The Exploration Of The Jewish Identity Of The Protagonist Yasha In The Magician Of Lublin

The sudden emergence of American Jewish literature forms the pattern of the bright starsafter the Second World War. Isaac Bashevis Singer is one of the most influencing authors.Singer’s creation is unique and profound and his work is different from the traditional Jewishauthors. Traditional Jewish authors only focus on suffering from the racial oppression and racialdiscrimination in a foreign country, and the alienation of the Jewish people’s religiousconsciousness and ethic culture in this process. However, Singer particularly likes Poland of the17th and19th century. He describes the significant impact that the religious consciousness andethic culture of the lost world have on Jewish life. His long novel The Magician of Lublin isuniversally known as the best influencing work of Singer by the critics. The long novel reflectsthe Jewish life at the end of the19th century in Poland. It is rated as a good piece of work inJewish literature and American literature.The Magician of Lublin successfully mould the extremely difficult story that Jew surviveon the margins of society under the wave of anti—Semitism.The hero—Yasha Mazur is a Jewliving to the magic that is willing to accept the challenge and not accept the situation. Afteryears of bitterness and hard entertainer career, he finally becomes the famous magician aroundthe Poland. However, the spirit and the flesh of Yasha are always under wandering andcontradiction. He steadily gives ways to his senses under pressing on the lust and ambition. Atlast, He loses himself in the slavery of the love. The good overcomes the evil in the intensestruggle of the good and evil. He imprisons himself in the stone house in order to maintain aJewish identity. Keeping the Jewish identity, he still hides the feelings of the helpless and chaos,which shows the emotions of perplexity and confusion in the good and evil, reason and lust,science and religion. The thesis aims to analyze that the protagonist Yasha undergoes thedominant and recessive vagrant, loses himself and finds himself and faces with the new self—confusion in the process. The thesis explains the journey of the exploration of the Jewishidentity of Yasha by virtue of the vagrant motive and theoretical knowledge of other disciples.