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近期由楼主接替kid为大家继续贴题~~~很荣幸
下面是今日作业:
速度：Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994: His Book, “Invisible Man,” Won Awards and is Still Discussed Today （附音频 见附件）
越障：Why Fewer Young American Jews Share Their Parents' View of Israel
看到速度里的“Invisible Man”一词，有木有感觉眼熟嘞？先看下面SC一道~
A mixture of poems and short fiction, Jean Toomer’s Cane has been called one of the three best novels ever written by Black Americans—the others being Richard Wright, author of Native Son, and Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man.
A.Black Americans—the others being Richard Wright, author of Native Son, and Ralph Ellison, author of InvisibleMan
B.Black Americans—including Native Son by Richard Wright and InvisibleMan by Ralph Ellison
C.a Black American—including Richard Wright, author of Native Son, and Ralph Ellison, author of InvisibleMan
D.a Black American—the others being Richard Wright, author of Native Son, and Ralph Ellison, author of InvisibleMan
E.a Black American—the others being Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s InvisibleMan
Ralph Ellison, 1914-1994: His Book, “Invisible Man,” Won Awards and is Still Discussed Today
By Richard Thorman
2010-9-18
BARBARA KLEIN: I'm Barbara Klein.
STEVE EMBER: And I'm Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about writer Ralph Ellison and his famous novel "Invisible Man." The book is about a nameless black man's search for his identity and place in society.
(MUSIC)
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下面开始计时：
计时1( 295 words )
BARBARA KLEIN: Ralph Ellison's novel, "Invisible Man", was published in nineteen fifty-two. Ellison was at once called a major new writer. The book won the National Book Award, a high and rare honor for a first novel.
Since then millions of copies have been printed. The book is still used in many universities and other schools. One professor said that he has used the book in his teaching for twenty-five years. He said that each time he returns to "Invisible Man" he finds new ideas in it. Ellison writes in the beginning of his book:
READER: "I am an invisible man ... I am a man of substance, flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me...When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me."
STEVE EMBER: From the start, "Invisible Man" was a book that changed the way white Americans thought about black Americans. It also changed the way black Americans thought about themselves. And it caused major disputes among both black and white critics.
Black critics said the book was too difficult to read. One black critic said that the black man needed "Invisible Man" like he needed a knife in his back. Another black writer dismissed Ellison because Ellison demanded that writing skills must be learned before political ideas can be expressed.
Some white critics refused to accept a black writer who did not write from direct anger at whites. They seemed to want him not to write from his mind, but from the color of his skin. Yet the book continues to live long after most people have forgotten the disputes.
(MUSIC)
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计时2 （282 words）
BARBARA KLEIN: Ralph Ellison was born in nineteen fourteen, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His father died when Ralph was three. His mother supported herself and her son by cleaning other people's houses.
She also supported her son's interest in music and writing. She would take home old music recordings and magazines from the houses where she worked. Ralph liked jazz, and played trumpet in his high school band. He dreamed of writing serious music.
STEVE EMBER: In nineteen thirty-three, Ralph entered a black university, Tuskegee Institute, in the state of Alabama. He wanted to study music. He moved to New York City in nineteen thirty-six. He still planned to study music and art. However, that same year he ran out of money and could no longer attend school.
The nineteen thirties in America were difficult economic times. There were not many jobs to be found, and even fewer for black men. Ellison worked at many things. He shined people's shoes. He played trumpet in a jazz band. He worked for the Young Men's Christian Association. He worked in factories. He worked for a brief time taking pictures. Lack of money was an important reason for Ralph Ellison becoming a writer. He said:
READER: "I have always read a lot, and I began to realize I had a certain talent for it. It was not easy to be the kind of musician I wanted to be: I did not have enough money to go to Juilliard [school of music]. So I stuck with what I had."
BARBARA KLEIN: In New York City, Ellison joined the Federal Writers Project. This was a program created during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency to keep writers employed at writing.
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计时3（271 words）
He met two important black writers, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Wright soon would publish "Native Son," the book that made him famous.
Later, during World War Two, Ellison served as a cook in the United States Merchant Marine. Merchant marine ships carried war supplies to American and allied soldiers. For Ellison, the war was a time of learning and trying to write.
He read books by the American writers T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. And he read books by foreign writers like the Irish writer James Joyce.
