“What we talk when we talk about Anne Frank?”

“What we talk when we talk about Anne Frank?”

Introduction

“What we talk when we talk about Anne Frank”? It is hard to think of a more appropriate title for the stories in this book. It is a collection of eight stories, published by Englander, focusing on world and Jewish culture view from a thousand angles. All perfect, deep, ironic and always unsettling. To narrate is Nathan Englander, Jew, and New York, born in 1970, widely considered one of the best Jewish-American writers of the last generation.

Discussion

Born and raised in America, Englander has spent a long period of his youth in Israel, and perhaps for this reason is able to perfectly convey the anxieties, the sacrifices, fears and expectations of the Jews of today (Alter, 2012). Everything is seasoned with irony "dark" that his style very closes to that of Philiph Roth and in some ways the films of Woody Allen. Not by chance is considered the heir to the great tradition of Jewish-American writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow.

Does it make sense to say that a part of the Jewish community is suffering from an "obsession with the Holocaust as an indispensable sign of identity"? The question answered by Englander himself, by the mouth of one of his characters. And how important it is to know that the character in question is under the influence of marijuana? And what weight is the fact that the character in question, between a rod and the other decides to "play the game of Anne Frank, also known as who hide me?" A weight is because if it is true that no one wants a repeat of the Holocaust, it is equally true that in history you never know (Elmhirst, 2012). And in the case of a hypothetical second Holocaust, it is right to wonder who among our acquaintances would hide in a haunted Jew house, as they did at the time while being the neighbors of Anne Frank.

The characters and situations narrated by Englander are very different, but they all played between the acceptance of the Jewish tradition and its rejection. It starts with the story that gives the book its title, in which two couples - one American and "mixed" (Jewish wife and husband friendly), the other ultra-Orthodox Jews organize together a strange game of society: they ask, when the Holocaust happens again, as a citizen not Jew would hide a Jewish family today. The conclusions are entirely unexpected and disruptive (Englander, 2012). The author then precedes Hills sisters, tough tale revealing scenes in which she tells of life in the Holy Land from the eve of the Yom Kippur War to the present through a story of legacy and testament as the two women. As in the Bloom exacted retribution from her protagonists are violence against the Jewish community in small-town America (Brownstein, 2012). To guard against an anti-Semite, a group of Jewish children go to ...