The Lady of the Castle offers two parallel readings. The focus of the Zionist reading is the post-Shoah Israeli Jewish identity, which emphatically proclaims the imperative of rejecting the diaspora Jewish identity. In contrast, the focus of the European reading is the post-Shoah crisis of European identity and culture. From a Jewish perspective, however, Europe does not only signify persecutions and the Shoah, but also the values and attractions of European culture that had a defining role in the formation of European Jewish identity. Goldberg embeds all of these parallel and contrasting threads in a Gothic drama, in which she attempts a certain measure of conciliation between them.
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