Toys, or The Adjacency Romance

A toy can be used in any number of ways, according to the imagination of the player.

  • I have seen kids who were not allowed to own toy guns pick up a twig and start shooting with it: Pew! Pew! Pew! (I understand the impulse to keep toy guns out of the hands of children, but I’ve never seen it attain its objective.)
  • Regardless of what Mattel might have believed, for some of us Barbie wasn’t an aspirational toy. I used my Barbies to populate the elaborate cities and houses I constructed out of blocks and other toy box flotsam, and to serve as models for my inept attempts at clothing design. 
  • A friend’s daughter repurposed the highly detailed and elaborate play kitchen her grandparents gave her to be a library, with herself as the librarian (this is a child after my own heart). 

Where am I going with this? Well, after three years I have succumbed, and spent a week watching all three seasons of Bridgerton. I had been told repeatedly that I would love it: since I started out as a writer publishing Regency romances–Bridgerton, which is set in an alternate version of the English Regency, should be right up my road, right? Kinda? Maybe? No?

Well, kinda, in the sense that Bridgerton is entertaining. But also no, because I was left wondering why, out of all the toys available to them, the show’s creators decided to play with the English Regency. Continue reading “Toys, or The Adjacency Romance”

Reading and Bristol

By the time you read this, I will be in Bristol. I’m spending a couple of days with Catherine Butler, who is the most wonderful person. We will talk literature: she’s both an academic and a fiction writer and knows enormous amounts of fascinating stuff. My first encounter with her was when she answered questions for my book History and Fiction.  That’s today, at your end. At my end I’m still in Canberra!

Between Bristol and Canberra, came Reading. I will have met several friends, and also some new people with overlapping research interests. With luck, I will have seen The Importance of Being Earnest, acted in a place where Oscar Wilde’s prison is visible… and it will be work-related. That place is a ruined abbey. I’ll be in Reading mostly to create a photographic essay about how the town depicts its Middle Ages. Photographs. Lots of them. I’m happy to share a couple with you when i return, but only if you’re interested.

If you want to know about any of the places I go to or want to know more about the writers and science fiction folks I see along the way, let me know on each of these posts.  Comment madly. Tell me what you know and love. tell me what you’d like to know more about. When I return I’ll read all your comments. If you tell me what you’re interested in, I’ll report on those parts of my journey when I get back. A series of posts to match a series of posts! If everyone is silent, then what I write about on my return will be a complete surprise.

A Sigh of Relief

I noticed two major reactions in my (carefully curated) social media after President Biden decided not to run for re-election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Mine – and the most common one – was a sense of relief and a bit of hope.

We are visiting Seattle, and I overheard someone discussing Biden’s decision at the Ballard Farmers Market (an overwhelming place, though full of good food). I checked the news before I shared the information with my partner and our friends.

As the day went on and I saw people – including prominent Democrats – quickly chiming in to support Harris, I felt my stomach unclench and my feelings of doom recede. It has always seemed to me that she could bring the strong presence and fight we need in this race, so long as she got support.

On Monday morning, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t wake up panicking about the felon nominated by the Republicans getting back in office.

The other reaction among people I know is the not unreasonable fear that misogyny and racism can still prevail. Too many women (in particular) are still reeling from 2016 and misogynoir is a very real thing.

There’s no question that things are going to get ugly.

But it’s also good news that the felonious con man and his minions were caught off guard by this. I’m sure they’ll get more sophisticated with their attacks, but right now it’s just bog standard nastiness.

From what I can tell, Biden handled this brilliantly. He announced just after the Republican convention ended, taking away their advantage. And apparently they were not ready for such an announcement, perhaps because their dear leader can’t imagine someone willingly giving up power.

After the drip, drip, drip of ageist bullshit (I’ve never met the president, so I don’t know anything about his health, but given that no one was doing the same thing with the equally old Republican nominee who rambles incoherently and is known to lie about his health, I am skeptical of the claims), the great strategy came as a relief. The pundits’ dream of an open and chaotic convention would be a disaster.

