![]() ![]() These books included a very good early gay novel, a scandal book on Pres. Indeed, he produced works which only an underground, and disreputable, publisher with a shrewdly iconoclastic sensibility would dare distribute: “If not I, who,” he said. Roth enjoyed this role as outsider, gadfly, and truth-teller. Roth's use of the phrase on the title page of his first magazine publication is declaration of his disreputable status, and an irritating dare. There may be a suggestion of the libel on a Jew as him/herself being a plague. It may be similar to the Hebrew “machos,” which denotes in the Passover Hagaddah the ten plagues. The word “mocki” is pejorative for a Jew who speaks in a Yiddish accent. ![]() Too bad Sam did not get an illustrator for his MS. He distills into parts of TRANSFIGURATION a pious meditation, affecting in its plainspoken renunciation of the power to harm, and offering in the place of power politics a benevolence glowing with the clarity of pure winter sunlight (the novel ends with Hitler-Yeshea and Madeleine on the steps of the Reichstag), which might be an allusion to Shekinah, the light of God’s presence. Once again, as with his reverential early poetry about Moses, Sinai, and Kol Nidre, Roth can write about humility and the quest for peaceful wholeness. That way, the new nation, with all the idealism of Jewish philosophy and theology aimed at preparing for the Messiah, would not be under the thumb of an imperial power, as it might be if it were a bulwark against the oil-rich Arabs in the Middle East. It has created a Gordian knot, to disentangle which a transfigured Hitler rose in the League of Nations, to announce that the Jews of Germany will be able to establish a country of their own in Africa, with which the Master of Europe would cooperate in establishing international trade. The wind-up: a fight between the Jews of Germany and Poland to establish immigration quotas to the new land. Second, Sam was thinking not only of a blockbuster spy- and –romance thriller, but probably of a film, as he was with for example, his Faro imprint’s THE MAN WHO KILLED KITCHENER. In the novel, he is not a monster, but rather a man who has done great harm and is mesmerized by a group of sinister advisers. Yeshea proceeds to extricate Germany from the grip of the Nazi imperialists and their newspaper propagandists, with the support – get this – of a beautiful movie star, Madeline (I bet he had in mind Madeleine Carroll) who is enamored of Hitler ( and even more so since "he" has turned benevolent).įirst, this was before Hitler’s full plan for the Jews became known. Yeshea appeared one night to Hitler and, reviling the “master of Europe” for the most monumental meanness, took his place. In this novel, set in 1948, the Second World War DID NOT TAKE PLACE! He wrote some of it in the early morning hours, by the light of a bathroom ceiling lamp. Sam’s most intense work on the Hitler period is his unpublished TRANSFIGURATION, written while he was at Lewisburg in the late 1930s. ![]() Jeremiah “unflinchingly” stares at the possibility that the Lord, if responsible for everything, is responsible for “even the cruelest evil.” Yes, and remember the Bible, as the present, demonstrates many such meannesses by Israel as well as its enemies. Roth tells us what Jacob saw but could not report: six Jew-killing monsters, including Hitler and Stalin, a “monumental meanness.” Could the battle God Jehovah, the earthshaker who so gloriously vanquished the pagan idols, let his Children of Israel contemplate such a desultory future? Roth seems close here to what James Kugel described, apropos of the Book of Lamentations, as “God as the enemy. In Roth’s version, the patriarch finds that he cannot predict the ultimate future, for God’s vision (mercifully) at that moment departed from him. 21, reimagines Jacob’s deathbed prophecy to his sons, to become the Children of Israel (Genesis 49:1–2). His powerful poem in his late (mid-1960s) redacted PSALMS OF DAVID (_Israeli Davidia_), no. Proud of the Roth family’s contribution to fighting Hitler (he knew what WWI had done to his birthplace, and could not yet imagine what WWII had done), Sam wrote a small book _Dear Richard: A Letter to My Son in the Fighting Forces of the United States_ (1942). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |