Jewish Fantasy Worldwide: Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile (Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy) 1666926604, 9781666926606

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand
The Wandering Messiah in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Imaginary Universes
When Jews Ruled the Volga
Kabbalist Rap
Djinn, Hauntings, and Double Consciousness
Alternate History and Jewish Anxiety in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhes
Ancient Jewish Elements in Twenty-First-Century Alfredian Fanfiction
Free Will, Kabbalah, Human Nature, and Messiah
Contra Torrentem
Motifs of Secrecy, the Hidden and the Unspoken in the Novels of Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem
Soviet Science Fiction of the 1960s and Jewishness
Seeking a Promised Land
Why Are Science Fiction Anthologies Ashkanormative?
Writing the Jewish Heroine’s Journey
Teaching Jewish Speculative Fiction
Conclusion
Index
About the Editor and Contributors

Citation preview

Jewish Fantasy Worldwide

Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy

Series Editor Valerie Estelle Frankel ‌‌ Jewish science fiction is a monumental literary genre worldwide, with hundreds of novels and short stories along with an enormous canon of films, plays, television shows, and graphic novels. It’s also strikingly popular. Not only have works of this category just won the Hugo and World Fantasy Award while dominating bestseller lists, but talks on the subject are standing room only. The Own Voices movement has led to a renaissance of Jewish fantasy, even as its authors create imaginary worlds reflecting their unique cultures. This series seeks subtopics of exploration within the massive canon, defining aspects of Jewish genre fiction and its unique qualities. It features both monographs and anthologies focused on trends, tropes, individual authors, beloved franchises, and so on. Scholars of all disciplines are welcome, especially those in Jewish Studies, Literature, and Media Studies, while interdisciplinary and international perspectives are particularly encouraged. Titles in the series Jewish Fantasy Worldwide: Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile, edited Valerie Estelle Frankel Jews in Popular Science Fiction: Marginalized in the Mainstream, edited Valerie Estelle Frankel Goliath as Gentle Giant: Sympathetic Portrayals in Popular Culture, Jonathan L. Friedmann Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1945: Immigrants in the Golden Age, Valerie Estelle Frankel

Jewish Fantasy Worldwide Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile Edited by Valerie Estelle Frankel

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Frankel, Valerie Estelle, 1980- editor.   Title: Jewish fantasy worldwide : trends in speculative stories from Australia to Chile / Valerie Estelle Frankel.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Jewish science fiction and fantasy | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023001922 (print) | LCCN 2023001923 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666926606 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666926613 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Speculative fiction--History and criticism. | Speculative fiction--Jewish authors. | Fantasy fiction--Jewish authors. | Science fiction--Jewish authors. | Jews in literature. | Judaism in literature.  Classification: LCC PN3448.S64 .J48 2023  (print) | LCC PN3448.S64  (ebook) | DDC 809.3/876098924--dc23/eng/20230310  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001922 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001923 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In memory of Sasha Urman, who was happy to share Jewish works from his culture and put up with plenty from mine.

Contents

Introduction ix Chapter 1: Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand Gillian Polack and Bettina Burger

1

Chapter 2: The Wandering Messiah in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Imaginary Universes Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang

19

Chapter 3: When Jews Ruled the Volga: Exploring the Novels of the Khazars Steven B. Frankel

37

Chapter 4: Kabbalist Rap: A Love Song for the Torah in Victoria Hanna’s Music Video “‫”אורייתא‬ 53 Katharina Hadassah Wendl Chapter 5: Djinn, Hauntings, and Double Consciousness: An Exploration of Mizrahi Magical Realism Valerie Estelle Frankel

71

Chapter 6: Alternate History and Jewish Anxiety in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America Ilana Goldstein

87

Chapter 7: Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhes: A Groundbreaking Yiddish Science-Fiction Novel Stephen M. Cohen



Chapter 8: Ancient Jewish Elements in Twenty-First-Century Alfredian Fanfiction Martine Mussies vii

101

121

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Contents

Chapter 9: Free Will, Kabbalah, Human Nature, and Messiah: Chaim Cigan’s Time Cruise via Parallel Histories and Identities Michaela Weiss

137

Chapter 10: Contra Torrentem: Leo Perutz’s By Night Under the Stone Bridge and Central European Fantasy Cameron Barrows

153

Chapter 11: Motifs of Secrecy, the Hidden and the Unspoken in the Novels of Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem Julie A. Hawkins

167

Chapter 12: Soviet Science Fiction of the 1960s and Jewishness: The Cases of Ilya Varshavsky and Gennady Gor Marat Grinberg

185

Chapter 13: Seeking a Promised Land: Estrangement and Belonging in Queer Jewish Speculative Fiction Akiva Hoffman

201

Chapter 14: Why Are Science Fiction Anthologies Ashkanormative? 225 Mara W. Cohen Ioannides and Valerie Estelle Frankel Chapter 15: Writing the Jewish Heroine’s Journey Evonne Marzouk and Patti McCarthy Chapter 16: Teaching Jewish Speculative Fiction Judy Klass Conclusion Index



249 269

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About the Editor and Contributors



305

Introduction

New York Jews invented science fiction as it’s known today, when the immigrant Hugo Gernsback set out to write realistic, technology-focused stories and created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, gathering authors and editors (largely Jewish) who shared his interests. This was the Golden Age, when Jews in the thirties and forties like Asimov, Weinbaum, and Kornbluth wrote anti-Fascist stories of persecuted aliens, though rarely with Jewish characters. Overt Jewish science fiction and fantasy sprang up closer to the 1970s, at a time when American Jews felt encouraged to share their culture. From the stories collected in the celebrated anthology Wandering Stars, they branched out with episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and celebrated feminist golem novels like Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers, Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. Alternate history boomed as well. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America stunned readers, exploring a world in which Hitler won. But all that’s in the US. Outside it, Jewish science fiction writers often found themselves hiding in the post-Holocaust Soviet territory of Eastern Europe. Their pleas for tolerance are subtle and coded, using the medium for its symbols and metaphors. Cameron Barrows explores Leo Perutz’s By Night Under the Stone Bridge, while Michaela Weiss considers Slovak writer Chaim Cigan’s use of time travel and alternate history. Julie Ann Hawkins looks at Polish author Stanislaw Lem and how much his post-Holocaust tropes of secret enlightenment reflect Asimov’s. Marat Grinberg considers Soviet science fiction of the 1960s, especially that of Ilya Varshavsky and Gennady Gor. Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky incorporated Jewish tropes into his graphic novel series The Incal, as Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang observes. Gillian Polack and Bettina Burger tackle the few overtly Jewish speculative works of Australia and New Zealand, while considering what makes their settings particularly unique. Other authors explore what could have been with alt-world and lost world adventures of the Khazars, a warrior ix

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Introduction

empire that existed between the sixth-century Byzantine Empire and Middle Eastern Caliphates. Steven B. Frankel chronicles these adaptations and how well they fit into history. Judy Klass shares lessons and projects from her university class, from Asimov, Piercy, Levin, and Serling to Isaac Bashevis Singer and I.L. Peretz of Eastern Europe and Clarise Lispector and Moacyr Scliar of Brazil. Mara W. Cohen Ioannides painstakingly searches the anthologies for Sephardic or Mizrahi tropes, questioning to what extent and why these stories are so Ashkanormative. Indeed, Mizrahi novels from Iran, Iraq, and Turkey offer a unique magical realism, even as they confront the cruelty of expulsion and estrangement. Likewise, editors Lavie Tidhar and Sheldon Teitelbaum especially are bringing Israeli and international fiction to a wider audience as they explore the cultural difference in non-Western tropes. New eras give authors new opportunities to break out and explore what a changing religion means to them. Akiva Hoffman looks at LGBTQ+ themes, including how the characters and authors reconcile the religious traditions. Stephen M. Cohen explores Canadian Israeli author Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhes (The Secret Mission), a genre-blurring Yiddish science fiction novel of 1980. Evonne Marzouk and Patti McCarthy explore the mystical heroine’s journey among the biblical prophetesses as well as in fiction of America, Israel, Spain, Babylon, Iran, and Morocco. Online, authors are also using Jewish tropes, as Martine Mussies observes in her exploration of Western European Alfredian fanfiction with its borrowings from biblical David. Katharina Hadassah Wendl examines Jewish fantasy elements on YouTube, specifically in Victoria Hanna’s music video ‫אורייתא‬. It should be noted that other writing styles exist beyond Western fantasy. While some authors incorporate this style, others are more influenced by Israeli magical realism and near-present dystopia. Under the Soviets, social science fiction was popular, allowing writers to subversively share their protests. Today, slipstream and mixed-genre works are surging in popularity, offering jaded readers innovative storytelling. Graphic novels and online publishing have reached new levels of acceptance and innovation. Transmedia productions offer games, cartoons, and comics, blurring the mediums. In this advancing universe, the science fiction critics are looking beyond the US to discover how much more is available. It’s a dazzling new realm, with old and new fiction alike available to a new, more diverse generation of Jewish readers.