And no, such a convention would not be more “democratic.” I remember when conventions were actually contested and even as a teenager – OK, a nerdy teenager who watched conventions – I knew that everything happened in the smoke-filled rooms. Continue reading “A Sigh of Relief”

Like ships that pass in the night…

I needed my time off. My thesis is much advanced, but life has been really curiously strange recently and so it’s not yet finished. It’s far closer to being finished, and I do appreciate your patience. I’m going to ask you to be patient a bit longer before I return to regular blogging. I’m traveling for a bit. I’ll report back when I’m home, I promise. In the meantime, since I won’t have regular access to my computer, I thought I’d work through my itinerary and put up posts for the whole trip, tonight. Every Monday you’ll hear where I am and some of what I intend to do there.

This is something new for me. But this voyage i something new for me. I’ve been ill for so long and this is a giant test of whether I can keep the illnesses in abeyance and return to normal life. If i do well while I’m away, then I can do well when I return. I don’t want to share trials and tribulations, so I’m going to tell you about what I’m doing when I cannot blog. Pretend you’re with me….

A Violent Country

The chickens came home to roost. A man who built a political career around stoking violence became the target of it.

I immediately thought of the attempt to kill George Wallace in 1972. Another man who stoked violence suddenly became a victim of it. The shooters in both cases sound similar.

Wallace spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He also repented of at least some of his racist actions. Being shot might have made him reflect on himself.

I don’t expect such reflection from the grifting felon that the Republicans are preparing to nominate. I wouldn’t expect it even if he’d been more badly injured. I don’t think he has the capacity to examine himself.

The Wallace shooting provided some of the material for Martin Scorcese’s brilliant movie Taxi Driver, a movie I saw when it first came out in 1976 and am not willing to ever watch again. I left that movie in shock – I still remember how I felt – because it so perfectly encapsulated the violence in our society and the thin line between someone seen as a good guy and someone seen as evil incarnate.

(If you’ve never seen it, you should watch it, but make sure you watch it with friends you can discuss it with afterwards.)

As I recall, the guy who shot at Ronald Reagan (and did more harm to his press secretary, Jim Brady) was obsessed with that movie and with Jodie Foster, who was in it. These things all connect.

Our politics has been intertwined with violence for most of our history. I am old enough to have been shocked to my core by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The murders later in the 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made me fully aware of how off the rails things were.

The mass shootings we are so familiar with start about that time, too, with Charles Whitman climbing to the top of the University of Texas tower in 1967 and shooting so many people.

Nowadays, school shootings and similar violent attacks in dance halls, at concerts, even in churches, are now such common news that the response is more numbness than shock. Continue reading “A Violent Country”

You Are What You Hear

Warning: approaching elderhood conversation ahead. You’ve been warned.

One of the things I have become… well, not anxious about, exactly, but vigilant about, is my hearing. I know that a certain amount of degradation of my original acuity is to be expected, but I by-god want to know if I’m beginning to lose a meaningful amount of hearing. Because I’m convinced that, while loss of hearing doesn’t cause dementia, it’s a big contributor to the speed with which it can take over. So once a year I get my ears tested, and the minute it’s indicated, I want hearing aids.

Why? Aside from the obvious–I don’t want to be a person who trails around conversations saying “huh? Will you repeat that?” if I can avoid it–sound, and particularly speech, is one of the things that keeps me moored to the world. There are now a budget of studies that indicate that there’s a strong correlation between hearing loss and cognitive decline. Studies of older adults with hearing loss found that they had mental decline 30%-40% faster, on average, than those whose hearing remained intact.

Why? There are a number of theories. 1) Hearing loss increases isolation, which decreases stimulation. 2) When you experience hearing loss, more of your brain is put to work trying to process the sounds you do hear and make sense of it. And 3) there’s a sort of diminishing loop between the ears and the brain: if your ears don’t pick up as much sound, the auditory nerves send fewer signals to the brain, and the brain declines.

I have spent the last eight years or so watching my beloved aunt’s succumb to dementia. Among other things, by the time anyone really noticed the decline in her hearing and hearing aids were acquired, they were not a habit: someone else had to remind her to use them, they annoyed her, so she didn’t use them. As I write (sitting in my aunt’s room while she dozes nearby) I can see the hearing aids in their case–the batteries probably in dire need of recharging. I cannot think of a single time I’ve seen hear use them since they came home with her–it’s just not a thing that became routine (when she was still able to form routines). Whereas she will put on her reading glasses to spend time with the newspaper. Reading–and those glasses–define something for her about who she is, even now. The hearing aids do not.

