Subject
Re: "Perfection", David is Jewish? (fwd)
Date
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From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
Brian will obviously answer this question for himself but I also always
assumed that David was Jewish despite his "blonde" hair which may be
misleading. David is a common name for Russian Jews; unlike here, it
was much less frequently used there among non-Jews. Unlike Ivanov, David's
family has been in Germany long enough, it seems, for the boy to
speak fluent German. They are also obviously well off, or, at any rate,
better off than Ivanov -- all the signs of a bourgeois middle-class
Russian-Jewish family which possibly left prior to the revolution and had
time to establish business roots in Germany. When David's mother tells
Ivanov that she wants her son to go to "morskoi shtrand," it sounds like a
combination of Russian and Yiddish to me even more than Russian and
German.
I happen to like this story a lot since to me it reads like an early
precursor of the Pnin-and-Victor "motif." Ivanov, interestingly enough,
also has a "weak" heart.
Galya Diment
On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Donald Barton Johnson wrote:
> From: Bennett Lerner <bennett@cm-sun.cm.ksc.co.th>
>
> How does Brian Boyd know that the young pupil, David, in the short story
> "Perfection" is Jewish?
>
Brian will obviously answer this question for himself but I also always
assumed that David was Jewish despite his "blonde" hair which may be
misleading. David is a common name for Russian Jews; unlike here, it
was much less frequently used there among non-Jews. Unlike Ivanov, David's
family has been in Germany long enough, it seems, for the boy to
speak fluent German. They are also obviously well off, or, at any rate,
better off than Ivanov -- all the signs of a bourgeois middle-class
Russian-Jewish family which possibly left prior to the revolution and had
time to establish business roots in Germany. When David's mother tells
Ivanov that she wants her son to go to "morskoi shtrand," it sounds like a
combination of Russian and Yiddish to me even more than Russian and
German.
I happen to like this story a lot since to me it reads like an early
precursor of the Pnin-and-Victor "motif." Ivanov, interestingly enough,
also has a "weak" heart.
Galya Diment
On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Donald Barton Johnson wrote:
> From: Bennett Lerner <bennett@cm-sun.cm.ksc.co.th>
>
> How does Brian Boyd know that the young pupil, David, in the short story
> "Perfection" is Jewish?
>