Chapter 1

Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand Gillian Polack and Bettina Burger

Historically, there has been little scholarly examination of Jewish science fiction and fantasy from Australia and New Zealand. Recently, Jewish science fiction and fantasy writers from these countries have begun to garner a small amount of attention. Of this, the most interesting foci are on the work of New Zealand writer Sir Julius Vogel within New Zealand and Australia and the role Jewish Australian speculative fiction plays in the “Charting the Australian Fantastic” project1 run from universities in Dusseldorf and Cologne, which has so far included a panel discussion between Jason Franks, Jack Dann, Rivqa Rafael, and Gillian Polack, teaching and research programs within the universities, and various conference talks. The project has also resulted in several student-written blog entries on the authors in question, including a brief summary of the aforementioned panel discussion2 as well as several reviews and short essays on narrative structure, origins of the Melusine story and Gothic elements in Gillian Polack’s The Time of the Ghosts (2015), but since these writings, though insightful, are undergraduate blog posts, they do not suffice to fill the lacuna in scholarship with regards to Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction. Other student essays arising from the “Charting the Australian Fantastic” project include work on Rivqa Rafael, though this focuses on the representation of “people with disabilities and chronic illnesses”3 rather than on Jewish influences. An example of the historical work on Vogel is a 1974 article by V. Dupont, which covers “Sir Julius Vogel and his Utopia” and which both mentions Vogel’s Jewish background and discusses his writing as a utopia and thus as speculative fiction. It describes Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 as “an utopian anticipation, the recording in the present and past tenses of events to come, 1

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looked back upon from some distant point, or rather several distant points in years to come,”4 attributing to it both feminist and imperial themes.5 Interestingly, the article mentions a Jewish character, a young woman who seems to be an atomic scientist, but while the quote from Vogel’s work actually draws a connection between the scientist and “a Chaldean inscription of great antiquity,”6 Vogel’s Jewish background is not addressed in great detail, except for a rather unsavory speculation that he was suffering from “some social and racial complex.”7 The lack of a more thorough discussion of Vogel as a Jewish speculative fiction writer as well as the study’s age aptly demonstrate that, despite the existing scholarship and the new attention garnered by the Dusseldorf project, there is, as yet, no comprehensive study of Australian and New Zealand Jewish speculative fiction over the modern history of the two countries. Thus, this chapter aims to be a first step in that direction by providing an overview and hopefully sparking interest in more in-depth studies. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO JEWISH ANTIPODEAN HISTORY Before we delve deeper into a discussion of the literature, a brief outline of some of the more relevant aspects of Jewish Australian history and, to a lesser extent, Jewish New Zealand history8 will help explain how Jewish Antipodean speculative fiction links into Antipodean history and possibly give some explanations for the strange path Jewish speculative fiction has taken in this region. The very first record of Jews in Australia was in 1788, when Jewish prisoners comprised approximately 1 percent of the convicts on the First Fleet. The existence of Jewish convicts there means that Australian Jewish history is integral to modern colonial history. While there has been antisemitism in Australia and non-British Jews have been affected by White Australia policies and by restrictions on migration to Australia, Jews with British and Australian citizenship have been accorded equal civil rights. This might explain why, initially, Jewish Australia was strongly English culturally. The earliest Jewish worship was English in nature, following the Modern Orthodox norms of Great Britain. For well over a century, this was the dominant cultural practice in Jewish Australia, and shall be referred to as “Anglo-Australian Judaism,” for convenience. Jewish practice has, more recently, become more varied in nature, and the legacy of Great Britain is fading. The Jewish population in New South Wales began with the First Fleet, in 1788, with recorded Jewish free settlers from 1830 in Sydney. The first Jews

Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand

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specifically to live in Queensland were recorded about the time it separated from New South Wales (1859), which was after transportation had ceased: that is, they would have been free settlers or have arrived elsewhere. The first Jews to live in the area near Melbourne were part of a failed settlement in 1803 in what is now the seaside town of Sorrento. Tasmania has had a Jewish population since 1804, though initially mainly convicts. In South Australia, the first Jewish settler is thought to be John Levey, who arrived in 1836; however, a Montefiore was part of the early colonization plans, prior to that. South Australian Jews were also the first known Jews in the Northern Territory, as South Australia governed the Northern Territory at that point. In Western Australia, the first identifiably Jewish free settlers arrived in Swan River (now Perth) from 1828. The group that settled in Melbourne in the 1830s also included several Jews. The 1840s is when the first formal Jewish communities, synagogues and newspapers were documented by historians. In all cases, the numbers were small until after World War II. The first Jews who were a noticeable and important part of the colony were in New South Wales and New Zealand. In New South Wales, Esther Abrahams, who later married George Johnson, managed Johnson’s affairs when he was court-martialed in the UK for deposing Governor Bligh (the same Bligh who earlier had faced mutiny on HMS Bounty). Joel Samuel Polack was a notable Jewish writer, particularly well-known for his books about New Zealand and the Pacific islands. He was contemporaneous with an escaped convict recaptured in Van Diemen’s Land and then re-sent there after re-trial, who is more known for writing that features him than for his own writing. Isaac “Ikey” Solomon (1787?–1850) was the model for Fagin in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. Each of these three held very close ties with the United Kingdom, which remained an important part of Australian history even after Federation, and played a strong role in Australia’s literary development. These ties have affected some of Australia’s and New Zealand’s science fiction, but not all. From early on in the history of both colonies, then, Jewish people played notable roles. This did not translate immediately into the writing of fiction, even though the potential for speculative fiction was certainly present. To detour for a moment, in science fictional terms, alternate histories have had much scope for much larger Jewish populations in Australia from the nineteenth century. Both Tasmania and the Northern Territory were considered as potential places for a Jewish homeland9 (and the Kimberleys10 added to the Northern Territory as a possibility in the twentieth) and one of the popular themes in Australian science fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was lost lands. Meanwhile, British Jewish authors such as Benjamin Disraeli were writing Jewish alternate history. In the nineteenth century, the Australian colonies were part of British book export trade,

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which means that such works would most likely have been available. The potential influence of Benjamin Disraeli and his counterparts on Australian and New Zealand speculative fiction in the nineteenth century has not been fully explored. Early Australian Jewish literature ran parallel with Jewish production in other arts. Jewish artists included Barnett Levey, who opened the first commercial theatre in 1827. George Isaacs (writer) and Isaac Nathan (composer) played significant roles prior to independence, as did Polack, in New Zealand. Politically, with Federation in 1901, there were four Jewish members in the Australian Parliament, one of whom (Sir Isaac Isaacs) later became Attorney-General then Governor-General. Isaacs was the first Australian-born Governor-General. This number of Jewish Members of Parliament was not repeated at Federal level until over a hundred years later. This reflects cultural changes in Australia, with restrictions placed on Jewish migrants by various governments and especially on Jewish refugees. These cultural changes are complex, but most certainly linked to the White Australia Policy. Australian Jews were active in the military during both world wars, and also in handling increased amounts of local antisemitism during World War II. Soon after World War II, Australia changed its immigration policies. While the numbers of Jewish immigrants were not large compared with the overall numbers of migrants in the 1940s and 1950s, they comprised the highest number per capita of Shoah survivors outside Israel. This resulted in another significant cultural change in Jewish Australia. By the twenty-first century, Anglo-Australian Jews were the minority and the public voice became strongly Ashkenazi Jewish. In 2006, the first Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival was held, and it strongly reflected the voices of Shoah survivors. The privileging of Shoah in the publication of Australian Jewish narratives and in studies of Australian Jewish writing raises questions about the nature of other Jewish stories, as has been discussed in scholarship on hope and despair in Gillian Polack’s The Time of the Ghosts (2015), which culminated in a talk at Finncon 2022. While there have been scholarly studies on the Holocaust in fantasy and science fiction, they have not focused on Australian or New Zealand speculative fiction. In fact, Elisa Morera de la Vall claims that “if literature reflects reality, it is undeniable that Australian Jewish literature cannot but reflect tragic realities.”11 This double insistence on a “reflection of reality,” which in many scholars’ views still exclude speculative fiction, and on tragedy may be the reason why Jewish Australian speculative fiction is not visible in academic writing yet or, indeed, why there are so few writers who may fall under that label. While there are many intriguing reasons for the small number of Australian Jewish writers who write speculative fiction (for example that Australian Jews might lack confidence compared with their US counterparts

Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand

5

or might be silenced or even hidden), these questions have not been examined in relation to Australian Jewish writing. Until Australia and New Zealand were established as autonomous countries, New Zealand was governed from New South Wales and writers with links to New Zealand are often described as Australian. New Zealand literary history nevertheless describes its literature as separate and, in terms of speculative fiction, began with shared regional folklore collections. Currently, there is only one known New Zealand Jewish science fiction writer who worked in the nineteenth century, Sir Julius Vogel. The most notable speculative fiction novel with a link to New Zealand from this time is probably Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), as Butler lived on the South Island of New Zealand for five years. Significant elements at this time in the Antipodes include the Australian Gothic and also exploration/adventure novels strongly derived from writers such as H. Rider Haggard, but using Australian and regional locations and recent exploration. John Lang was the first known writer of speculative fiction in either country. While he had Jewish ancestry, he was not, himself, a practicing Jew. The third John Lang (1816–1864) (not to be confused with nonfiction author John Dunmore Lang or the brother of Andrew Lang) was born in Sydney and was descended from John Harris (1759–1803?). Harris was among the Jewish convicts in the First Fleet and set up the first police force in the colony of New South Wales. John Lang himself was sent to Cambridge in 1837 but left due to his “Botany Bay” manners. Thanks to a single ghost story, he is often credited as writing the first published Australian speculative fiction short work. His story competes with an earlier version of “Fisher’s Ghost” for this status. Lang also adapted Gulliver’s Travels for children. His work is plentiful, though as yet not analyzed as a whole, and it is not unlikely that there is additional science fiction or fantasy in its midst. The stories fit very nicely with British work of the time and have no apparent Jewish aspects. The second writer is inarguable and not much later. He has no direct link, however, either with convicts or with the colony of New South Wales. George Isaacs (1825–1876) wrote South Australia’s first published novel The Queen of the South, about the Victorian gold fields. He also wrote the Burlesque of Frankenstein, Australia’s first published full-length work of speculative fiction, first performed (online) in 2022, by Critical Mass, a science fiction group based in Adelaide. This play uses the Frankenstein novel as a vehicle for a comic play on the relationship between science, politics and religion. As a burlesque, it contains neither significant intellectual insights, nor any significant Jewish content, but it should still be more widely recognized that the very first full-length work of speculative fiction was by a Jewish writer. Thus, even if Jewish Australian speculative fiction writing is little and rare, it

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has still been integral to the broader field from the very beginning and should receive more critical attention. There is just one widely known Jewish writer from New Zealand from this time: Sir Julius Vogel (1835–1899). He is best-known for his work as an administrator and, most notably, as Premier of New Zealand. He is also known for his 1889 novel Anno Domini 2000, or, Women’s Destiny, and the New Zealand speculative fiction awards are named after him. Given that Australia was not an independent country in the nineteenth century and that much of Australian publishing was British based until quite late in the twentieth century, it is quite likely that some Jewish writers regarded as British might actually equally be regarded as Australian. One such nineteenth-century Jewish writer produced a small amount of speculative fiction (given his large corpus, a very small amount), including the novel The Last Tenant (c. 1893). Benjamin Farjeon (1838–1903) is more known, however, as a British writer. His daughter, Eleanor Farjeon is far better known as a writer of fantasy novels. However, Eleanor Farjeon not only lacked the links to Australia, she also converted to Catholicism. From the late twentieth century the amount of speculative fiction written in Australia increased dramatically and so did its international reach. Very little of this, however, is identifiable as written by Jewish writers and, of those small number, even fewer have Jewish themes. Of those writers identified as twenty-first century-writers at least two (Jack Dann and Gillian Polack) were published first in the late twentieth century. There may be more Jewish writers from this time, but in the field of speculative fiction, they are not visible. It is also possible that some of their work was not considered speculative fiction just as, more recently, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) is currently included on lists of literary novels by Indigenous Australian writers and not on those of science fiction or fantasy. One example of a literary writer who is of Jewish ancestry (though not practicing) and could be considered a speculative fiction writer is Mireille Juchau, whose The World Without Us (2015) is considered climate fiction and features “an idyllic Australian landscape, now polluted by the chemical emissions of a gas mining company,”12 which is speculative in the sense that it has not happened yet, however plausible it might be, and which is almost Gothic in its portrayal of “monstrous creatures such as a double-headed fish appear in the waters, clear-cut logging turns once verdant areas into deserts, the air itself appears to become poisonous.”13 Additionally, “the novel poses the question of if and to what extent the imitation of bee life in the human world can be a feasible alternative to contemporary social, economic and climatological problems,” touching on both utopian and dystopian themes.14 Juchau also serves as an example of a writer of Jewish heritage who publicly admits to this heritage, but who is not necessarily a practicing Jew.

Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand

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Another “literary” book, written as an imaginative and slightly fabulous reconstruction of the final days of the Jews of Bialystock (Arnold Zable, Jewels and Ashes, 1993) and therefore potentially a speculative fiction novel, is one of the best known of the Shoah-related near-novels of late twentieth-century Australia and yet it has never been discussed in studies of fantasy as a work of fable. It is generally thought of as a literary study of the loss of family. If the same classification process had been used for US novels, then Jane Yolen’s 1992 novel Briar Rose would have been treated as literary and not as speculative fiction. This suggests that classification may well have affected how books written by Jewish Australian writers are considered and thus which are visible to speculative fiction critics and readers. These are some of the reasons why it is difficult to be certain just how many Jewish writers of speculative fiction there are in the region, and even harder to determine how their Jewish background has influenced their work, but the following discussions will show why more attention should be paid to the cultural specifics of Jewish Australian speculative fiction. The impact of Jewish Australian writers on the world of science fiction and fantasy is currently only measurable by individual influences. Part of this is because of the boundaries that have, until recently, restricted what fiction is published on Jewish themes. The exception to this is the work of Jack Dann. He has been a part of how science fiction presents Judaism since he edited Wandering Stars (1974), likely the most important and well-known volume on the subject. This influence is directly due to his role in US writing, however, and has been imported into Australia by his relocation. CURRENT SITUATION OF JEWISH AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE FICTION Several known Jewish writers of speculative fiction do not use their background in their work, although now that the subject has been raised publicly (for example, at science fiction conventions), several are writing with this in mind (for example, Sue Bursztynski, personal communications). Until new work is published that demonstrates this change, it has to be said that most Jewish Australian and New Zealander writers write work that is not speculative fiction. Within the Jewish communities, biographical and historical work tend to be given more attention, and within the writing communities, work for children, literary fiction and detective/mysteries receive more attention. This attention (and the related income) is the most likely reason for most Jewish writing in the region falling outside the sphere of speculative fiction.