So if, as seems likely, I will eventually need hearing aids, I want them early enough that putting them in becomes part of my routine. Also–I learned this from watching my father-in-law– once you have hearing aids you can deploy them to manage your surroundings. More than once when there was a family squabble, I saw him, smiling seraphically, reach up and turn his hearing aids off. Family strife? No problem, just tune out. I’d like to think I won’t do that, but having the ability to do it is kind of appealing.

Golde and Tevye In Queanbeyan

By the time you read this, my thesis is almost ready to be lodged for examination (all going well). This is the last, then, in the exploration of my past writing. If you enjoyed it, let me know, because I have nearly a thousand pieces lurking on my computer, mostly written over 25 years. Tell me what subjects you like and I’ll see what I can find.

Last week I mentioned “a Jewish view of everything.” That’s pretty much my life in the late 1990s. I’d been made redundant from my public service job and hadn’t yet given myself permission to be a writer. I knew I would, but there were two years when I needed to find out who I was after my time as a policy wonk and an activist.

I spent a lot of that time in the Jewish community and in the folk community. This led to my being recommended as historical consultant to a production of Fiddler on the Roof by the choreographer. There were newspaper articles about the production and one of the first requests (for a Jewish magazine) of something by me, myself. This is that something. Another thing is the reason for this particular production of Fiddler on the Roof. We need this attitude right now. The hate has come full circle (again) and it would be very helpful to have more people like that wonderful cast of Fiddler, learning and understanding.

 

Golde and Tevyeto dinner?

Being asked questions always throws a strange light on reality. Being asked questions by sixty actors and various production team members from the cast of Fiddler on the Roof gives the word “questions” a whole new meaning. Especially when the production is by Queanbeyan Players.

Queanbeyan is not well-known for its dynamic Jewish community. The few (very few) Jews who live in Queanbeyan commute to Canberra for their Jewish communal activity. When I say “commute” to Canberra, I mean drive for maybe 15-20 minutes. When I say “Canberra’ I mean the ACT Jewish Community, total membership of about 300, no rabbi, everyone active wearing as many hats as possible without collapsing of overwork. Canberra’s tiny community luxuriates in two congregations: Orthodox downstairs, Liberal upstairs -More than one of us attend both.

This production of Fiddler on the Roof is different. It is Queanbeyan Players’ answer to their immense discomfort at the rise of certain attitudes to a very large number of minority groups. The director, Vivien Arnold, feels very strongly about racism of all varieties, and sees Fiddler as a powerful vehicle for addressing many negative assumptions about culture and cultural difference. This is why they asked me to advise – not because I am an historical expert or a religious expert (I am neither) but because I know what it is like to be Jewish, and I have the research skills to flesh that out as far as the cast needs. I have family help in that endeavour, as you will see.

What this production aims to do is make the audience see that Jews are ordinary and interesting human beings and can lead a full and happy life unless forcibly prevented from doing so. In May, Canberra and Queanbeyan residents will hopefully feel, strongly, that the forcible prevention of normal living can be agonising.

Why Jews and not other groups? Because Fiddler on the Roof is such a very good vehicle. The music is wonderful fun, and the characters still have that very warm feel that is the legacy of the original stories by Sholom Aleichem. It is very easy to relate to good music and delightful people, even when they wear clothes that are different and follow rituals that are alien.

I am learning over and over again that what is ‘normal’ in Jewish life is totally unheard of outside. I am reminded over and over again that stereotypes about Jews can be subtle and often change. Little things like wine on Friday night, like the shape of havdalah candles, like the idea of pareve food, can throw non-Jews remarkably at first. On a daily basis, it is easy to forget this, as the friends and work colleagues we mix with tend to understand a lot about our lives simply through knowing us as individuals. Either that or the subjects do not come up. But when you explain such a wide range of Jewish tidbits to sixty odd people over and again, the sudden blink of the eye and the eager questions begin to mount up. It becomes a joyous task, helping people understand that we are human and non-threatening and that the rules and regulation we often live by have rhyme and reason (well, mostly).

