Kuzey Amerikalı Şair Richard Fein’ın Yidiş Benliği

Abstract

In this study, I aim to analyze poems of the North American poet Richard Fein that he collected in his book entitled At the Turkish Bath. In my analyses, I intend to follow a cognitive poetic point of view, as the theory of “Cognitive Poetics” (1992) of the Israeli linguist and cognitive scientist Reuven Tsur, is based on cognitive processes, through which one solves the semantic ambiguities, such as metaphors, and the cognitive obligations, which lead to the correct interpretation of the poetry. This book is a good presenter of the Yiddish culture. I intend to discover the Jewish and Yiddish self of the poet through the cognitive word arts, such as metaphors, and metonymies that he uses. The poet uses some Yiddish words and inserts some Jewish elements into his poetry in English. Briefly, I aim to discover the formation and the description of the poet’s Yiddish self in his book At the Turkish Bath through the interpretation of the word arts, and their classification in cognitive poetics, both of which are the best aesthetic sources for understanding the identity and the self of the poet from a Gestalt-like perspective. Besides, I am going to talk about the North American Jewish culture, discovering the poet’s Yiddish and North American identities via the cognitive poetic analyses of the two poems of Richard Fein, entitled “My World of Yiddish” and “The Yiddish Poet Yankev Glatshteyn Visits Me in the Coffee Shop.”