Scrutinizing Roth's The Counter-Life

though the book deals with an important topic as Anti-Semitism, the fluidity that the book

The Night is a story about war. A war that is way too different from the war that happened in different countries around the world. The challenge to the warrior and the sufferings of the noncombat. A terse, merciless testimonial, the book serves as a harsh reflection on war. The work serves as an example of a devastating effect of evil on innocence. The Holocaust served as an event that has disrupted both human history and the life story of God. Night is one of only a few books that gives us the understanding about the Holocaust. The Holocaust’s significance is for the human understanding of man’s relationship to God. However. Night is not an example of the death of God theology. Wiesel claimed that the covenant was broken so he talked to God

Samira Ahmed’s realistic fiction novel, Love, Hate, and Other Filters, takes place in modern-day Chicago where a suicide bombing has engrossed the attention of America. Maya Aziz, a Muslim teenager, is targeted for her heritage while attempting to lead a life free of high school drama, controlling parents, and difficult relationships. As Maya copes with Islamophobia, prejudice against Muslims, she begins to understand the horrors and shortcomings of violence. One lesson the story suggests is that hatred is an infectious and blinding motive.

The Holocaust was a dreadful and truly awful time period, people were dehumanized, and shamed into losing their faith while they experienced tragic and awful death and pain. One Jewish survivor documents his experiences with death in his memoir, ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel. The novel is filled with his tales of death, dehumanization, and faith throughout the concentration camp, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the Jews lost their innocence that they once had. In the novel, Night, Elie, his father, and his fellow Jews lost their innocence through dehumanization, loss of faith, and experience of death and violence.

In 1948, Mahmoud Darwish was six years old when his interrupted childhood brutally confronted exile. Thousands of Palestinians were forced to exile due to the systematic occupation by the Israelis. For Darwish, severance from the homeland gave birth to his poetry, and commenced a love affair with location and dislocation. Throughout Mahmoud Darwish 's poetics is the linkage of individuals or occupied entities to the ideal of a universal struggle for freedom and liberty from oppression, and a link to the beauty of life and language through the creative process, thus affirming Wellek and Warren 's notion that: "the work of literature is an aesthetic object, capable of arousing aesthetic experience." (1984: 241). And it was Darwish 's creative work and precise language that transcended his experience not only as a Palestinian writer, but also as a writer who aroused the universal, while managing the aesthetic transmission of the oppressive side of the human condition under occupation. In his prosaic memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish writes in hauntingly surrealist manner:

In the article “Ten Responses to Jewish Lackeys”, Kurt Hilmar Eitzen speaks about Nazis’ attempts to convince Jewish Lackeys that Jews are bad. Unlike other articles “Ten Responses to Jewish Lackeys” is structured into 10 arguments by which quotations are from Jewish lackey’s perspective; then gives counterarguments. For instance, one argument Jewish lackey’s make is that Nazis are hypocrites as they go against their own principle of not intervening with religion by bothering the Jewish religion. Eitzen states that “From this first lie that Jewry is a religion, not a race, further lies inevitably follow”(Eitzen). Therefore, Eitzen is implying that Jewish religion is just a belief taught. In connection with the thesis, Eitzen is saying

In October 1905, James Joyce wrote “Araby” on an unnamed narrator and like his other stories, they are all centered in an epiphany, concerned with forms of failures that result in realizations and disappointments. The importance of the time of this publication is due to the rise of modernist movement, emanating from skepticism and discontent of capitalism, urging writers like Joyce to portray their understanding of the world and human nature. With that being said, Joyce reflects Marxist ideals through the Catholic Church’s supremacy, as well as the characters’ symbolic characterization of the social structure; by the same token, psychoanalysis of the boy’s psychological and physical transition from one place, or state of being, to another is

The film “Gentleman’s Agreement” portrays Jews as second class citizens during a time period in America where bigotry is prevalent and the harsh discrimination against Jews has lessened their own pride and dignity while no one stands up for them.

Imagine watching your beloved hometown being captured by your worst enemy. All the things that you love, being stripped of you one by one. Forced to wear a gold star just because of your religion, and being beat up and mistreated by your fellow neighbors. Sadly, this was just the beginning. As time continued on ghettos where the Jews’ new home. As some thought that life was harsh in these environments, they were not prepared for what was coming. As the SS hauled people onto cattle cars, the officers kept the secret that their prisoners were being transported to their death. From there on, the Jews were treated like objects rather than people. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, we learn the harrowing truth of the Nazi’s actions to dehumanize

David Broudo was a Jew who helped destroy supply lines from the Germans that they established by blowing up bridges and trains and sabotaged them. He also smuggled munitions for resistance and hid guns in empty milk cartons (“David Broudo”). This smuggling was something many did during the Holocaust. The Holocaust started in the year of 1933 and lasted about 13 years. This dreadful event was the term for the slaughter of about six million Jews by the Nazi's controlled by Hitler. They were murdered in mostly death camps. Camps and ghettos were a terrible place to inhabit because the Jews are separated from the entire world and have little clues on what is happening outside of there. Jews were killed on site for no reason like for example walking

In Night, the author describes what he had to encounter just because he was a Jew - cruel beatings, starvation, and forced labor. In To Kill a Mockingbird, characters Tom and Boo were treated unfairly either because of their color or because of rumors that were spread about them. In the “Rwandan Genocide,” the Tutsis were murdered by the Hutus out of jealousy and spite. Each of these literary works incorporates human rights that were breached. In each reference and situation, what happened to these people was morally and ethically wrong. It is tragic to see individuals, social groups, or entire races and ethnicities having basic human rights

Ironically, the displacement of Palestinians, from the late 19th century forwards, is in turn removing the scattering of Jews with the State of Israel. Thus, Palestinians have to turn elsewhere, to become refugees and immigrants in other countries. Susan Abulhawa’s first novel Mornings In Jenin explores the 4 generations of a single Palestinian family, the Abulhejas, who existed before Israel was established in Palestine in the 1960s. In the small village of Ein Hod, Susan starts with a prominent farm and house owner, Yehja and Basima Abulheja, with their two sons – Hasan and Darweesh. Hasan weds a Bedouin girl, Dalia. The next generation continued as Dalia has Yousef first and an infant Ismael, who would be taken away by a Zionist soldier. Later, after several years in Jenin as refugees in their own land, Hasan and Dalia have a daughter – Amal, “with a long vowel of hope.” Despite other narrators, she is the main narrator, voicing the history she knew about her

The novel as well as the short story proclaimed a literature of the oppressed that extended hope to those who have none. This can be seen in three key dimensions of the Palestinian novel. First, there is a beautification of the lost homeland of Palestine. Palestine is portrayed in literature as a paradise on earth. There is always a sense of nostalgia and belonging to the homeland. For example, the words of Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) express nostalgia for a past that every Palestinian has experienced. In the wake of the events that happened in 1948, Al-Nakbah emerged in Palestinian literature as a concept that signifies an unbridgeable break between the past and the present. The Palestinians’ loss of the homeland becomes the loss of paradise.

In the late 1800s, Arab American literature began to emerge in the USA. The Arabs arrived in North America as immigrants. Moreover, they settled in cities such as New York and Boston and they wrote in newspapers about political and sectarian events in the Middle East. Khalil Gibran, Ameen Rihani and others formed the Pen League and they introduced the Mahjar school of Arab-American writing. Their objective was to create bridges between East and West and create philosophical meeting points between Arab and American ideologies. They used many poetic lines from both east and west to build bridges between the two worlds. ( Majaj, “Arab –American Literature: Origins and Developments” ) Some features of Arab American literature are: asserting