It helps, I must admit, when I admit to ignorance and say, “Do you mind if I ask my Mum?” I had to do this with tsitsis, for example, as I could not describe how to make them for on-stage wear. Mum gave me an answer, but, being thorough, also checked it out. She collared every single Orthodox male in sight one Sunday (for some reason I envisage her doing this in the queue at Glick’s, but it is just as likely to have happened at the Jewish Museum) and asked how much of what showed in what circumstances, and what the costume people should do for the production. If you are an orthodox male and were asked the question, you will be pleased to know that the costume lady still wanted to see what the garment looked like. She could not believe that men would wear a whole garment of which only eight cords were visible. We are still arguing that one.

The differences in the production is not merely in the amount of detail being consulted. The director announced at the first full meeting of the cast that she did not want a ‘Jewish burlesque’. It is still a musical based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories. The script and songs are still old and familiar. The ghost of Fruma-Sarah has developed a love of screeching that rivals none, and Tseitl has a decidedly scornful and sarcastic manner when she answers her younger sisters in “Matchmaker”. All this is straightforward.

What is less straightforward is that the whole cast has been divided into families, given occupations and are responsible for creating their parts of the shtetl. Not just for creating viable backgrounds and raisons d’être for the family, but actually helping build their parts of the set, and furnish it, and behave towards their bits of plyboard as if they have lived there fifty years. Cast members are seldom offstage. The houses spill out into the auditorium, enveloping the audience in the village atmosphere. Even when hearts are breaking in song, the water carrier will continue to fill the water barrels, and the greengrocer’s wife will get the daily round ready for delivery.

This has resulted in such a flow of questions! I cannot answer them all. The historical ones are sometimes easier than the religious ones (yes, there were restrictions on Jewish access to State education, but that did not stop the Jewish community working towards literacy, is one answer that I have had to give over and over again) but I have had recourse to Sonya Oberman where my knowledge fails (a guide at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne, and, purely coincidentally, the mother I mentioned earlier) and to the administrator at Bentleigh Progressive Synagogue in Melbourne when I have an “Ask the Rabbi” question thrown at me (Suzie Eisfelder – she’s my sister and has no objection to acting as a go-between – I keep things in the family wherever possible!). A lot of the questions involve putting my background knowledge together in the most surprising ways. It is really astonishing how much you can find out about how your family celebrated weddings a century ago or what death customs were, when you put your mind to it.

Being an inveterate Net-hound and also a practising historian (so I’m better on Medieval cookery or on King Arthur than on most Jewish history, but at least I know how to research) has really helped. The YIVO Institute has some lovely photos on the Web which have been very useful for the costume and set design people, as have the books my family and I have scraped together. The genealogically-minded branch of my family (making use of their particular addiction has added whole dimensions to telephone conversations) helped the cast find suitable names and produced more photos and descriptions of shtetl life. For anyone interested in shtetl life, in fact, there is a world of information on the Net. Certainly enough for an amateur theatre production with a small budget. My folk studies background has paid off, as it helped me locate material for the choreographer, an Israeli dance teacher of mine, Robyn Priddle, who got me into this mess in the first place. It serves her right that she has to teach dancing to sixty singers with 450 left feet!

Right now I am in the process at tearing out my hair at the inevitable compromises that production dictates. The historian in me is desperately rebellious. We will be using modern yarmulkas, for instance (bought from Gold’s, sent up to Queanbeyan by my devoted mother) and there is a real problem in finding headgear of any sort, not to mention frockcoats. Everyone will be hatted, although the hats may not be the right ones, and all the women will have their heads covered: it was a classic moment when I told the ‘married’ women about shaving their heads. They are not willing to get that authentic. Not even the Rabbi’s wife. Mum and I had this lovely moment when we envisaged Golde’s scarf coming off during the Dream sequence, but, alas, it is not to be. Golde adamantly says that her curls are staying. And the men – well, they are reluctantly prepared to grow beards but are drawing the line at peyot. The costume team is experimenting with all sorts of fake versions. This was just when I was delighting (drat it) in the thought of 16 men wandering around the Canberra region in full turn-of -the century Ashkenazi garb. It would have been so beautiful, and so good for their acting, to be comfortable wearing the clothes. They won’t even do it to make me happy, or to give unbelievable photograph opportunities to tourists. They will practise the hats, I am told, and maybe yarmulkas.

