Abstracts
Abstract
When Mendel Beilis, a Jew, was accused of having murdered a Christian child in Kyiv in 1911, the allegations drew on centuries-old “blood libel” legends, dating back to the Middle Ages, in which Jews purportedly sacrificed Christian children for ritual purposes. While Beilis eventually was acquitted of the charges, the master-narratives that drove them have proved resistant to counter-narration. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, by fictionally attempting to retell Beilis’s story through the character of Yakov Bok, provides a “critical reinterpretation […] of dominant narrative models” (Meretoja 2021)—a powerful counter-narrative, not only to the specific tale of Beilis, but also to the longer-standing claims that continue to buttress antisemitism.
Keywords:
- blood libel,
- antisemitism,
- master-narrative,
- counter-narrative,
- Bernard Malamud
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Appendices
Biographical note
Howard Sklar is Senior University Lecturer in the Department ofLanguages (English Philology) at the University of Helsinki. His book,The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and EmotionalPersuasion, was published by John Benjamins in 2013. He has alsopublished articles in Poetics Today, Storyworlds, Diegesis, PartialAnswers, and the collection Narrative Ethics (Rodopi 2013), amongother publications.
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