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Those who write speculative fiction, for the most part, do not bring their own background into it, or do not publicly describe themselves as Jewish. This latter statement cannot be supported with evidence that does not break the privacy of the writers, however; Gillian Polack explains: When I speak before a large audience, I often have Australian (so far no New Zealander) writers coming up to me afterwards and admitting they are Jewish and asking, “But don’t tell anyone.” Some give the reason as personal safety, while others give no reason at all. Others identify with Judaism because of Jewish parents and grandparents but are not halachically Jewish and do not wish to claim Jewishness.15

There is no way of quantifying, then, how many writers are privately Jewish. Furthermore, this summary applies only to short stories, novellas, and novels. Easily the most well-known New Zealander who writes speculative fiction and who identifies publicly as “Polynesian Jewish” is Taika Waititi. If the film JoJo Rabbit can be considered speculative fiction (along similar lines to Zable’s Jewels and Ashes), then Waititi does indeed use his Jewish background in speculative fiction. Another creator who works outside the written work is Yoram Gross, who adapted Ethel Pedley’s 1899 novel Dot and the Kangaroo and also directed the sequel Dot in Space, which can be read as a metaphorical rejection of fascism. He is also known for the Blinky Bill series, which, as a story about talking animals, could also be seen as speculative fiction, adapted from Dorothy Wall’s series of children’s books. Despite their non-Jewish source texts, Gross’s animated works can be considered Jewish Australian speculative fiction in particular since he “incorporates his experiences of escaping capture into animated films and television cartoons about youngsters separated from their parents and surviving in hostile environments with the help of compassionate animals or people.”16 However, this chapter mainly focuses on novels and short stories so these two creators are examples rather than a complete list. There are, for example, multiple co-productions in the areas of film, comics, puppet shows, etc., in which Australian creatives, some of whom might be Jewish, have been actively involved. In a region where many Jews do not publicly identify and that is home to many Survivor families, it is impossible to estimate the number of Jewish writers who maintain privacy about their background. Rather than debating further how many writers we cannot identify, the final part of this chapter will therefore be a list (and some discussion) of known Australian or New Zealander Jewish speculative fiction writers. This list is, of necessity, conservative. Only writers who identify publicly as Jewish or who have been identified through lists of Jewish writers shared by the Jewish community17 are included.

Jewish Speculative Fiction in Australia and New Zealand

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The pattern of publishing novels and short stories written by Jews and using their own background is clear in Australia. A writer is far more likely to get a novel published if they write a novel that handles the Shoah, something that’s humorous, something that looks at Ultra-Orthodox, or something that exoticizes Jews and does so as historical fiction. Jewish Australia is permitted to hurt, to be in the past, to be exotic. This means that much potential Jewish fiction that does not follow these paths is unpublishable or not reviewed positively. Publishers often avoid these works as hard to sell, and regional Jewish communities have demonstrated little historical interest in speculative fiction. This further reduces the capacity of Jewish writers to sell their work or to maintain a career using their own background to write fiction. In fact, the most common background used in recent Australian Jewish works is fantasy Viking narratives, which are very popular, as can be seen through the success of Sara Douglass’s BattleAxe series. In contrast with the few well-known Jewish writers, many other writers publish just a few stories over their career and do not reach public visibility. One example is Melbourne writer Suzie Eisfelder, whose two speculative fiction short stories were published in a university magazine. She has a prominent role in the Melbourne Jewish community, and she is active in the local science fiction world. Still, her writing is not widely known, which clearly demonstrates how difficult it is for Jewish Australian writers to be visible. In addition to those “invisible” writers, there are a number of publicly recognized Jewish Australian speculative fiction authors who are not known for using Jewish material. Goldie Alexander (1936–2020), for example, was mostly known for her children’s books, her use of historical subjects as themes, and her speculative rewritings of Shakespearean material. Anna Ciddor (1957–) wrote a Viking Magic Series. Her other books include The Prisoner of Quentaris (2006) and The Boy Who Stepped Through Time (2021). Like Goldie Alexander, her work is mostly for children, and the fantastic in it is generally linked to historical themes. Sue Bursztynski also mainly writes for children. Her work includes science-based stories and history-based stories. Her novel, Wolfborn (2010) is an Early Middle Ages young adult fantasy. Nicki Greenberg (1974–) is known for comic art and visual stories often with a fantasy twist, for young children. The noticeable predominance of children’s speculative fiction by the aforementioned writers is undoubtedly also a sign of a more general prejudice toward speculative fiction writing that associates it with “childish” themes and refuses to take speculative writing seriously, which also explains why authors may find it difficult to get published, especially if their content is outside of the usual range of speculative fiction, as speculative works that include Jewish elements and cultural allusions certainly would be.

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Because of all of this, it is difficult to find specifically Jewish speculative fiction in either Australia or New Zealand, and the work that exists is very recent indeed. The first clearly Jewish Australian fantasy novel, Gillian Polack’s The Wizardry of Jewish Women, which explicitly uses Australian Jewish culture, was not published until 2016. It was not celebrated within the Jewish community until several years later and was not given much notice in Jewish publications and review sites. The Australian Jewish News (the most-read Jewish newspaper) had not made any reference to it, not even when it was short-listed for the 2017 Ditmar, the award voted on by speculative fiction fans. The novel was written in order to redress the relative dearth in Jewish Australian #own voices novels, as the author explains in a recent blog post: I wanted a Jewish Australian #ownvoices novel. There are so many options for Jewish Australian #ownvoices, so I chose one very precise family and had a lot of fun exploring them. I was also reacting to the invisibility of Jewish Australian culture and the misuse of the Jewish fantastic.18

Polack continues to contribute to the Jewish Australian speculative fiction field. Her novel, The Time of the Ghosts (2015), actually predates The Wizardry of Jewish Women and has, in fact, been re-published as volume one of the so-called Enchanted Australia series, which also includes The Wizardry of Jewish Women as volume two and The Art of Effective Dreaming as volume three. The novels are, however, not thematically connected and the publication as a trilogy is likely due to an effort by the publishers to appeal to the expectations of fantasy readers, who are used to trilogies as one of the most popular fantasy formats. The Time of the Ghosts contains, perhaps, fewer Jewish elements and is not as close to Polack’s own experience of Jewish Australian culture as The Wizardry of Jewish Women, given that Polack’s “family arrived in Australia between 1858 and 1918”19 and Melusine, The Time of the Ghost’s central Jewish character, only comes to Australia in 1967 while looking for a place that “held no ghosts”20—only to be sorely disappointed as the title of the novel already indicates. Nonetheless, the novel is undoubtedly inflected by Polack’s Jewish background and can therefore be considered a piece of Jewish Australian speculative fiction. While The Time of the Ghosts not only references the Holocaust, but also other incidents of antisemitic persecution experienced by Melusine during her long life, the focus is not, as Morera de la Vall would have it, on “tragic realities.” Instead, storytelling itself is the focus, which is indicated by the subversion of linear storytelling that occurs through the various “Tales of the Melusine” that are interspersed throughout the novel:

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This is the first in a series of attempts at impossible tales. Full of truths and untruths. Melusine’s stories, written down by her in a series of fits of pique or misery. She wrote this tale last. Or maybe first.21

As the page number indicates, this is far from the first of Melusine’s tales to be featured in the novel, and the same section also makes a humorous distinction between fairy tales as most readers would know them and “the tale of a fairy,”22 which can prove to be “very difficult when the fairy refuses to keep to form.”23 Aside from the many references to Jewish diasporic history, this fascination with speculative storytelling itself can also be seen as an indication of the novel’s “Jewishness,” as Polack herself explains that she writes speculative fiction “because I’m Jewish. It’s the way we were told stories. Fables weren’t separate”24 and fables also seem to be how Polack narrates Jewish history. Like The Time of the Ghosts, Poison and Light (2020) and Langue[dot]doc 1305 (2014) include appropriate elements of Jewish history and culture. In Poison and Light, Jewish characters have a different response to the re-invention of the eighteenth century on New Ceres, while Langue[dot]doc 1305 has a minor character whose experience of Judaism is of a kind that is seldom covered in fiction. Additionally, some of Polack’s stories make use of alternate history; The Green Children Help Out (2021), stories in Mountains of the Mind, (2019) and “Why The Bridge Builders of York Pay No Taxes” (published in Other Covenants, 2022), for example, are all set in an alternate universe where England has a significantly higher number of Jews. Polack also “intentionally uses [her] Anglo-Australian Jewishness in [her] fiction, whether directly in The Wizardry of Jewish Women, or indirectly, for example as satire in Poison and Light,”25 which causes some differences between her writing and that of the other writers discussed here—Dann, Rafael, and Franks. The latter three all reflect the post-war Australian Jewish community because their families were not in Australia prior to that. Despite this, Franks and Polack in particular partly express their Jewish background in similar ways—through satiric commentary on suburban life. Of course, there are also several other contemporary Jewish Australian writers who use Jewish themes or stories in some of their work, like Anna Tambour, whose Bronx-set “Wiseman’s Terror Tales” appears in the 2015 anthology Jews Versus Zombies. Still, Jack Dann (1945–) is the most notable of these authors. The Jewish themes in his work reflect his New York background and also his continuing response to the Holocaust. His work, overall, reflects his US background and seldom reflects his life in Australia, where he moved in 1994. His most discussed Jewish story is “Jumping the Road,” which explores the question of whether aliens can be Jewish. He is most known for introducing (mainly) US Jewish writers in the first Jewish

