"The Jewbird" | |
---|---|
Author | Bernard Malamud |
Country | USA |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Fantasy short story |
Published in | The Reporter April 11, 1963; Idiots First |
Publication type | Magazine; Short Story Collection |
Publisher | Straus and Company |
Media type | Print (Paperback) |
"The Jewbird" is a short story by the Jewish-American writer Bernard Malamud. The protagonist is a crow named Schwartz, who identifies himself as a Jewbird. Fleeing persecution by antisemitic birds, Schwartz tries to find a home with a New York City Jewish family. Despite being generous and respectful to the family, the father first persecutes, and then attempts to kill Schwartz. The story has been interpreted as an allegory about Jewish self-hatred. [1]
The story was first published in The Reporter on April 11, 1963, and collected in Idiots First (1963). It also appeared in A Malamud Reader (1967), The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983), and Two Fables (1978), where it appeared along with "Talking Horse." The story was adapted for the stage at the Israeli Gesher Theater, along with other tales, under the title Schwartz and Other Animals.
The Fixer is a novel by Bernard Malamud published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.
Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kiev in the Russian Empire in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or the "Beilis affair". Although Beilis was acquitted after a lengthy process by an all-Slavic jury, the legal process sparked international criticism of antisemitism in the Russian Empire.
Cynthia Shoshana Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Schwartz's, also known as the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen, is a Jewish delicatessen restaurant and take-out, located at 3895 Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, Quebec. It was established on December 31, 1928 by Reuben Schwartz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania. Its long popularity and reputation has led to it being considered a cultural institution of Montreal.
Henry Bech is a fictional character created by American author John Updike. Bech first appeared in assorted short stories, stories which were later compiled in the books Bech: A Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1982), and Bech at Bay (1998). These books were all later collected in The Complete Henry Bech (2001), which also included the short story His Oeuvre (2000).
Self-hating Jew or self-loathing Jew, both associated with auto-antisemitism, is a term which is used to describe Jewish individuals who hold antisemitic views. The concept gained widespread currency after Theodor Lessing's 1930 book Der jüdische Selbsthaß, which sought to explain a perceived inclination among Jewish intellectuals, toward inciting antisemitism, by stating their views about Judaism. The term is said to have become "something of a key term of opprobrium in and beyond Cold War-era debates about Zionism".
The Magic Barrel is a 1958 collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Also, the Jewish Publication Society released its own edition at the same time. It won the 1959 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. It was also Malamud's debut collection of stories.
Jewish American literature holds an essential place in the literary history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of which has been Yiddish. While critics and authors generally acknowledge the notion of a distinctive corpus and practice of writing about Jewishness in America, many writers resist being pigeonholed as "Jewish voices." Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot be considered representative of Jewish American literature, one example being Isaac Asimov.
George Wyle was an American orchestra leader and composer best known for having written the theme song to 1960s television sitcom Gilligan's Island. He is the grandfather of musician Adam Levy.
The Natural is a 1984 American sports film based on Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel of the same name, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Robert Duvall. Like the book, the film recounts the experiences of Roy Hobbs, an individual with great "natural" baseball talent, spanning the decades of Roy's career. It was the first film produced by TriStar Pictures.
Bernard Malamud’s short story "The Mourners” first appeared in Discovery in January 1955. The story was included in Malamud's first collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, published in 1958.
Wandering Stars is an anthology of Jewish fantasy and science fiction, edited by American writer Jack Dann, originally published by Harper & Row in 1974. It represented, according to the book cover, "the first time in science fiction that the Jew - and the richness of his themes and particular points of view -- will appear without a mask." In his introduction, "Why Me?", Isaac Asimov discussed how many Jewish science fiction writers prior to that time had used gentile pen names in order to get published: "Many of the Jewish pulp writers, however, used pen names as a matter of sound business. A story entitled "War Gods of the Oyster-Men of Deneb" did not carry conviction if it was written by someone named Chaim Itzkowitz." He then goes on to discuss the pen names of various Jewish writers included in this book. Wandering Stars is therefore of historical significance as the first science fiction anthology where Jewish writers openly identified themselves as such. It was followed by a second anthology, More Wandering Stars, also edited by Jack Dann, published by Doubleday in 1981.
"Jackals and Arabs" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly Der Jude. It appeared again in the collection Ein Landarzt in 1919.
Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition is the fifth published novel of Bernard Malamud. It is a novel in the form of a short story cycle, which gathers six stories dealing with Arthur Fidelman, an art student from the Bronx who travels to Italy, initially to research Giotto, but also with the hopes of becoming a painter. It was published in 1969 and includes stories from Malamud's earlier collections The Magic Barrel (1958) and Idiots First (1963), plus two previously uncollected stories and one previously unpublished story.
God's Grace is the final novel written by American author Bernard Malamud, published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel focuses on Calvin Cohn, the supposed sole survivor of thermonuclear war and God's second Flood, who attempts to rebuild and perfect civilization amongst the primates that make their way onto a tropical island.
Tosia Malamud was a Mexican sculptor of Ukrainian origin, one of the first female graduates of Mexico's Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Her family immigrated to Mexico when she was four, and her talent for art appeared early. She went to art college against her parents' wishes, graduating in 1943. Because of family obligations, her career did not begin until the mid-1950s with two important exhibitions that brought her style to the attention of critics. From then until her death, she exhibited her work in Mexico and abroad. She also created large and small works for public spaces and was considered to be the best bust maker in Mexico at the time. In addition to depictions of notable people, she created works mostly dealing with maternity, family and childhood which can be found in places such as the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Hospital Siglo XXI in Mexico City. La familia has become iconic for Mexico's Instituto Mexicano de Seguro Social and Viento for the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Morelia.
The Tenants is the sixth novel of Bernard Malamud, published in 1971.
Patricia Beck was an American writer from New York state. She studied at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont but dropped out after her mother's death. Beck kept a diary, wrote poetry, and published two short stories before committing suicide in 1978. Her papers were selected for inclusion in the Smith College women and disabilities collection, as they provide insight into chronic illness and depression.