METAPHORS

Isaac Singer

 

To grow up in a Jewish family near Warsaw 1902 was not such a great experience for the family of Isaac Singer and was a fact that marked him. Being a very harsh defensor of the Yiddish literature he had started his work doing translations for his community newspaper, and making sure that the language didn’t die.
He is nowadays famous for his tales which are based on his childhood but without the horrors of it explicitly written he would basically write things which would not be accepted easily by his community. Such as in the case of “The family Moskat”, where he describes a double adultery during the night of the Yom Kippur (one of the most importants for the jews). Or about female homosexuality ("Zeitl and Rickl" in "The Seance"), transvestitism ("Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" in "Short Friday"), and of rabbis corrupted by demons ("Zeidlus the Pope" in "Short Friday"). In those novels and stories which seem to recount his own life, he portrays himself unflatteringly (with some degree of accuracy) as an artist who is self-centered yet has a keen eye for the sufferings and tribulations of others.

METAPHORS

Hidding the reality through tales

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (also known as Alice in Wonderland) is a very well known book written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll in 1865. The book describes the adventures of a young girl who falls into a rabbit whole and experiences many fantastic adventures. The book has been published, has many adaptations for the cinema, television, comics and, up-to-date is very popular among kids as well as adults.

What most people doesn’t know is that Alice in Wonderland is not just a bedtime story, the facts there pictured were just a symbolism to what was happening in the writer’s life or in the Victorian society of the time. For instance: in the eighth chapter, three cards are painting the roses on a rose tree red, because they had accidentally planted a white-rose tree that the Queen of Hearts hates. Red roses symbolized the English House of Lancaster, while white roses were the symbol for their rival House of York. This scene is an allusion to the Wars of the Roses.

To clarify all those possible interpretation the researcher and writer martin Gardner putted together The Annotated Alice, a book in which he compares the original book to notes of the writer as well as social facts of the period to create a parallel between reality and fantasy.

Font: http://www.squidoo.com/the-annotated-alice (visited the 4th of November, 2010)