Mordecai Roshwald

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Mordecai Roshwald (2012)

Mordecai Marceli Roshwald (born May 26, 1921 in Drohobycz , Poland , today Ukraine ; died March 19, 2015 in Silver Spring , Maryland ) was an American social scientist and writer, best known for his science fiction novel Level 7 by 1959. As a social scientist, he mainly worked in the fields of political science , political philosophy and religious studies .

Life

Roshwald was born the son of Abraham Leib Roshwald, a trader and civil servant, and Sidonia Feuer in Drohobycz, then in the Polish voivodeship of Lviv . He attended a private Jewish school in Lviv and emigrated to Israel in 1934 , where he attended an Orthodox school in Tel Aviv . He then studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1942 and his doctorate in philosophy in 1947. In 1945 he married Miriam Wyszynski, with whom he had a son and who was also the co-author of his Moses biography Moses: Leader, Prophet, Man (1969). After completing his studies, he was initially a lecturer in political theory at the Israel Institute of Public Administration and from 1951 at the Hebrew University. In 1955 he moved to the USA, where he taught political theory at Brooklyn College from 1956 to 1957 . From 1957 he was a professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Minnesota . In between he was visiting professor in Israel ( Technion ), England ( University of Bath ) and Canada ( Simon Fraser University ). In 1962 and 1963 he received the McKnight Foundation Award from the University of Minnesota. His main work is the monograph The transient and the absolute , published in 1999 .

However, Roshwald became known beyond academic circles primarily through Level 7 (German under the title Das Ultimatum ), a 1959 novel of an apocalyptic future in which the world is being destroyed by a global nuclear war, from which there is no protection not on the eponymous level 7 , located at a depth of 1,300 meters , a nuclear bunker in which a small group is supposed to survive the extinction of humanity and the radioactive contamination of the earth's surface for 500 years. In 2004 an expanded edition with the original framework was published , in which Martians thousands of years later find the protagonist's manuscript under the remains of the bunker. Level 7 has been translated into 14 languages ​​and has been recognized by Bertrand Russell , JB Priestley and Linus Pauling .

The second novel, A Small Armageddon , published in 1962, also deals with a scenario of the Cold War and its possible consequences, but now satirically and on board a nuclear submarine . Roshwald wrote of his two apocalyptic novels:

"I wrote Level 7 out of concern for the future of humanity. [...] A Small Armageddon deals with a similar concern in a farcical manner: I was still concerned writing it, but I needed a relaxation. "

“I wrote Level 7 out of concern about the future of humanity. […] A Small Armageddon treats the same concern in the form of a farce : I was still concerned when I wrote it, but I needed some relaxation. "

In 2008, Roshwald took the topic of the nuclear Armageddon to the discursive level by juxtaposing the novels Level 7 and Miller's Canticle of Leibowitz in Dreams and Nightmares: Science and Technology in Myth and Fiction .

bibliography

Novels
  • Level 7 (1959)
    • English: The ultimatum. Goldmann's Science Fiction # 27, 1962.
  • A Small Armageddon (1962)
  • Les Mutinés du "Polar Lion" (1963, with Élisabeth Gille , French original edition)
Non-fiction
  • Humanism in practice (1947, English translation 1955)
  • Political parties and social classes in Israel (1956)
  • Moses: leader, prophet, man; the story of Moses and his image through the ages (1969, with Miriam Roshwald)
  • Marginal Jewish sects in Israel (1973)
  • Moses: the ideal of a leader (1989)
  • Modern technology: the promise and the menace (1997)
  • The transient and the absolute: an interpretation of the human condition and of human endeavor (1999)
  • Liberty: its meaning and scope (2000)
  • The half-truths by which we live (2006)
  • Biblical revisions and para-biblical visions (2008)
  • Dreams and Nightmares: Science and Technology in Myth and Fiction (2008)
  • Paths through mankind's perplexities (2008)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ To Interview With Author Dr. Mordecai Roshwald , interview with Mike Strozier, 2009.
  2. ^ Robert Reginald : Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Gale, 1979, ISBN 0-8103-1051-1 , p. 1054.
personal data
SURNAME Roshwald, Mordecai
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roshwald, Mordecai Marceli (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American social scientist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Drohobycz , Poland
DATE OF DEATH 19th March 2015
Place of death Silver Spring , Maryland