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speculative fiction anthologies Wandering Stars (1974) and More Wandering Stars (1981). An extensive list of his writing with Jewish content, albeit but a small proportion of his work, can be found on a list of Jewish Australian speculative fiction on Gillian Polack’s blog.26 The short story collection Concentration (2016), which was published long after Dann’s move to Australia, arguably comes closest to the Holocaust theme expected of Jewish Australian fiction by scholars such as Elisa Morera de la Vall. In contrast with Polack, Dann does not use alternate history in its usual sense, but rather depicts the Holocaust through various lenses of time travel or the fantastic by portraying time that has shattered in stories such as “Timetipping” or “Camps” or introducing fantastic beings such as vampires into the horrifyingly real setting of a concentration camp in “Down Among the Dead Men,” which Marleen S. Barr describes as “immediately fantastic”27 in her introduction to Dann’s collection. As Barr adds, “Dann plays with time to enable Auschwitz and its particular demarcated temporal horror to fuse with the present—and the future.”28 Jason Franks is a Melbourne writer, originally from South Africa, who has frequently juggled multiple identities and only came to think of himself as an Australian writer when he lived in the United States.29 During a panel discussion with Jack Dann, Rivqa Rafael, and Gillian Polack, he spoke about the lack of explicit Jewishness in some of his previous writing, while also remarking that his self-perception as a Jewish Australian writer has become more pronounced as a counterreaction to a rise in antisemitism in Australia and around the world.30 Most of Franks’s work is at the very dark end of fantasy. His two-volume satirical graphic novel and a third volume of short stories portray the eponymous Sixsmiths (a Satan-worshipping suburban family) and draw on the experience of being Jewish in Melbourne. The Jewishness of the stories is implied, and the tone is satirical. In nature, the story reflects family life as a member of a little-understood minority religion and has resonance for anyone from suburban Australia. One of the major issues addressed is the lack of acknowledgment that Christianity is the culturally dominant religion in Australia, so several sequences in The Sixsmiths highlight Jewish issues in addressing a casual Christian cultural overlay. In this respect, his work is very Australian and also very Jewish—it is the lightness of his approach that marries the two together. The Sixsmiths is a rare work that is specifically Jewish Australian and also speculative in that the Sixsmiths’s satanism functions as a complete stand-in experience of followers of a marginalized religion, while bearing little to no resemblance to actual Satanism and playing with well-known stereotypes instead. Readers will have no issue recognizing, for

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example, that the children’s names, Jezabelle, Lilith, and Cain, are outside of the culturally expected norms. This becomes especially clear when Lilith’s new teacher shortens her name to the more accepted “Lily” or when Lilith renders the supposed meaning of her name as “slut-mother of demons,” only to be faced by the shocked-looking faces of her classmates in front of an entirely black panel.31 Franks and his illustrator for the first volume, J. Marc Schmidt, also make full use of the graphic novel’s affordances and play with the readers’ preconceived notions about suburban Satanism: A panel at the bottom of a page shows the two younger Sixsmiths children, Lilith and Cain, looking bored while a lone speech bubble proclaims, “Bring forth the child!” in bolded letters, prompting readers to expect a literal child sacrifice. The following pages keep up this illusion by only showing the “body” of the child covered by a blanket and indicating the sacrifice itself through the image of a seemingly bloody dagger in front of the congregation. The pretense is kept up for another page before the “child” is subversively shown to be rather bread-like in appearance and eventually revealed to be “sort of like a jam donut.”32 Franks’s other work is very dark fantasy novellas and novels and graphic novels. If they express his Jewish background, it is through the questioning of accepted tropes and a conscious undermining of acceptance of a hero being good. Rivqa Rafael is a Sydney short story writer, brought up in the Melbourne Chabad community, but born in Israel. She consistently incorporates Jewish folktales and Yiddish culture, translated into modern settings. Her awareness of gender roles and the way she questions traditional use of gender in speculative fiction equates more with the work of other gender-aware speculative fiction writers than with Australian Jewish writing specifically. As with Jack Dann, a list of Rafael’s works with Jewish themes can be found on Polack’s curated list.33 They currently consist of short stories that have been described as both “unabashedly Jewish” and “unabashedly queer.”34 The short story “Whom My Soul Loves,” for example, follows queer Jewish woman Osnat, who is about to exorcise a dybbuk from Mrs Stein, a woman in her local community. As the story unfolds, the dybbuk is revealed to be the soul of a recently deceased woman called Batya, a “single lady in her fifties, back from Australia a few months”35 who had “[n]o one to sit shiva for her.”36 Osnat eventually uncovers that the reason why Batya’s spirit is drawn to Mrs Stein is Batya’s unrequited love for the other woman, and the two women share a moment of queer kinship as Batya gets ready to depart. Interestingly, Batya’s last word to Osnat is “stay,” which makes Osnat wonder “whether Batya meant stay good, or stay in Crown Heights, or something else entirely.”37 The story ends on this question, prompting readers to perhaps draw a connection to Batya’s stay in Australia, the only overt reference to

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the continent in the story. It is possible to interpret Batya’s plea to Osnat as a reminder not to seek relief from her own (queer) loneliness by giving up on her community completely and relocating to Australia; instead, Osnat may flourish more within her neighborhood, whose Anglophone name “Crown Heights” does not help to localize the setting exactly, but which is, as first indicated by the aforementioned review, “unabashedly Jewish.” In another story, “Love Thy Neighbour,” Rafael chooses the perspective of Eve, who begins the story by pondering Lilith, Adam’s first wife (and not, in fact, as Franks’s Sixsmiths would have it, the “slut-mother of demons”). Eve “was supposed to hate her,”38 but her statement—the first sentence of the short story—already indicates that this is not the case. Instead, Eve learns to make decisions of her own, challenging her creator Elohim in turn by stating that humans were made to be “able to decide”39 and she should thus be able to do more than just please Adam. Rafael succeeds in queering the relationship between Adam, Lilith, and Eve, while closely adhering to the creation story itself as she has Eve exclaim that “Lilith was my lover, too, before you split me from him. Why should she not be now?”40 The story ends on a positive note as Eve “lay on the grass between [her] lovers, staring up at the stars.”41 Bringing all of this together, there are, historically, not many Jewish writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror in Australia and New Zealand. Some of the writers are, however, important, and have meaningful stories to tell, as the brief interpretations in this chapter have shown. Their work does not fall neatly into categories or lean heavily on the work of other writers, even though this is a pattern in other speculative fiction from the region. Given all of this and the potential for new and different studies based on the high level of individual expression and the low level of cultural conformity in Australian and New Zealand Jewish writers, it is quite possible that really interesting studies of the genre in the region may yet emerge, even as more authors enter the field. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baron, Lawrence. “Jews, Kangaroos, and Koalas: The Animated Holocaust Films of Yoram Gross.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 32, no. 2 (2013): 60. Barr, Marleen S. “Introduction; Playing with Time /Redux).” In Concentration. Hornsea: PS Publishing, 2016, xiv. Burger, Bettina, and Lucas Mattila. “About Us.” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, n.d., blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratures/about-us. Charalambous, Theodora. “‘Two Somebodies Go Hunting’—Apocalyptic Australia and Disability Representation,” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, January 25,

