A Study Of Trauma In I. B. Singer’s The Magician Of Lublin

Isaac Bashevis Singer is acclaimed as the best contemporary storyteller. He insists on writing in Yiddish, Jewish language. Isaac Singer is a well-known Jewish writer whose works are different from traditional Jewish writers who only concentrate on the racial discrimination and repression of Jews in a place far away from home and the dissimilation of religious consciousness and national culture of Jews during this period. However, Singer is interested in Poland of the 17 th and the 19 th century.The novel The Magician of Lublin is one of Isaac Singer’s representative works. This book won the Nobel Prize on literature in 1978. The Magician of Lublin came out in 1960, and the story happened in 1863 after the failure of Poland People’s Revolution. At that time, the long-established Jewish community was keeping stable in Lublin. This novel was regarded as the most influential work of Singer by the critics and there is no doubt that it was attracted by many scholars to study it. Most of the critics focus on the Jewish culture in his work. In China, many critics pay attention to the psychoanalysis of the protagonist. And some other critics concentrate upon the reasons of the protagonist’s fate. However, few critics criticized this novel from the point of trauma theory.Trauma is a common theme in American Jewish literature. Employing Freud’s theory of cultural trauma Moses and Monotheism as the framework and based on the studies of I.B Singer’s novel The Magician of Lublin, my thesis aims to find out the causes of Jewish trauma and the losses of cultural identity, and the feasible ways of reconstructing the Jewish cultural identity.In terms of the trauma theory, this thesis will analyze the novel from the trauma theory by using induction, comparison and case study to unify theory and examples. The author of the thesis believes that only through the case analysis can the conclusion be possessed of persuasive power.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the writer, the novel, and the trauma theory. In the second chapter, I analyzed the cultural trauma and the identity crisis of the main character Yasha in the novel. In the third chapter, I explored the causes of the cultural trauma of the Jewish. In the fourth chapter, I analyzed how Jewish people in the novel work through their trauma. In the last chapter, I made a conclusive explanation on the process of the Jewish cultural trauma by analyzing the cause of and working through the cultural trauma.