STEVE EMBER: Ralph Ellison's stories were first published during World War Two. When the war was over, he visited a friend in the state of Vermont. Ellison said:
READER: "One day I wrote, 'I am an invisible man.' I did not know what those words represented at the start, and I had no thought about what gave me the idea."
STEVE EMBER: The book that started with those words took almost seven years to write.
(MUSIC)
BARBARA KLEIN: Like many other novels, Ellison's story is a series of experiences as the storyteller learns to deal with life. Yet, unlike other novels, "Invisible Man" takes place in a dream-like atmosphere in the United States. It is a world where dreams come close to reality, and the real world looks like a frightening dream.
The man telling his story in "Invisible Man" lives in a hidden underground space. But to prove that he exists, at least to himself, he has lit his underground room with one thousand three hundred sixty-nine lights. They remain lit with power he has stolen from the electric company. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
计时4 （300 words）
In much of Ellison's novel the person telling the story is a victim, usually of white people, but also of some blacks. He both loves and hates the world. He plans some day to leave his underground shelter. He says that as a man he is willing to believe that "even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all."
STEVE EMBER: The man telling the story says that as a boy, white men covered his eyes with a cloth. The white men tell the boy to blindly fight other black boys. The blacks are forced to fight each other to please whites.
At the end of the novel the story has moved from the American South to the North. There are riots in Harlem, the black area of New York City. Instead of ten black children fighting each other blindly, grown black men are battling each other to the death. Blacks still are having their strength turned upon themselves.
(MUSIC)
BARBARA KLEIN: Critics said "Invisible Man" was well written. But some critics called this a weakness. They said the writing seemed to hide the book's ideas and make them less a product of black life.
One critic said that he found it difficult to call "Invisible Man" an African-American novel. He said that the main person in the book is a southern black man. But, the critic said, he is all of us, no matter where we were born or the color of our skin.
STEVE EMBER: After "Invisible Man" was published in nineteen fifty-two, Ralph Ellison taught at a number of universities. He retired from New York University in nineteen eighty. While he was alive, he published only two other books. They were books of criticism and essays, called "Shadow and Act" and "Going to the Territory."
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计时5 （265 words）
Ralph Ellison died in nineteen ninety-four, at the age of eighty. After his death, a book of his stories, "Flying Home," was published. Shortly before his death, Ellison had told someone that his second novel was almost finished. He had worked on the novel for forty years without finishing it.
Parts of the book had appeared in magazines during the nineteen sixties and seventies. Ellison had to rewrite the novel after a large part of it was burned in a fire at his home in nineteen sixty-seven. The novel was said to be two thousand pages long. Finally, his friend John Callahan put the book together after Ellison died. The novel was published in nineteen ninety-nine. It was called "Juneteenth."
BARBARA KLEIN: Since "Invisible Man" was published, many American writers have said how much Ellison influenced them.
In nineteen ninety, another black writer, Charles Johnson, was given the National Book Award. In receiving the prize, Johnson thanked Ralph Ellison for leading the way for black writers. Ellison was present at the ceremony. He thanked Johnson. Then he expressed his belief that black writers should not be influenced only by other black writers. He said:
READER: "You do not write out of your skin. You write out of your ideas and the quality of your mind."
(MUSIC)
STEVE EMBER: This program was written by Richard Thorman and produced by Lawan Davis. Shep O'Neal read the part of Ralph Ellison and quotes from "Invisible Man." I'm Steve Ember.
BARBARA KLEIN: And I'm Barbara Klein. Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.
越障
(1096 words)
"I'm trembling," my mother says when I tell her I'm working on an article about how younger and older American Jews are reacting differently to the Palestinians' bid for statehood at the United Nations. I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians who are dealing with ongoing Israeli settlement construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama's promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.
"This is so emotional," she says as we cautiously discuss our difference of opinion. "It makes me feel absolutely terrible when you stridently voice criticisms of Israel."
A lump of guilt and sadness rises in my throat. I've written harshly of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and assault on Gaza in 2009, and on civil rights issues in Israel. But speaking my mind on these topics — a very Jewish thing to do — has never been easy. During my childhood in the New York suburbs, support for Israel was as fundamental a family tradition as voting Democratic or lighting the Shabbos candles on Friday night.