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2022, blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratures/2022/01/25/two-somebodies-go-hu nting-apocalyptic-australia-and-disability-representation. Dann, Jack, Jason Franks, Gillian Polack, and Rivqa Rafael. “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Authors in Conversation.” YouTube, uploaded by Charting Australian Speculative TLE, chaired by Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila, edited by Lucas Mattila, March 12, 2022. youtu.be/33yn8fS4t1I. Dupont, V. “Sir Julius Vogel and His Utopia: ‘Anno Domini 2000 or Woman’s Destiny.’” Commonwealth (Dijon), vol. 1, 1974, 149–170. Franks, Jason, The Sixsmiths. Livonia: Caliber Comics, 2015. Frazer, Ryan, “How the Kimberley Nearly Became the Jewish Homeland.” Australian Geographic, September 27, 2017. www​.australiangeographic​.com​.au​/topics​/ history​-culture​/2018​/09​/how​-the​-kimberley​-nearly​-became​-the​-jewish​-homeland. Goldman, Lazarus Morris. The History of the Jews in New Zealand. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1958. Levi, John Simon, and J. Bergman. Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers 1788–1850. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Lite Reads. “Lite Reads Review: ‘Whom My Soul Loves’ by Rivqa Rafael.” The Feminist Bibliothecary, April 12, 2021. thefeministbibliothecary.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/lite-reads-review-whom-my-soul-loves-by-rivqa-rafael. Manguel, Alberto. “The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau Review–An Intelligent Portrait of a Crumbling Family.” The Guardian, January 16, 2016. www​ .theguardian​.com​/books​/2016​/jan​/16​/world​-without​-us​-mireille​-juchau​-review​ -portrait​-crumbling​-family. Morera de la Vall, Elisa. “Jewish Literature in Australia.” In Anglophone Jewish Literature, edited by Axel Stähler, 174–185. Melbourne: Routledge, 2007. Osman, Sevgi. “Australian Jewish Speculative Fiction Writers Using Jewish Material,” Gillian Polack’s Blog, May 17, 2017. gillianpolack.com/australianjewish-speculative-fiction-writers-using-jewish-material. ———. “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Event.” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, January 17, 2022. blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratures/2022/01/17/jewis h-australian-speculative-fiction-event. ———. “Reasons to Write #ownvoice, a Bit of Personal History.” Treehouse Writers, July 11, 2022. treehousewriters.com/wp53/2022/07/11/reasons-to-write-ownvoicea-bit-of-personal-history. ———. The Time of the Ghosts. Milton Keynes: Next Chapter, 2021. Rafael, Rivqa. “Love Thy Neighbor,” In Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic, edited by T.S. Mendola. Teaneck: Ben Yehuda Press, 2021. ———. “Whom My Soul Loves.” Strange Horizons, November 11, 2019. strangehorizons.com/fiction/whom-my-soul-loves/. Rahn, Judith. “Of Bees and Women: Femininity and Climate Change in Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us.” Genderforum, vol. 81, 2021, 64–79. Rutland, Suzanne D. The Jews in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Webberley, Helen. “A Homeland in the Southwest.” Tasmanian Geographic, April 14, 2014. tasmaniangeographic.com/a-homeland-in-the-southwest.

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NOTES 1. Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila, “About Us,” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, n.d., blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratures/about-us. 2. Sevgi Osman, “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Event,” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, January 17, 2022, blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratu res/2022/01/17/jewish-australian-speculative-fiction-event. 3. Theodora Charalambous, “‘Two Somebodies Go Hunting’—Apocalyptic Australia and Disability Representation,” Anglophone Literary Studies Blog, January 25, 2022, blogs.phil.hhu.de/anglophoneliteratures/2022/01/25/ two-somebodies-go-hunting-apocalyptic-australia-and-disability-representation. 4. V. Dupont, “Sir Julius Vogel and His Utopia: ‘Anno Domini 2000 or Woman’s Destiny,’” Commonwealth (Dijon), vol. 1, 1974, 149–170, 156. 5. Cf. Dupont, 159. 6. Vogel, qtd. in Dupont, 164. 7. Dupont, 169. 8. For an introduction to this subject, see Goldman, Levi and Bergman, and Rutland. 9. Helen Webberley, “A Homeland in the Southwest,” Tasmanian Geographic, April 14, 2014, tasmaniangeographic.com/a-homeland-in-the-southwest/, n.p. 10. Ryan Frazer, “How the Kimberley Nearly Became the Jewish Homeland,” Australian Geographic, September 27, 2017, www​.australiangeographic​.com​.au​/topics​/ history​-culture​/2018​/09​/how​-the​-kimberley​-nearly​-became​-the​-jewish​-homeland. 11. Elisa Morera de la Vall, “Jewish Literature in Australia,” in Anglophone Jewish Literature, ed. Axel Stähler, 174–185 (Melbourne: Routledge, 2007), 175. 12. Alberto Manguel, “The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau Review—An Intelligent Portrait of a Crumbling Family,” The Guardian, January 16, 2016. www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2016​/jan​/16​/world​-without​-us​-mireille​-juchau​-review​ -portrait​-crumbling​-family. 13. Manguel. 14. Judith Rahn, “Of Bees and Women: Femininity and Climate Change in Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us,” Genderforum, vol. 81, 2021, 73. 15. Gillian Polack, “Reasons to Write #ownvoice, a Bit of Personal History,” Treehouse Writers, July 11, 2022, treehousewriters.com/wp53/2022/07/11/ reasons-to-write-ownvoice-a-bit-of-personal-history/. 16. Lawrence Baron, “Jews, Kangaroos, and Koalas: The Animated Holocaust Films of Yoram Gross,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 32, no. 2 (2013): 60. 17. jewishaustralia.com/writers-jewishaustralia-database.asp. 18. Polack, “Reasons to Write #ownvoice.” 19. Polack, “Reasons to Write #ownvoice.” 20. Gillian Polack, The Time of the Ghosts (Milton Keynes: Next Chapter, 2021), 284. 21. Polack, Ghosts, 160. 22. Polack, Ghosts, 38.

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23. Polack, Ghosts, 159. 24. Jack Dann, Jason Franks, Gillian Polack, and Rivqa Rafael. “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Authors in Conversation,” YouTube, uploaded by Charting Australian Speculative TLE, chaired by Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila, ed. Lucas Mattila, March 12, 2022. youtu.be/33yn8fS4t1I, 00:14:41–00:14:53. 25. Gillian Polack, “Reasons to Write #ownvoice.” 26. Gillian Polack, “Australian Jewish Speculative Fiction Writers Using Jewish Material,” Gillian Polack’s Blog, May 17, 2017, gillianpolack.com/ australian-jewish-speculative-fiction-writers-using-jewish-material/. 27. Polack “Using Jewish Material,” xxvii. 28. Marleen S. Barr, “Introduction; Playing with Time /Redux),” in Concentration (Hornsea: PS Publishing, 2016), xiv. 29. Dann et al., “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Authors in Conversation,” 00:07:27–00:07:42. 30. Dann et al., “Jewish Australian Speculative Fiction Authors in Conversation,” 00:07:46–00:08:14. 31. Jason Franks, The Sixsmiths (Livonia: Caliber Comics, 2015). 32. Franks. 33. Gillian Polack, “Australian Jewish Speculative Fiction Writers Using Jewish Material,” Gillian Polack’s Blog, May 17, 2017, gillianpolack.com/ australian-jewish-speculative-fiction-writers-using-jewish-material. 34. Lite Reads, “Lite Reads Review: ‘Whom My Soul Loves’ by Rivqa Rafael,” The Feminist Bibliothecary, April 12, 2021, thefeministbibliothecary.wordpress. com/2021/04/12/lite-reads-review-whom-my-soul-loves-by-rivqa-rafael. 35. Rivqa Rafael, “Whom My Soul Loves,” Strange Horizons, November 11, 2019, strangehorizons.com/fiction/whom-my-soul-loves. 36. Rafael, “Whom.” 37. Rafael, “Whom.” 38. Rivqa Rafael, “Love Thy Neighbor,” in Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic, ed. T.S. Mendola (Teaneck: Ben Yehuda Press, 2021), 77. 39. Rafael, “Love,” 82. 40. Rafael, “Love,” 82. 41. Rafael, “Love,” 83.

