The Muselmann at the water cooler / Eli Pfefferkorn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfefferkorn, Eli.

Contributor:

Berenbaum, Michael, Contributor.

National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program, Funder.

Series:

Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Efferkorn, Eli.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Personal narratives.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945).

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Biography.

Radzyń Podlaski (Poland)--Biography.

Radzyń Podlaski (Poland).

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (244 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2011.

Academic Studies Press, [2017]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Winner of the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Literature. A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp Muselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that ultimately the human condition has not changed significantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates.

Contents:

Front matter

Table of contents

Foreword / Berenbaum, Michael

Preface

Glossary

In the Beginning there was Bread and Freedom and Apathy

One or Two?

A Journey Back in Time

Quo Vadis?

The Amphibian Feet and the Soprano Voice

Three Levels of Knowing

Getting High on Zinger Tea

Carrying the Armband Jude

A Tom Sawyer Adventure

Caught in the Web

From the Armband to the Yellow Triangle

A World that Has to be Imagined to Make it Real

A Mother Mourning her Children

The Plasticity of Human Nature

Dodging the Muselmann's Netherworld

Virtual Reality

Beware the Yellowish-Green Colour

Irena - My Willowy Sister

Protecting my Lebensraum

Looking into the Pistol's Muzzle

Mottos reflecting the Shifting Situations

The Messiah is Nigh

The Predator Matrons

Jedem das Seine - To Each his Own

The Bond and the Rule

"April is the Cruellest Month"

Latter-Day Messiahs have come

Death Stalking Life

At the Birth of a Dream

My Initiation into Scooping Humus

The Schnitzel Riddle

Israel and I - An Uneasy Co-Existence

The Sabra Model

The Other

The New Day's Rhythm

The Temptation of the Cross

Harold Fisch - My Patron Saint

A Subject of Interest

The Lure of the London Stage

Humouring the Jewish Agency

The Fateful Sukkah Meeting

My Brother - Yusuf

In the Aftermath of the Six-Day War

A Critic at Large

Kosher Style

Black Cats versus White Cats

An Immodest Proposal

Hosanna

Chomsky and I

From Providence to the Holy Land

The Yom Kippur War

Touching the Past with Dieter

Pfefferkorn versus the State of Israel

The Latter-Day Hellenists

Imitatio Dei

The Bitburg Offence to Memory

The Water Cooler Metaphor

In Image and Word

The Life of Pi

My Secret Garden

Speak No Evil of Man: He, Himself, is Testimony to It

The Lost Generation

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page, viewed July 12, 2021.

ISBN:

9781618116857

1618116851

9781618111203

1618111205

OCLC:

1135588889

Access Restriction:

Unrestricted online access