Jewish postmodern writers and national identity

Abstract

The expression of the peculiarity in Jewish national identity has been a very actual detail for hundreds of years to this day. It has been a matter of controversy from the time of patriarchate, especially after the creation of Diaspora, not only among Jews but among all people in the world. Recent disputations in Jewish Knesset, about who can be called a Jew, summarize all the questions of Jewish origins and the question above all questions - what essentially determines the essence of Jewish identity in relation to other nations? We find two types of classification which relate to Jewish writers: 1. by the language; 2. by the topic. Some of the significant authors, especially in America, who had written prose with Jewish subject matter, could be classified into two main groups by the language in which they had written: Hebrew and English. A strict classification by topic is not possible, but comparing the writers' attitudes towards different questions of life, Judaism and modern tendencies, the following topics have emerged as the unique themes being shared by the various numbers of authors: religious and mythological questions; historical questions; solitude and alienation; infiltration into another societies; Jewish sufferings; family in Jewish community. In this paper we shall try to express the most frequent indicators of the Jewish construction in their literary works as the main characteristics of Jewish national figure and their identity. They have represented the indicators of their bad destiny, their sacrifice for the better world by the solitude and alienation of Jewish individual in America, turning back to the historical facts (since World War II) as the cause for anti-Jewish atrocity and suffering then and now. The writers put the Jews on the pedestal of a sublime nation and at the same time made them the victims of modern society.