immigrants to America in the aftermath of WWI and II. The study draws on Freudian psychoanalytic theory of Jewish “self-critical “and “self-deprecating” humor. Considerations of the cultural dilemma of the Jewish ghetto immigrant and his negative depictions as “the wanderer Jew” and the “displaced-person” are addressed from the critical perspective of contemporary cosmopolitan discourses of Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman and Ulrich Beck. Keywords: Jewish neopicaresque novel, Jewish humor, cosmopolitanism, Kafka’s Amerika, Soul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March.

The Potential of Literary Translation in Intercultural Communication: Ota Pavel’s Short Stories for the Russian Reader

The purpose of this article is to reveal the specifics of the translation of cross-cultural texts by the Czech writer Ota Pavel. The main research methods are a description of potential difficulties and possible solutions, a comparative analysis of the translation and the original, contextual analysis, the use of analog texts to indicate the genre nature of the translated text. The main conclusions of the article are as follows: to convey the style of Ota Pavel, the translator must recreate the model of the world presented in the original text, which includes the specific features of Czech and Jewish cultures, by transmitting such characteristics of the text as slow narration, an abundance of retreats, repetitions, details, comparisons, specific Jewish humor using such translation tools as historical and cultural translation comments and compulsory translation transformations. The latter include: lexical transformations (translational transcription, tracing, lexical-semantic substitutions); lexical and grammatical transformations (explication, transformation); grammatical transformations (syntactic assimilation, division of sentences, combining sentences, grammatical replacements). Keywords: cross-cultural texts, analog texts, contextual analysis, adaptation, translation transformations

Jødisk humor hver fredag

For six years (2011–2017), the weekly newsletter of the Jewish Community of Oslo included «The Joke of the Week» on the last page. The present study of these jokes provides a) a mapping of predominant themes and b) expositions of jokes representative of these themes, addressing cultural and religious contexts and characteristics and employing – when applicable – the typology of Jewish jokes developed by Richard Raskin (1992). Predominant themes include marriage, family, dietary laws, holiday observance, God and the rabbis, biblical narratives and heroes, and intercultural and interreligious encounters. This collection of jokes reflects the international character of the Jewish community in Norway and confirms the common notion that Jewish humor typically is self- disparaging. Jokes at the expense of non-Jews are rare, a handful of slightly disrespectful jokes about Jewish–Catholic encounters being the main exceptions. Even the jokes about interreligious encounters usually make fun of the Jewish protagonist. Anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish cleverness, cunning and love for money appear prominently. There is striking silence, however, when it comes to topics that have sparked humor controversies in Norway: circumcision, the Holocaust, and Israeli military aggression and superiority towards the Palestinians.

Tzara, Tristan (1896-1963)

Born Samuel (Samy or Sami) Rosenstock in Moineşti, Romania, Tristan Tzara was an avant-garde poet, performer, critic, and film director. Together with Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, and Richard Huelsenbeck, Tzara founded Dada in Zurich, Switzerland, as an iconoclastic and fiercely anti-bourgeois protest movement in art, active from February 1916 to 1920. Though introduced by Ball, the word Dada first appeared in print in Tzara’s anti-war Dada novelette The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Fire Extinguisher (1916) (Dickerman 33). The Romanian poet flaunted himself with his adopted name, wearing spats and his trademark monocle, just as he flaunted the word Dada in banners, posters, advertisements, and a journal, presciently branding the nonsensical movement its trademark. Like a modern-day Seinfeld, deeply steeped in Romanian Jewish humor and culture, Tzara’s Dada claimed to be about ‘nothing’, as famously formulated in his 1918 ‘Dada Manifesto’. Thus Tzara’s Dada exhibited a distinctly nihilistic and absurdist dimension, as seen, for example, in his 1920 poem, which offers instructions on how ‘To Make a Dadaist Poem’ from newspaper clippings.