In one of his last poems published shortly before his death at the age of 95, the poet Tuvia Ruebner (1924-2019) who escaped from Europe in 1941, contemplated not only what would remain of our knowledge and lived experience, but also what vessels, including digital means, will promise their survival. Written in both, or rather between German, his mother tongue, and Hebrew, the language of his land of immigration, his poetry embodies a lifelong journey between self and other, through which this ethical response (and responsibility) of bearing witness to the dead without, however, forgetting the living, is conveyed, articulated and challenged. As Jahan Ramazani notes in Poetry in a Global Age (2020) "Ideally, the circuit we travel by poem or vessel unmoors us, destabilizes our preconceptions, renews our sensory engagements, and opens us afresh to ourselves and the world." In this vein, I argue that Ruebner's poetic traveling destabilizes our preconceptions within a broader ongoing movement of which translingualism is just one, albeit prominent, aspect alongside the shifting between cultural sites, textual traditions and mediums such as music and the visual arts. For instance, Shahar Bram, who explored Ruebner's ekphrastic poetry, showed how various poems ("three Chinese drawings", "two Zen paintings", and "four Japanese woodcut prints"), represent the poet's perception of the otherness of Western culture as a part of his working-through of memory. Following his conclusions, this paper focuses on Ruebner's employment of the far-Eastern haiku in his late work published between 2017 and 2020. I hope to show that this series of German and Hebrew haikus, variants that embody distinct differences, demonstrates the poet's use of the foreign imagination as a "vessel" for his most intimate yet haunting recollections.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1959 novel, The Magician of Lublin, tells the story of an enlightened Jewish magician who “returns” from secularity and modernity to tradition. This process has been widely discussed as a sign of the modern Jews’ ethical yearning for Jewish tradition. However, as the novel ends with a tempting letter from one of the magician’s mistresses, this epilogue invalidates the previous narrative of “returning” to Jewish tradition and brings antithetical possibility to the previous research. Under these circumstances, this article argues that this novel has a two-fold perspective of ethnicity and modernity. For the most part, as an American Jewish writer, Singer uses the magician’s returning to Jewish tradition to satisfy non-Jewish readers’ imagination of Jews in the post-Holocaust period. Meanwhile, as a Yiddish writer, Singer also uses specific Jewish ethical and religious customs that are not widely known among non-Jewish readers to allegorically express his secret worry about Yiddish literature after the Holocaust, during which most Yiddish-speaking Jews perished. From this two-fold perspective, this article argues that The Magician of Lublin shows the irreconcilable ethical position of a modern Jewish writer like Singer in the post-Holocaust period. 

On the one hand, the "nonhuman narrative theory" developed in the West recently has provided a new perspective and method for the study of Chinese narrative literature, and enriched the research content of Chinese narrative literature. On the other hand, Chinese narrative literature has also provided a rich textual foundation for the world nonhuman narrative study, which confirms the interpretive power and effectiveness of the nonhuman narrative theory. Under the special period, The Old Tales Retold also presents the unique nonhuman characteristics of its narration, that is, the Nuwa, the Moon Goddess and the Dead Corpse, etc. This article focuses on the analysis of the characteristics of the nonhuman narrative in The Old Tales Retold, and then reveals the ethical appeal and moral implications behind these genres of nonhuman narration.

Despite the ample documentation of the rapid rise of Protestant Christianity in Korea in the early twentieth century, it still bears explaining why, unlike in the case of China and Japan, Protestant Christianity came to establish itself in Korea’s mainstream culture as well as become a defining trait of the Korean cultural establishment in such an extraordinarily short amount of time. This paper addresses this large question that remains fundamental to understanding the cultural force of Christianity in Korean modernization—one unanswerable by way of quantitative analysis—by examining the most notable cultural product that secured the place of Protestant Christianity in modern Korean culture: the 1917 publication of the novel Mujong (The Heartless) by Yi Kwangsu. If there were any doubts that Christianity marked modernity in Korean culture, the publication of what is considered the first Korean novel permanently secured Christian artifacts as one of the strongest symbols of modernity in the Korean cultural imagination. Yet, as any particular aesthetic product turned into mainstream cultural practice also works to critique the very cultural use it generates, the novel Mujong is also a work of art that resists the cultural codifications it engenders. This paper analyzes Yi’s representation of Christian symbols as kitsch objects in the overall structure of irony of the novel to consider why figures of Christianity have been productive in South Korean literary production.

In_Cinnamon_Shops_, Polish author, Bruno Schulz presents a new narrative of Genesis in which the narrator's Father permutates the words in an ornithological compendium and realizes that he can and should create wholly new species. He proceeds to breed different species of birds together, taking over the top floor and attic of the house where he lives with his creations. He manipulates matter and produces a wholly new world. The son, Josef, declares Father's creative experiments to be heresies, beautiful transgressions. By the end of the book, the Father has advanced a theory of golems that he suggests represent the future of human existence. However, the book ends with his failure: Father witnesses the destruction of his creations. Surrounded by feathers, and carcasses, he howls at the heavens; his messianic creation is reduced to detritus at his feet.

In Schulz's subsequent, _Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass_, the son, Josef, abandons his Father's failed creations and moves into a letter phenomenology in which creation is produced solely through the permutation of the letters of the text. Using "The Book of Creation," Josef believes he has become a witness to the original Genesis. He has discovered the secret of Adam in Eden. However, this project underscores for him that he can either be sealed into the book, or he can abandon this world of letters and forfeit creation in order to live among people.

In other words, Schulz posits two forms of creation, one in which matter is manipulated to produce a golem, and the other, a literary creation in which letters are permutated until the reader slips into the text discovering another world entirely. This paper will explore these two different creations, to argue that Schulz not only sees Father's golems as failure but also rejects Josef's letter phenomenology because its heresy pushes Josef to abandon the human world.

Bibliography

Schulz, Bruno Cinnamon Streets

Schulz, Bruno Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass

Millet, Kitty Kabbalah and Literature