Representations of the Jewish memory and the Jewish exile in the Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer and in some paintings by Marc Chagal

Abstract

This paper aims to make an intersemiotic analysis about the Jewish memory and exile in the novel The fixer, by Jewish American writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), published in 1966, and in some pictures of the Jewish Russian painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985), for example: Exodus (from 1952-1956), The White Crucifixion (from 1938), I and my Village (from 1911). In spite of they had been raised up in distinct Jewish generations, Malamud (son of Jewish Russian immigrants that went to the United States) and Chagall (immigrated to France), both take as theme the home-place from where originated their families, the shtetl (small village, in Yiddish). The shtetlekh were small cities demarcated in Poland and Russian during the ninth and twenty centuries; centers of the Jewish religious and cultural life. For many immigrated European Jews and their descendants, the shtetl became the nostalgic, primordial and mythical place, in spite of the destruction occasioned by the pogroms and the Holocaust. For this reason, art’s men as Malamud and Chagall recreated the shtetl’s life in their works, having recourse to the zekher, the collective and the individual memory of the Jewish people, whose transmission occurs by means of the ritual and the narrative. Therefore, the memory recreates time and space, transgressing chronologies; this mnemonic phenomenon is showed in the Malamudian novel The fixer and the Chagallian picture, because both artists searched the oniric universe and the unconscious, Surrealism’s elements. Furthermore, Malamud and Chagall take as theme the exile suffered by the Jewish people deconstructing the use of the crucifixion of Christ as anti-Semitic pretext. Malamud makes it through the character Yakov Bok, anti-hero that lives individually a self-exile under the implications of the historical and collective exile of the Jewish people. Likewise, Chagall makes it, according to his vision, by means of the recreation the Ahasuerus legend, the wandering Jew