Other things they will practise with much more pleasure. Eating challah was practised very thoroughly the first night the Sabbath Prayer scene was worked on in detail. And proper washing of hands. One cast member is making her own challah cover, to remember the show by.

Some things do not require practice. They do not even require questions. One afternoon I invited anyone in the cast around to afternoon tea who wanted to see a Jewish home in situ and make sensible decisions about mezuzot, candlesticks and so on. Every cast member who turned up was a ‘Mama’ in the production. So we have a cast which is delineating itself very naturally. The mothers do all the work.

Their questions that day went far beyond what they needed for the play. Two admitted that one of the reasons they auditioned for the production was to learn a bit more about Judaism. Ten ‘mothers’ demolished tayglach and biscuits and borrowed my cookbooks. They fell in love with the family seder plate and learned how to light Shabbos candles.

Until that session, questions had focused more on the historical aspect: what regulations were around at the time that affected Jewish life, what was the town water supply, what were houses built of? Then the cast turned to the ritual. Now there is another shift, as most people want to go beyond a formal knowledge of Judaism and understand what it is like to be Jewish.

It is a very positive form of understanding. Instead of asking about Anti-Semitism and various forms of hatred, they are getting to the nitty gritty. What do all these rituals mean? How do they affect the way Jews lead their lives? I have found myself giving practical explanations as best I can of tsedakah and of Jewish attitudes to learning and women. The symbolism of the candles at Shabbos has come up, and the reasons for kashruth. I find myself grateful to my extra-religious sister (I am well-supplied with siblings) whose dedication to Jewish learning and willingness to explain has kept a lot of the information they need somewhere in my life.

Really, this group need a Rabbi with an outstanding historical knowledge as advisor. Instead they have me. This is a worry. What is even more of a worry is that Golde and Tevye are coming to Shabbos dinner on Friday. They tell me they have some questions to ask.

Institutional Failure

In the United States, our institutions have failed us.

This is most obvious in the recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has progressed to declaring that at least some presidents are kings after having undermined voting rights, taken away women’s rights, and made it impossible for government agencies to do their jobs properly.

But the failure is broader than that. The Republican Party failed us long ago when it hooked up with right wing extremists to try to shore up its small base of rich people. Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt would be appalled. Even Dwight Eisenhower might be appalled. And it still only represents a minority of voters.

Congress hasn’t worked since the 1980s, when the Democratic majority in the House decided it had to work with Ronald Reagan. That wasn’t enough for the extremists, as evidenced by the shutdown games that are now a frequent issue.

The Senate, which should have been restructured decades ago to fix its vast inequality, has been a mess for a long time, but even when the Democrats have power, they avoid fixing the things that make it easy for the extremists to obstruct them.

People complain about polarization, but the problem is extremism enabled by those who’d still like to pretend we’re bipartisan.

The fact that voters turned out en masse to throw out the grifter and his minions in 2020 should have enabled the Democrats to take firm charge and make it impossible for the extremists to ever again be a threat.

Yet here we are. It’s 2020 all over again. Or 2016, with “he’s too old” replacing “but her emails.” The Republicans are putting up an equally old man who is also the convicted felon who came close to destroying the country the last time he got in and yet some polls favor him.

And of course, much of the news media has failed us repeatedly. The major newspapers and television networks want to cover politics like a football game or a horse race. They are not focused on the real problems we face and which would be the best administration to solve them. They’re not even looking at the extremism and absurdity of the Republican candidate.

I mean, all you have to do is compare what happened under each candidate’s term in office. That’s just Reporting 101. You don’t need an inside source to do that.

