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Assimilatory Perspectives of the First Republic: the Example of Prose by Gejza Vámoš

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2018

Abstract

Writer's persona of Gejza Vámoš was born when the period of unequivocal Jewish identity ended definitively. The external ideological influence of the majority of society, assimilation discourse caused the schism of the coherent Jewish identity.

From the plurality of contemporary discourses cultural hybrids were born. The ideal of the golden age in our article is presented as a cultural hybrid, because in the novel Odlomená haluz, the author's attempt to answer the question what a Jew is conceived ideologically: it is the concept of the author of what social path should be chosen by the Slovak Jewry.

The decline in the religious field - caused by the First Czechoslovak Republical state ideology - was filled by Vámoš with the ideal of the golden age (biological evolutionism-determinism or social darwinism). To construct his ideological plan, he used stereotype, negation of religious identity, and construction of pseudo-identities.

These appear in the presented novel to be the result of a certain camouflage, mimicry. Colonial mimicry is an identity construct that arises from the fact that the colonized half mimics language, culture, etc. of the colonizer.

As it has been pointed out in the article, proof of this imitation is that Vámoš in the negation of the Jewish religious identity has operated with Christian logic, with the so called conceptual Jew.