Holocaust reflection in Icchokas Meras novel “Stalemate”: recreating of religious plots and chess game scripts

Abstract

The article analyses the reflection of the Holocaust situation in Icchokas Meras’ novel “Stalemate”, using the statements of the cognitive poetics scholar Peter Stockwell (the concepts of script and schema). The structural model of this novel is a chess game, the text is supplemented with biblical plots (the motif of a father sacrificing his children; the myth of the creation of the world), and a few additional scripts are built in – certain identities and behavioral patterns assumed by the characters in the novel. By describing the course of a chess game and in parallel depicting the fates, behavior and value choices of the novel’s characters, an allusion is symbolically created that in the ghetto, in fact, each character is forced to play a symbolic game with life and death, and that each decision, action, move affects the others. The text becomes allegorical and the rethinking of the Holocaust situation, based on a rational multi-layered construction, turns into an intriguing intellectual and emotional challenge.