Continue reading “Institutional Failure”

Jewish King Arthurs

In 1999 I daringly went to a conference (GrailQuest ‘99) and my two worlds collided as they never had before. I went for the Medieval Arthurian stuff (of which I’ve long had a strongly academic interest and about which I’ve written my fair share), but I wasn’t confident enough after all those years outside academic research and didn’t offer a paper. I was more active in the fiction side, and met many people who became long-term friends. I asked a question from the floor of an academic panel and everyone looked across and asked me a question back. They listened, and one of my favourite Aussie writers of the matters of Arthur took me aside and we talked about the subject for a fair while. The write-up of the conference published my answer. I was also asked for a non-academic version of my answer. This is the one I’m giving you this week.

A Jewish King Arthur?

OK, let me admit it up front. As far as I know King Arthur was not Jewish, not in any piece of medieval literature. I have seen him written up as a fairy, as a warlord, as the leader of a very fancy court, but never Jewish. But while he was definitely not Jewish, Jews wrote about him. How do I know the authors were are Jewish? Well, one work is in Hebrew and another in Yiddish. This is a fairly strong indication.

It is hard to say if any other Medieval Arthurian works are Jewish. Most are blatantly Christian. There is, for example, a wonderful prose romance (just amazingly long) where the Grail becomes a very religious object (which it may not have been originally, but that is another story): this is a decidedly Christian affair. And there are some named authors who belong to one court or another and are more likely to be not Jewish. Most Medieval literature is, naturally, by that prolific author anonymous.

One author is borderline. I have seen it argued that Chretien de Troyes (who first introduced the grail into Arthurian romance) was Jewish. He was one of France’s great poets, so I have always wanted it to be proven that he was, indeed Jewish, but the likelihood is that he was not. He may well have Jewish relatives though, or at least Jewish friends – his place of birth was an important Jewish centre, after all -so there is some consolation. Since Chretien as good as invented the verse novel known as the Medieval romance, even a vaguely possible Jewish link is a nice thing.

Most literature written in most medieval languages, sadly, has to be assumed to be Christian unless there is positive proof to the contrary. We are talking, you see, about a Christian society.

But because we are talking about Christian countries in the Christian corner of the world, we can be 100% certain that anything written in Hebrew or Yiddish is very, very unlikely to be written by a Christian. Hebrew was known by scholars of all sorts, but the one Hebrew Arthurian manuscript we have is purely and wholly and gloriously Jewish. There was no reason for clerics to write German texts down in Hebrew characters unless it was for a Jewish audience, so any Christian reader of a Yiddish Arthurian manuscript would have to be the rather bizarre combination of a scholar whose native tongue was German and who preferred to read a translation into a dialect of their vernacular language written in an odd script. Unlikely, I suspect, especially when there is a lovely German version of the same story (Wigalois). So the likelihood is nicely strong for the writer of Widuwilt (the Yiddish tale) to have been Jewish, and probably the copyists and, almost definitely most of the listeners. It was written originally to be declaimed or sung, so most of the audience were listeners rather than readers.

So we are back to the works themselves. What are they? Do we have any idea why they were written? What is their history?

The Hebrew tale is popularly known as the Melekh Artus, and was written in 1279 by a poor soul in the midst of a very trying time. We know this because he wrote it in his introduction: he was translating the Arthurian tales to cheer himself up, and justified it at great length, citing Rabbinic authority. The author/translator was from northern Italy and bits of Italian have crept in. As he was Jewish, bits of Christianity have crept out. Wherever his source has a mass, he omits it, and he translates concepts into Jewish equivalents. I am not sure that Saints and Tsaddikim are analogous, and I really like the thought of the Holy Grail becoming a dish used to give food to the poor.

Either the text is unfinished or the copyist ran our of steam, because the one manuscript of this amazing text is, alas, incomplete. Very incomplete. It is held in the Vatican, and has been edited and translated and yes, Canberra has a copy (at the National Library). Its literary value is very low, I must admit, and the French sources that were used are much more entertaining (except for the brilliant apologia at the beginning, which is well worth reading) but it is most definitely a Jewish (Italian) version of the Arthurian tales.

