Prof. Derek P. Royal

ENG 202 – Multi-Ethnic American Literature

 

Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Stories of an Imaginary Childhood

 

Major themes in the book

 

  • Coming of age; growth into manhood (action takes place in the narrator’s twelfth year, immediately prior to his bar mitzvah)
  • The growth of the artist; bildungsroman
  • Conflicts between the individual (especially the artist) and the family/community (Jewish, both secular and religious)
  • The Holocaust

 

Chapter Layout

 

“The Virtuoso”

  • Violin linked to narrator’s art
  • Violin linked to Jewish past and tradition
  • His troubled relationship with the instrument

 

“Levitation”

  • Narrator’s growing sense of independence from the rites of the tribe
  • Not a rejection of Jewish tradition, but an attempt at taking it to “new height”

 

“The Apprentice”

  • Hunger that is both literal and (especially) metaphoric
  • Hunger = emptiness, the need to be filled with something
  • Hunger linked to fasting on Yom Kippur; Jewish tradition
  • Anti-Semitism and hunger

 

“The Quilt and the Bicycle”

  • Individual identity linked quilt—story begins and ends with it in narrator’s possession
  • Quilt linked to dreaming = imagination and art
  • Quilt also linked to community
  • Bicycle linked to world outside of tribe; mobility beyond ethnic confines; modernity; uncertainty
  • Bicycle associated with “hunger” as well: gypsy ill-clothed and unkempt, narrator’s desire to possess bicycle

 

“Sincerely, Yours”

  • Narrator’s growing sense of identity and independence
  • Art as transformative (turning simple into grandiose, creating reality where none exists)
  • Lies = fiction = narrative voice
  • Use of words: for father, use words for religious pursuits; for Isaac, use words for love and persuasion; for narrator, use words for identity, control, and manipulation

 

“The Woman with a Dog”

  • Individual—community
  • Adam (dog) makes Shivka Bellet more “human”; brings her from isolation
  • Narrator is catalyst for Zalman the Digger becoming aware of his isolation
  • Zalman as means for narrator to “learn to talk” (community talks, p. 89)

 

“Ventriloquism”

  • Finding a voice; learning to use and control voice
  • Linked to previous story about silence and words

 

“The Blue-Eyed Jew”

  • Links between the old world (Europe, tradition, older ways of life) and the new (America, science, modernity)
  • Assimilation and tradition
  • The well as symbolic of past and tradition; significance of “descending”

 

“New Words for Old”

  • Tensions between traditional ways of community (esp. embodied in Reb Tellman) and artistic imagination
  • Transformative power of words; taking the old and making it new; giving new life
  • Usurping artistic authority; taking control; linked to Eden
  • Art as empowering, yet distancing

 

“Virginity”

  • Linked to previous story in terms of “giving birth” to the new
  • Narrator’s growing sense of individuality and adulthood
  • References to mysteries (of Cain and Abel, of mikvah, of puberty)
  • Questions communal norms of ethnics

 

“Nurseries”

  • Linked to previous story on giving birth
  • Many references to narrator’s “dreaminess,” his poetic predisposition—references to echoes, dreams, reflections; like art, they are “images” of reality, not reality itself
  • Riddles as a means to solving mysteries
  • The youth of children, the “youth” of the community (especially prior to the Holocaust)
  • Ethnic community as a nursery, nurturing everyone within safe haven (like an egg)
  • Nursery consumed in fire—links to Holocaust gas chambers

 

“Torquemada”

  • Narrator’s delusional state brought about by anti-Semitic attack
  • Underscores the uncertainty of identity, individual as well as ethnic communal
  • Narrator’s wild delusions similar to the “lies” of his “art”—demonstrates, perhaps the powers or limits of art?