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As the exilic experience, initiated in 587 B.C.E., continued over millennia, no one has been able to settle the question of what it means to be a diaspora Jew. Are those who actively participate in non-Jewish life still in a position to claim the heritage of Israel? And what about Jews who actively seek assimilation and renounce their roots altogether: are they still Jews in spite of themselves? Authors, from Joseph Roth to Sholom Aleichem to Chaim Potok, have tried to deal with this issue in light of different diaspora circumstances. One of the most recent perspectives on Jewish identity comes to us through "Sunshine", a powerful film by the Hungarian director Istvan Szabó (1999). Szabó, who wrote the screenplay with Israel Horowitz, tells the story of several generations in one Hungarian Jewish family: the Sonnenscheins. Living at the turn of the twentieth century, the patriarch of the Sonnenschein clan is Emmanuel, a successful distiller who seems to have found a balance between the two exilic extremes: neither complete assimilation, nor a retreat from gentile society.
Vsevolod M. Garshin's story "Four Days" ("Четыре дня") made the author famous when it was published in 1877. Intended as a strong anti·war statement and based on a true incident during the Russian-Turkish war (1877-78), "Four Days" is the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on an empty battlefield. His last name, Ivanov, which is traditionally considered to be the most common one in Russia, may suggest the idea of "everyman" in order to generalize the protagonists terrible experience on the battlefield into a broad anti-war message. The protagonist finds himself pinned down next to 0the body of a Turkish soldier whom he had killed just before being wounded. Forced to look at the corpse for a long time, Ivanov experiences terrible guilt, since he has never killed before. After four days of physical and mental agony, during which Ivanov reassesses his formerly idealistic attitude toward war and ends up condemning it as something far from glorious and noble, the protagonist is found by his regiment, and, unlike his real-life prototype, he survives (Henry. 47). Throughout the text we do not lave the confines of the protagonist's mind; as a result, the intense, relentless focus on his mental and physical anguish created by the interior monologue: immobilized by his wound, he becomes a prisoner of his own mind; as a result, the intense, relentless focus on his mental and physical anguish created by the interior monologue technique enhances the "horrors of war" effect intended by the author. At the same time the war-related situation and setting provide motivation for the wounded man's interior monologue: immobilized by his wound, he becomes a prisoner of his own mind and its therefore forced by circumtances to think through his entire predicament and its causes.
Given Tournier's own indication that the story of Taor in the last part of "Gaspard, Mechior & Balthazar" came to him from Edzard Schaper's "Die Legende vom vierten König" and Henry van Dyke's "The story of the other wise man", this article compares the three texts in order to determine their respective theological perspectives. It is argued that Schaper's and van Dyke's respective tales constitute meditations on the sheep and the goats pericope from Matthew 24. Tournier's tale, on the other hand, involves a different theological focus: the first temptation of Christ from Matthew 4:14 as this pericope relates to Deuteronomy 8:2-3. This shift in focus makes food central to the spiritual journey of Tournier's protagonist: the gluttonous Taor makes a symbolic transition from "living on bread alone" to living by "every word that comes out of the mouth of God" (the bread of the Eucharist). It is argued that because Taor begins his journey from the spiritually immature (from a Christian perspective) position of the Israelites in Exodus 16, his starting point is pre-Christological and, therefore, his journey is far greater than those of Schaper's and van Dyke's respective protagonists. The latter possess rudimentary Christological knowledge right from the start and therefore undergo less extensive spiritual metamorphosis than does Taor.
Ten years after writing "Spotted dog running along the seashore" ("Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря") Chingiz Aitmatov said that this novella was his favorite. Perhaps this is because it represents the essence of Aitmatov's artistic world view. The term "essence" is appropriate here because the setting and the characters of the novella are totally removed from the modem world and from history itself. Unburdened by the need to relate his artistic goals and philosophical interests to any specific socio-political context - a requirement made all the more problematic for an author writing within the Soviet literary system - Aitmatov was free to develop his favorite themes in a kind of "tabula rasa" medium. Thus, it was with absolute directness that the author could face questions dominating much of his fiction: the moral soundness of age-old values, the need for continuity in social development, the necessity of humanity's hannonious coexistence with nature, and the positive ethical value of myth.
Donald Siegel's 1971 film entitled "The Beguiled" is compared to Tale 1 of Day 3 from Giovanni Boccaccio’s "The Decameron". Both stories are about a man who arrives in a garden setting and finds nine sexually starved women. In Boccaccio's tale, a male gardener finds himself in a convent occupied by nine nuns with whom he proceeds to have sexual relations to everyone's satisfaction. Siegel's film is about a wounded soldier taken in at a girls' finishing school whose nine female residents become the objects of the hero's amorous attention. While Boccaccio adopts a philogynist tone with respect to the material, "The Beguiled" appears to be a virulently misogynist film projecting its female characters as jealous demons who end up mutilating and then killing their male suitor. Findings from evolutionary psychology pertaining to female jealousy and reproductive strategies are used to consider the respective attitudes toward women in the medieval tale and the twentieth-century film. Conclusions are drawn about the difficulty of placing either of the stories within a clear-cut philogynist or misogynist category.