Chapter 2

The Wandering Messiah in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Imaginary Universes Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang

Because Chilean-French writer-playwright-filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky focuses for the first time on identity politics in his last biopics (La danza de la realidad, 2013 and Poesía sin fin, 2016), his fans might be tempted to conclude that this artist usually downplays his Jewish heritage in the other genres that he masters—especially in his science fiction graphic novels. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Jodorowsky’s last two films that are based on his generational novels of the same titles do indeed give priority to his family history and include the testimony of his Ashkenazi parents’ failed attempt at assimilation into the anti-Semitic environment of 1930s Chile. Nevertheless, if we pay close attention to his major graphic novels of science fiction (not only the narrative itself but also his sources of inspiration), we can notice a tendency from the author to elaborate on his own version of Messianism. In fact, in his works of science fiction, Jodorowsky relies on his Jewish heritage not to transmit a family testimony of successive exoduses, but to explore deeper philosophical (and theological) preoccupations concerning the Messianic Time.1 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MESSIANICITY AND MESSIANISM According to Jacques Derrida, the difference between Messianicity and Messianism is comparable to the distinction that one must make between 19

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the idea of what the Law is (and how it is applied) and the human hope for absolute Justice.2 If all societies aim at reaching a state of absolute justice, they can also produce laws that can sometimes be interpreted abusively and fall far from what is precisely perceived as Justice. Similarly, what Derrida calls Messianicity3 (as opposed to Messianism) is any attempt at building a brighter future in the present time that would eventually disappoint its followers and falls prey to corruption. Hence comes the Derridean expression of “Messianic Impossibility.” For Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, the possibility of a “messianic overturning of the force of law” exists in the notion of “pure violence,” an event that can be exemplified in the proletarian general strike, “that does not have any aim, but freezes society in its entirety” and therefore brings us closer to the “Messianic Jetztzeit” (“Here and Now”), which can be compared to an end-of-History feeling.4 Although forty years separate Derrida’s academic career from Benjamin’s, both scholars conducted part of their research on interpreting their contemporary times based on the Messianic hope. Both philosophers also decided to restrict their research to the theoretical realm. According to Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah shall occur during the Jetztzeit (here and now) as opposed to the homogenous-empty time of Positivism. Derrida concurs when he insists that such an event could happen at any time.5 In the case of Chilean-French science fiction author Alejandro Jodorowsky, his experience with various types of Messianicities6 is indissociable from his historical and geographical environment. Derrida’s affirmation of Messianic Impossibility does not need to be demonstrated in the case of the Latin American experience, since such evidence is an integral part of the continent’s history. One only needs to recall Latin America’s various messianic movements that even predate the arrival of Columbus and that resulted in failures.7 Consequently, when Jodorowsky explores this theme in his works, finding a solution to this Derridean challenge becomes a major obsession. Although Jodorowsky does not seem to have read neither Benjamin nor Derrida, he seems to have had the intuition of their theories or to have reached similar conclusions to what these philosophers elaborated during their time, through different sources.8 MESSIANICITY AND JODOROWSKY’S TREATMENT OF THE FANTASTIC GENRE Before studying the Messianic figures that dominate the graphic novels of science fiction created by Jodorowsky, it is important to analyze, in priority, the cultural and historical failed Messiahs who appear in his narratives set in a Latin American environment, because these specific texts also belong

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to the fantastic genre. In Jodorowsky’s literary works on Latin America, the kinds of heroes who are associated with the idea of Messianicity find their source in Classical mythology or even in concepts inherited from Platonism. In his novel Donde mejor canta un pájaro (1992), Jodorowsky shares with his readers a fictionalized family history that begins with the expulsion of his imagined Sephardic ancestors from Spain and ends with the settlement of his Ukrainian Ashkenazi grandparents in 1920s Chile.9 The fantastic elements impregnate the entire text and are part of the environment in which each generation of the Levi-Jodorowsky10 family evolves. There is always a dybbuk (called “el Rebe”) that constantly follows, protects, and even possesses various members of the family. Pet lions who follow some of the relatives can turn white, then albino, then transparent until they become invisible. A family member even manages to mimic the animalistic characteristics of these big cats. For instance, the ancestor who becomes the master of the lions possesses the ability to retract his penis inside his body. Such “power” becomes extremely useful when he is captured by a group of North African pirates (after his expulsion from Spain) who decide to castrate him. Fortunately, they only manage to cut off his extended foreskin since his real penis is hidden inside his body.11 In this case, the reference to circumcision, one of the most famous Jewish rites, becomes a protection against an amputation. Beside these basic traditional Jewish references (the dybbuk, the rite of circumcision) found in Jodorowsky’s family saga, the dominant theme is the references to failed Messiahs. Throughout their misfortunes in Europe and later South America, Jodorowsky’s various ancestors meet different Messianic figures that seem to promise (for a while) a better world, but who eventually fail miserably. In Donde mejor canta un pájaro, Jodorowsky’s grandfather travels to various parts of Chile before settling near the copper mines. Nine months after, his partner gives birth to an androgynous baby. Immediately after this event, the exploited miners see in this newborn the incarnation of the “primordial being” described by Plato in his Banquet: someone who is perfectly man and woman at the same time.12 Because these desperate people see in the unique physical appearance of the child the characteristics of both sexes presented harmoniously, he is associated with the savior they have been awaiting.13 The desperate miners choose the androgynous baby as the mascot for their new revolution that will put an end to their misery. Such blind faith encourages them to organize a general strike that is repressed in blood. During this proletarian uprising, their mascot-savior eventually perishes. Such a Plato-inspired Messiah does not even have the opportunity to disillusion his followers. Although this episode that occurs in Jodorowsky’s cycle of generational novels coincides with the Benjaminian view of the coming of the Messiah (“here and now,” unannounced), it is, in fact, another instance of Messianicity because of its failure.

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The Juan Solo (1995–1999) cycle is a series of graphic novels by Jodorowsky that have their plot set in an unidentified Latin American country, and where fantastic beings (such as ghosts) are real and interact with the living.14 This narrative finds its sources of inspiration not only in popular science fiction global culture,15 but also in Mexican canonical literature16—and also includes a small dose of Classical mythology.17 The first half of the series tells the story of how an abandoned orphan (Juan Solo) rises within the ranks of a cartel, even though he cannot be considered entirely human because of the dog’s tail that is attached to his body. This first part of the cycle ends when the main character finds out that his older lover is actually his biological mother. The second half of the series is about Juan Solo’s redemption (after murdering his father), when he becomes the Messiah of an Indian village—thanks in part to his congenial deformity. He eventually decides to commit the ultimate sacrifice to save his adopted people. This is where readers who are familiar with Mexican literature would recognize Jodorowsky’s source of inspiration: Oficio de tinieblas (1962), a novel by Rosario Castellanos. The plot of this book is, in fact, based on actual events that occurred in Chiapas in 1867 and 1873, when the Chamulas Indians decided to literally mimic the Christian narrative of the crucifixion. Originally, this native population from Southern Mexico believed that sacrificing its own Messiah would grant the indigenous nations the same “white privileges” enjoyed by the country’s ruling class. In Jodorowsky’s version, the Messiah is partially successful. His death causes a rainfall that irrigates the arid fields. However, readers who are familiar with the original story also know that the Chamulas’ miserable lives will not change, despite the “miraculous” rainfall. These examples taken from the fantastic literature produced by Jodorowsky do not fit with Benjamin’s definition of the Messianic Time since the Messiah in this case is purely a human fabrication, whose death is even planned. According to Benjamin, the coming of the Messiah cannot happen during the “homogenous-empty-time” but during the Jetztzeit (or Now-Time).18 Despite the occurrence of failed Messiahs in his narratives that belong to the reality of Latin America, Jodorowsky’s attempts at solving the problem of Messianic Impossibility is still a constant obsession in his works of science fiction. However, if we study more carefully what this author proposes precisely when faced with the challenge of Messianicity, we can notice that his solution is more similar to a temporal environment that reminds us of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, i.e.,: the “here and now” that explicitly puts an end to History—even though Jodorowsky introduces innovations that he finds in other works of science fiction.

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MESSIANICITY, MESSIANISM, AND JODOROWSKY’S SCIENCE FICTION UNIVERSES In his narratives set in a fantastic Latin American environment, the ultimate failure of Jodorowsky’s Messianic figures are direct applications of Derrida’s concept of Messianicity. Nevertheless, in the pure science-fiction universes that he imagines, the author is successful at solving the problem of Messianic Impossibility. In fact, in the Incal universe, where the plots of most of his science fiction graphic novels take place, the characters that illustrate the concept of Messianicity often clash with a protagonist who becomes the defender of Messianism. In addition to having become an icon of science fiction, the Incal universe is also another contribution of Jodorowsky to the field that cannot escape from the initial paradigm prevalent in his fantastic literature. At first glance, the Incal universe also includes Messianic figures that are exploited to enforce a system of oppression. In this case, we are not even in the presence of a false Messiah who fails because his promises are not kept. Instead, we are introduced to a Messianic figure in form only, but not in content. In the political system that is in place in the Incal universe, for instance, the ruler’s physical appearance must fit with the description of an expected Messiah inspired by Plato’s philosophy. This Emperoratriz,19 is only a tool that is used to maintain the status quo. In fact, Janus-Jana (as she-he is called) is the product of some precise genetic manipulations. Its existence is made possible thanks to a team of scientists who want to create an individual who must be (biologically) perfectly man and woman at the same time, i.e.,: the Primordial being defined by Plato and thirteenth-century Kabbalists.20 However, this post-human creature does not even bother to propose a message of salvation. It is worth noting that in this case, the absence of any Messianic message (be it political or religious) is not a problem because the most important characteristic of Janus-Jana is the physical form that this fabricated Messiah must reveal to the public. The content of his (missing) message does not even matter. His authority simply comes from his physical appearance, and his image must match the Messianic figure that his subjects have learned to expect. It comes as no surprise that the ruling class of the known galaxy demands that the Messianic ruler comes from their ranks. Various higher castes are ready to compete to produce the “perfect androgynous being,” but it is the Imperial House that prevails. That is why the imperial couple hires the best mad scientists in the galaxy and demands that they synthetize Janus-Jana as their heir. Curiously, Jodorowsky did not initially get involved in the field of science fiction as a graphic novel author but as a filmmaker. After the early success

