Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque

The author describes the role of the polit, a socially marginal character the world acts upon, and a variation on the Spanish pícaro, as the quintessential protagonist in Jewish modernist literature, as well as its relationship to the picaresque and the Bildungsroman. She focuses on three types of the polit figure: the mobile modern subject, the demobilized soldier, and the new Soviet citizen, discussing narratives of mobility in terms of geography and social mobility in works by Sholem Aleichem and Issac Bashevis Singer; demobilization as a trope for post-Haskalah Jewish existence in I.J. Singer, Joseph Roth, and Yisroel Rabon; the fortunes of the polit in the new Soviet regime in works by Ilya Ehrenburg and Isaac Babel; and alternative forms of Jewish emplacement in the diaspora and Israel in works by Saul Bellow and David Grossman. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)