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This article intends to analyses the tale “O Velho Marx” (“The Old Marx”) by Moacyr Scliar in its humor, irony and critic features. The tale is showed as a fiction of the history in which is revealed, in reality, a critic about some social values. The power is seen here as an element that changes the human behavior promoting the illusion of the superiority among men.

This paper presents a study on the narrative ‘A exposição das rosas’ by István Örkény. We analyze death and issues on its representation. Born in 1912 and dead in 1979, Örkény testified in an intense and intrinsic way the great convulsions that affected Europe in the twentieth century. Far from the pamphlet, his literature has a remarkable feature of irony.In the novel analyzed, Iron Korom, a young and inexperienced director, tries to conduct a documentary on the final hours of three close to death patients, aiming at, in his words, help his contemporary folks to understand death experience. Based on Korom’s project Örkény makes us face a threshold, that is, the representation’s limit.

A village in the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, 1941, is the scene of a film Train de Vie, by Romanian director Radu Mihaileanu. While the script departs from strictly historical data to become more of a fable, Mihaileanu provides a realistic portrayal of Shoah. This is no easy task given the scale of the tragedy that is Shoah and the use of humor to reflect and expose the limits and fragmentation of speech.

Between other renowned books of the recent years, Edna Mazya’s work largely doesn’t directly approach the main events of the II World War in Europe. However, this is the background key of a big part of Romance de família, even when the events that are a part of the plot are developed in Palestine, by the time of the War, or even after it, in Israel or, again, in Europe.

El presente artículo relata la rápida visita de su Majestad el emperador del Brasil Don Pedro II (1825-1891) a un anticuario localizado en la antigua ciudad de Jerusalén. La peregrinación del monarca rumbo a Tierra Santa aconteció en el año 1876, durante su segundo viaje internacional. Al negocio del coleccionador William Moses Shapira. El emperador D. Pedro II sospecha que el dueño del comercio sea un gran oportunista empeñado en ganar dinero falsificando objetos de cerámica. El texto revela también una parte considerable de las excavaciones arqueológicas del siglo19 a la luz de la “cerámica moabita”.

Resenha a: SCLIAR, Moacyr; FINZI, Patrícia; TOKER, Eliahu. (Seleção, organização e edição). Do éden ao divã: humor judaico. São Paulo: Editora Shalom, 1990. 214p.  

Resenha a: SPALDING, Henry D. Enciclopédia do humor judaico: dos tempos bíblicos à era moderna. Trad. Dagoberto Mensch. São Paulo: Editora Sêfer, 1997.  

Resenha a: ROTH, Joseph. Jó: romance de um homem simples. Trad. Laura Barreto. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008. 200p.

O grande peixe

Os anjos

Carpinteiro

Critical reading of two short stories, “Berta”, by Aharon Appelfeld, and “A menor mulher do mundo”, by Clarice Lispector. The former, by an author who lives in Israel, the later, by a Jewish immigrant writer who lived in Brazil. Despite the differentiated plots and themes, underlies an ordinary reflexion on the management of the otherness built from a power apparatus.

In this article, I study Eve’s largest discours in The life of Adam and Eve, greek version. At first, I introduce the theme of the change of perspective through a contemporary novel, Jostein Gaarder’ʹs Vita Brevis. Next, I show fastly the text with which I work. Then, I aproach Eve'ʹs discours, observing in what way it is inserted in the narrative. I think about the way in which the change of perspective of Eve’s retelling makes possible the construction of a narrative which mix “to tell” and “to interpret”, like agadic Midrashim.

Analysis of three instances of Yiddish theatre in Buenos Aires. The first, a theatre spoken in Yiddish that comes from the contexts of immigration, that has to do with the millenarian life of the Jewish, the memories of the shetl, and the pogroms. The second is the theatre of the experience in the region of Argentina, related to the narrative, already in Yiddish, already in castellano. The third exemplifies the start of the extinction of Yiddish, having spectators with different migratory roots, that won’t understand the Yiddish, with the growing debility of Yiddish in the collectivity, or by effect of assimilation or by the tragic act that Yiddish had developed the huge debility imposed by Nazism, which will eventually lead to the death of the language that, in Argentina and several other places, was most identified with the Jewish.

This article analyzes the monstrosity of a biblical character: the big fish of Jonah’s Book and it reappearance in the contemporary novel, 1983, Moacyr Scliar’s, A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes. Through this analyze, it seeks to indicate some contrast and likeness features of monster’s function in each of these texts. It works with the hypothesis that the big fish in the biblical text would have a function of constitute and maintain Jewish identity. In novel, on the other hand, the monster would appear mainly as deconstructor of signification systems that claim to be unchangeable and hermetic.

Le conte Obras do diabinho da mão furada, écrit au XVIIIe siècle par Antônio José da Silva, o Judeu, apparut, pour la première fois, au Portugal, sous la forme de «Cordel». On aperçoit une poliphonie mélangeant des sources populaires et érudites. L’auteur tisse sa narrative avec des fils prêtés des aventures de Dr. Faust mêlé avec des pactes, des diables, des sorcières, outre des références académiques et classiques, par exemple la Bible, la Divine Comédie, de Dante, et Don Quixote, de Cervantes. Dans les entre-lignes du conte et les machinations des métaphores, Antônio José profite de l’occasion pour introduire de sevères critiques à la société de Lisbonne et à l’intolérance de la Sainte Inquisition Portugaise.

The most common crimes in the nazi movies were the seduction of women, the forgery of amounts, the theft of German documents and inventions, the fraud that damaged the people and overall the theft of jewelry. The criminals were represented with similar physical features: adiposes, dim and sensual look, with mustaches that decorated thick lips. Such biotypes were widely related to the Jewish in the anti Semitic caricatures. Nazi and pre Nazi widely spread in the press media of the Third Reich.

Analysis of Jewish monsters recreated by Jorge Luis Borges in the Handbook of Fantastic Zoology and The Book of Imaginary Beings, named: Behemoth, Lilith and the Angels Haniel, Kazfiel, Azriel and Aniel. Some multiples representations and versions of these entries as well as its dialogue with the Torah and its inscription in the literature.

The 20th century was a landmark of the tragedy and the progress for the occidental civilization. The atrocities perpetrated by human beings are not exclusive to the last century. In the Bible there are several stories about crimes/sins. In fact, the barbarism permeates the whole history of the humanity producing fear and horror. Paradoxically, the counterpoint of these tragedies is a critical, legal, artistic and technological ramification. Terrorists’ attempts of September 11 and continuous technological advances of the new millennium give the impression that the history repeated again.

This short article deals on a recent polemic about the possibility to represent or not the Holocaust of Jewish People in Arts. For most researchers there are unbridgeable frontiers to represent the Holocaust although there are some that accept easily all kind of representation on the biggest catastrophe of Humanity. At the same time that there is a debate between intellectuals is necessary to reach far into a deep reflection concerning the moral and ethics consequences of this tragedy.