A Study Of The Trauma In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Fictions

Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winner in1978, is known as "the bestcontemporary storyteller". His insisting on writing in Jewish language-Yiddish, in theUnited States where English is of absolute superiority, expresses his deep love andpersistence of the Jewish culture. He is known as "the only veritable American Jewishwriter". Singer’s writing career can be summarized as follows: write as a Jew, write onJews and write for Jews. Moreover, his individual life experience and memory as a Jew,together with a sense of ethnic mission, forms his Ethnic-Anxiety Complex. It inspires himto repeatedly survey the trauma that the ancient Jewish civilization has gone through in themodern times. Singer devoted all his life to looking for the effective prescription forrecovery.Singer endowed his works with trauma from his individual experiences, while theartistic works can be regarded as the solution to his trauma to some extent. Singer’s traumawriting not only consists of the themes and characters, but also integrates the rhythm,process and uncertainty of trauma with the ideas and structures of his novels. The traumacategories include faith and identity confusion, reflection on civilization and thecatastrophic world humans live in, as well as the inquiries of social power utterance andintrospection on alienation. The traumatic objects are concerned with both individuals andcollectives, including the intellectuals who hesitate in the traditional and modern world; thesurvivors from the Holocaust, as well as women suppressed by the Jewish conventions. InSinger’s works, trauma is like a prism which reflects the living predicament and essence ofthe Jewish people and even all humans from various angles.This dissertation aims to form the trend of Singer’s trauma writing with the analysisof his three well-known novels, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story andShosha. Singer first directly demonstrated the culture and war trauma of Jewish nation, and then juxtaposed individual trauma and the nation’s trauma. He was concerned with theJewish culture and history through elaborating the life of Jewish people in Eastern Europeand the survivors from the Holocaust. Thinking of the future of the Jewish, Singer tried tooffer an adoptable way out of the identity crisis for recovery. It actually reflects his processof working through the ethnic trauma by writing.As the integrator of an experiencer of trauma, a witness of others’ trauma and a creatorof the fictions, Singer demonstrated his concern on history, humanity and his cultural depthwhile representing his and others’ experiences with his outstanding imagination. Singer’sdistinguishing feature of trauma writing is combined with testimony, comment andimaginary reconstitution.