My mom has a master's degree in Jewish history and is the program director of a large synagogue. Her youthful experiences in Israel, volunteering on a kibbutz and meeting descendants of my great-grandmother's siblings, are part of my own mythology. Raised within the Conservative movement, I learned at Hebrew school that Israel was the "land of milk and honey," where Holocaust survivors irrigated the deserts and made flowers bloom.
What I didn't hear much about was the lives of Palestinians. It was only after I went to college, met Muslim friends and enrolled in a Middle Eastern history and politics course that I was challenged to reconcile my liberal, humanist worldview with the fact that the Jewish state of which I was so proud was occupying the land of 4.4 million stateless Palestinians, many of them refugees displaced by Israel's creation.
Like many young American Jews, during my senior year of college I took the free trip to Israel offered by the Taglit-Birthright program. The bliss I felt floating in the Dead Sea, sampling succulent fruits grown by Jewish farmers and roaming the medieval city of Safed, the historic center of Kabbalah mysticism, was tempered by other experiences: watching the construction of the imposing "security" fence, which not only tamped down terrorist attacks but also separated Palestinian villagers from their land and water supply. I spent hours in hushed conversation with a young Israeli soldier who was horrified by what he said was the routinely rough and contemptuous treatment of Palestinian civilians at Israeli military checkpoints.
That trip deepened my conviction that as an American Jew, I could no longer in good conscience offer Israel unquestioning support. I'm not alone. Polling of young American Jews shows that with the exception of the Orthodox, many of us feel less attached to Israel than do our baby boomer parents, who came of age during the era of the 1967 and 1973 wars, when Israel was less of an aggressor and more a victim. A 2007 poll by Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis found that although the majority of American Jews of all ages continue to identify as "pro-Israel," those under 35 are less likely to identify as "Zionist." Over 40% of American Jews under 35 believe that "Israel occupies land belonging to someone else," and over 30% report sometimes feeling "ashamed" of Israel's actions.
Hanna King, an 18-year-old sophomore at Swarthmore College, epitomizes the generational shift. Raised in Seattle as a Conservative Jew, King was part of a group of activists last November who heckled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with slogans against the occupation at a New Orleans meeting of the Jewish Federations General Assembly.
"Netanyahu repeatedly claims himself as a representative of all Jews," King says. "The protest was an outlet for me to make a clear statement ... that those injustices don't occur in my name. It served as a vehicle for reclaiming my own Judaism."
A more moderate critique is expressed by J Street, the political action committee launched in 2008 as a "pro-Israel, pro-peace" counterweight to the influence in Washington of the more hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Simone Zimmerman heads J Street's campus affiliate at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Jewish private schools, she lived in Tel Aviv as an exchange student during high school but never heard the word occupation spoken in relation to Israel until she got to college.
During Zimmerman's freshman year, Berkeley became embroiled in a contentious debate over whether the university should divest from corporations that do business with the Israeli army. Although Zimmerman opposed divestment, she was profoundly affected by the stories she heard from Palestinian-American activists on campus.
"They were sharing their families' experiences of life under occupation and life during the war in Gaza," she remembers. "So much of what they were talking about related to things that I had always been taught to defend, like human rights and social justice, and the value of each individual's life."
Even young rabbis are, as a cohort, more likely to be critical of Israel than are older rabbis. Last week, Cohen, the Hebrew Union College researcher, released a survey of rabbinical students at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, the premier institution for training Conservative rabbis. Though current students are just as likely as their elders to have studied and lived in Israel and to believe Israel is "very important" to their Judaism, about 70% of the young prospective rabbis report feeling "disturbed" by Israel's treatment of Arab Israelis and Palestinians, compared with about half of those ordained between 1980 and 1994.
Benjamin Resnick, 27, is one of the rabbinical students who took the survey. In July, he published an op-ed pointing out the ideological inconsistencies between Zionism, which upholds the principle of Israel as a Jewish state, and American liberal democracy, which emphasizes individual rights regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. "The tragedy," Resnick says, is that the two worldviews may be "irreconcilable."
Still, after living in Jerusalem for 10 months and then returning to New York, Resnick continues to consider himself a Zionist. He quotes the Torah in support of his view that American Jews should press Israel to end settlement expansion and help facilitate a Palestinian state: "Love without rebuke," he says, "is not love."
Dana Goldstein is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Nation Institute.
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发表于 2011-10-1 19:12:56
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