TY  - BOOK
AU  - Pfefferkorn,Eli
TI  - The Müselmann at the Water Cooler
T2  - Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History
SN  - 9781618116857
PY  - 2017///]
CY  - Boston, MA : 
PB  - Academic Studies Press, 
KW  - Holocaust survivors
KW  - Biography
KW  - Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
KW  - Poland
KW  - Personal narratives
KW  - Jews
KW  - Persecutions
KW  - Self-preservation
KW  - BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; 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; Open Access
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781618116857
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9781618116857.jpg
ER  -