Life of Isaac Deutscher Essay

Trotskyism is a theory by a German, Leon Trotsky who was a Bolshevik-Leninist and also a Marxist. Trotsky politics do not advocate for socialism but rather proletarian revolution in a country, proletarian revolution is a revolution whereby the working class work together to overthrow bourgeois. Trotsky’s followers are known as Trotskyist or Trot. The play Trotsky’s bar mitzvah is a ten minute play that was produced in Louisville KY. The drama explores the life of a Jew in the twentieth century. The play is somewhat based on the life of Isaac Deutscher. Isaac Deutscher was born in Chrzanow in Poland into a family of religious Jews, he studied the torah and the Talmud but by the time of his bar mitzvah he had lost his faith. After testing God by eating forbidden food at the grave of a holy person and witnessing that nothing happened, he became an atheist. The play examines the life of Isaac Deutscher and the challenges he went through that eventually led him to loose his religion. Since the play is set in modern times, the viewer is able to relate to the life of the main character in the play and understand the life of a modern ay Jew. The charm in this play is irresistible, Max Apples is willing to experiment and try almost anything. He welcomes new ideas and his language is versatile. In the play he captures the audience by recreating history afresh and using an approach that the viewer is able to relate to. The author of the play, Max Apple has been compared favorably with other prominent writers such as John Barth, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. Although his work has received critical acclaim and enjoys considerable popularity, some commentators think Max’s work in literature may have limited relevancy due to Max Apple’s heavy usage of cultural references, he makes use of plenty of his Jewish traditions in which some non Jewish readers find hard to relate to. However, it has been posited by some scholars that Apple’s audience is increasingly a younger generation, the younger generation is more sympathetic to his flashy postmodern technique in literature and for whom the written language of the play is less meaningful than apples pictograph which is flashy. The author has borrowed real-life figures for use in his fiction for purely utilitarian and pragmatic purposes: the author assumes that his readers know some things and hence commences his work from there. He has stated that he tries to write very quickly and economically so that anything that saves him from descriptions and unnecessary words is always helpful to him. That explains why the play ‘Trotsky’s bar mitzvah’ is rather short. The playwright does not use long descriptive sentences. The play is given serious themes by the author, examples of these serious themes include: death, love, health, money. The use of humor is widely employed in his work; the author uses comic relief as he examines the variety of human attributes. To the author, allusions, ironies, and levels of meaning make writing rather tiresome and instead he prefers the use of symbols, acronyms, images, real names, datelines, and the kind of catchy and absurd headlines often found in tabloids to give his writing an edge that it has over other types of literary works. The author is indeed charming in script as well as in character as depicted in the play, he is more interested in exploring new forms of writing, Max Apples has a refreshing and an uncommon way of telling a story. In conclusion it is clear to say that that play ‘Trotsky’s bar mitzvah’ is wide known for its characteristics in comedy, intelligence, and witty inventiveness. Although it has a cultural bias that tends to discriminate non Jews or people who have no knowledge of Jewish traditions, it is safe to say that it is indeed a fascinating piece of work. REFERENCES 1. http://actorstheater. com 2. Jerome Beaty, J. Paul hunter: new worlds of literature. 3. http://seanhart. com/barmitzvah 4. http://the nation. com/doc/200503/aronson