The other work is later and exists in several versions in several manuscripts and editions. It was not written down until the very close of the Middle Ages, but made up for this shocking lapse by being popular for centuries. Widuwilt only features Arthur as an aside. It is actually about Gawain and his son. It is from the German that the tale reached Yiddish, hardly surprisingly, from an Old French original. The hero has a different name I the German, though. Unfortunately, we have an early example of Jewish humour (maybe written by an ancestor of Sylvia Deutsch?). Apparently Gawain was not really paying attention when his wife bore him a son (he was just about to desert the poor lady, in point of fact) and so, when she asked him what Gawain wanted to call the baby, Gawain answered “Whatever you want”, so he was called “Whatever you want” or “Widuwilt”. Apart from this, most of the tale follows the German original according to my sources (which is just as well, because the French and the German are relatively available, but the Yiddish is not so none of these comments imply a sighting of the original!) except for some adventures added at the end.

It seems to be a lovely adventure romance, with all the Christian bits left intact (yes, Arthur holds court at Easter, rather than at Pesach!) and lots of good fighting. While the Hebrew tale was a bit more serious (as befitting a scholar suffering form melancholy) Widuwilt is simple entertainment, and very suited to a Spielmann and his audience.

Now for the $64,000 question: why am I interested in these works? Like the writer of the Melekh Artus, it is for sound and moral reasons, although I won’t go so far as to cite Rabbinic authority..

One thing that these Medieval Jews had in common with us was the fact that they were a minority group in a society so very Christian that it took that Christianity for granted. You ask most Australians and they will say that Australia is not a Christian society, that it is secular. Yet Christian holidays, Christian imagery and Christian concepts weigh down the very air we breathe. The relationship between Christianity and society was different in Italy in 1279 to Australia seven hundred years later, and Jews definitely have different status, different acceptance, different problems. But we are still not quite mainstream. We are still outside the norm.

Even in the more restrictive atmosphere of Medieval Europe, Jews could reach out and make sense of the fullness of the outside culture. Unless you translate a romance or read it in its original language, you cannot make any sense of the people who write and read in that style. Widuwilt is evidence that some Jews were enjoying Arthurian romances, and actively coming to terms with all those elements of Western European vernacular culture.

The fact that only two works have been translated or interpreted into Jewish languages, one unfinished and apparently for private use, shows that Jews had very different concerns to Christians. But it also show that there was overlap and a meeting of interests. Not only is this interesting in its own right, but it gives us a neat tool for use in understanding our own society, for understanding the culture we share with others, and those elements that are specifically Jewish.

As Australians we often use the dread phrase “cultural cringe”. It can apply just as much to being Jewish Australians as to being Australians in general. We are neither solely religious nor simple recipients of wider Australian culture. We don’t take the whole of our identity from Chaim Potok, nor from Mary Grant Bruce. King Arthur teaches us that. If there is a Jewish view of King Arthur and even a Jewish grail, then there is a Jewish view of everything.

It’s Been a Hell of a Week

It’s been a hell of a week. Not personally – I’m fine, my partner is back from travels, and even though there’s a heat wave, it’s actually quite pleasant in the shade.

No, what’s making me miserable is the U.S. Supreme Court, which is apparently stocked with the sort of “originalists” who think the American Revolution was a bad mistake, given that they just gave the President (though maybe only the former guy) powers usually reserved for kings. The people who wrote the Constitution had a lot of flaws, but I’ve read enough history to doubt very seriously that they were in favor of kings or anyone else being above the law.

The court also dismantled the administrative side of government – you know, the agencies who deal with air quality, medicines, consumer goods, air travel, workplace safety, and so on. That is, they’re undermining what government actually does.

Combine that with the fact that the Republican candidate for president is a convicted felon and a grifter who is spouting absurd lies and promoting an extremist authoritarian plan for government and yet the coverage of the presidential race treats him as if this is normal.

Despite all this, the news coverage is focused on Joe Biden having a bad debate with the criminal grifter and urging him to drop out.

It’s enough to make one run screaming for the woods, except that I don’t think I’ll be safe there. It’s not the bears; I’m just not sure it’s possible to get far enough away from the disasters of this world.

(I forgot to mention climate change. A category 5 hurricane – unheard of this early – just devastated several places in the Caribbean. And there’s a nasty heat wave in California. Plus fires.)

My response to all of this – outside of ranting and feeling unsettled at all times – has been my go-to response since I was five years old: I read. Continue reading “It’s Been a Hell of a Week”