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of his first post-surrealist movies (La montaña sagrada, 1973; El topo, 1970), the Chilean-French director tried to raise funds in Hollywood to make a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal novel Dune (1965). Unfortunately, the project never materialized. Nevertheless, the original screenplay, along with the storyboard that artist Moëbius had drawn, were turned into the strips of The Incal graphic novel years later. One must remember that the original plot of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) already presents the problem of Messianic corruption. If we analyze the entire novels of the Dune cycle, we can notice that the initial unifying plotline for all the volumes of the series has to do with the repeated expectations and the ascendance of a Messianic figure.21 However, in Herbert’s galaxy, the principle of entropy is at full strength. As a result, the Messiah’s successors tend to corrupt his message, and a new Messianic figure must reappear at the end of each episode to put an end to human misery (or prevent it) once more. Although Jodorowsky’s Dune project dates back to the 1970s, its creator had already brought together the Derridean and Benjaminian visions of the Messianic Time in his screenplay. In the version of Dune that Jodorowsky had proposed to adapt to the big screen—contrarily to the original plot—the Fremen’s Messiah, Paul Muabdib actually dies. However, at the moment when his assassin is convinced that his time has come, all the disciples of Paul Atreides begin saying “I am Muab Dib.” Moreover, instead of conquering the rest of the known universe to subjugate other planets, the Fremen remain on Dune, and it is the planet itself that leaves its orbit and wanders throughout the galaxy to bring their Messiah’s message to other solar systems and save new worlds. In an interview he gave to Jean Annestay, Jodorowsky himself explains the change he made in Frank Herbert’s original plot: There is a Hebraic legend which says: “The Messiah will not be a man but a day: the day when all human beings shall be enlightened. Kabbalists speak about a cosmic, collective consciousness, a type of meta-universe.” And this was what the Dune project represented for me. Showing the process of how a hero becomes enlightened, then a people, then the entire planet [of Arrakis] (which, in turn, is the Messiah of the Universe since by abandoning its orbit, as a holy planet, it leaves to spread its seeds and its light to all the galaxies).22

In his own words, Jodorowsky claims that, by reading the Kabbalists, he finally understood what the coming of the Messiah really meant for him. However, he is not quoting any text in the interview he gave to Annestay. In fact, the alternate ending that he had imagined for his version of Dune rings more a bell with the Derridean and Benjaminian perspectives on the Messianic Time. The Messiah comes by surprise, and since he keeps wandering from

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one world to the next, his initial message cannot be corrupted. Messianism, in this case, is achievable. Jodorowsky also wrote for Métal Hurlant, a short-lived series where he recycles the theme of the “gypsy-planet”—at the time that Les Humanoïdes Associés Publishers were trying to revive this now defunct science fiction magazine. Echoing the script of his failed version of Dune, Jodorowsky imagines a wandering-messiah-planet/asteroid that becomes self-aware and leaves its original orbit in search of other worlds to save. At the beginning of each episode, this living traveling asteroid narrates the events that it witnesses. Each story (no more than ten pages) lets the readers discover a new planet where a local Messiah reaches enlightenment and saves his people. On every world that is being visited, the moment when the Messianic Time occurs parallels the sight of the wandering self-aware celestial body. The same author also recycles this narrative model of a traveling planet/ generation spaceship that spreads its Messianic message across the galaxy in Los tecnopadres (1998–2002), another of his graphic novel series from his Incal universe.23 With this science fiction saga, readers follow the destiny of Albino, a lower-class computer genius who rises within the ranks of an intergalactic corporation that takes advantage of its monopoly on advanced technology. After rebelling against, his masters, Albino along with his disciples/people and his family flee the known universe aboard a generation spaceship, in search of a “Promised Galaxy.” In addition to transplanting the Exodus story to a science fiction environment, Jodorowsky also introduces the theme of the Wandering Messiah in this series. Indeed, almost each planet that Albino and his family discover become enlightened and lives a Messianic time when the main character lands on its surface. In Los tecnopadres, we are not dealing with a self-aware wandering planet or asteroid, but a Wandering Messiah aboard a generation spaceship who is spreading his message across the galaxy. It is worth noting that other science fiction authors have already exploited not only the theme of the Traveling Planet/Moon/Asteroid but also of the Wandering Messiah. In the old British TV series Space 1999 (1975–1979), nuclear waste stored on the Moon’s far side explodes, knocking the Moon out of orbit and sending it, as well as the 311 inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, hurtling uncontrollably into space.24 In every episode, the crew visits a new world. In the series of graphic novels Les Êtres de Lumière (1982–1984), French writer Jean Pleyers imagines an alien civilization that carves a giant propulsion engine inside the moon that orbits its home planet.25 Such a project allows its endangered homeworld’s inhabitants to escape a supernova.26 Recently, Chinese science fiction author Cixin Liu in The Wandering Earth (2000) recycles a similar idea, but instead uses Earth (instead of its moon) as a generation-ship.27

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As for works of science fiction and fantasy that share the theme of the traveling savior, one must recall immediately the Eternal Champion collection, by British writer Michael Moorcock.28 In the various series (Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon) that Moorcock wrote, an “Eternal Champion” takes a new identity each time he begins a new cycle in a different world/dimension. It is important to remember that the author explicitly recognizes that all these heroes represent the same “Eternal Champion” throughout his different literary works. Another wandering champion who must begin his world-saving mission all over again is the main character of the animated series Captain Herlock.29 Created by Japanese writer Leiji Matsumoto, this space pirate saves Earth several times from different alien invasions. However, each one of his Messianic moments belongs to a different universe. Every time that Matsumoto begins a new cycle with Captain Herlock, the events that occur in the new universe he imagines are not related to the previous series. The case of Captain Herlock is another incarnation of the “Eternal Champion,” who travels to different realities to save humanity. This Wandering Messiah literally puts an end to history every time he finally defeats the enemies of Earth, because his adventures begin again in an alternate reality. Even though Jodorowsky was not the first science fiction writer to introduce the idea of the “Eternal Champion” or the “Wandering Messiah,” this creator takes this concept a step further when he modifies original plots that other authors had already imagined, such as Frank Herbert, Rosario Castellanos or René Daumal.30 It is in his graphic novel/film adaptations that Jodorowsky applies not only Benjamin’s perspective but also Derrida’s solution. Moreover, Benjamin’s view on the Messianic Time also includes the following: 1) any individual can become the Messiah, 2) there is no necessity to anticipate or prepare for his arrival because such an event could occur at any moment.31 In his planned (and failed) adaptation of Herbert’s Dune (1965), Jodorowsky not only incorporates Benjamin’s interpretation of Messianism, but also applies this innovation to other science fiction plots. This is particularly true when his graphic novels characters evolve in the Incal and Mudara universes. In fact, Jodorowsky transforms several of his heroes into Messiahs when he creates a new series set in the Incal universe. Every time a new Messiah appears in one of his graphic novels, the fate of this hero is directly connected to the ending found in Jodorowsky’s failed film adaptation of Herbert’s Dune (1965). This is the case of the Metabaron, who is based on the character of Duncan Idaho (a bodyguard and a super-warrior) from the Dune universe. Originally, Duncan Idaho dies and is resurrected, thanks to an advanced cloning technology. Nevertheless, he never becomes the central protagonist of a novel. The Metabaron that Jodorowsky creates, on the contrary, is the main character of two cycles of graphic novels.32 In this science fiction narratives,

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this hero becomes in fact a Wandering Messiah who saves various worlds and two universes. Every time he accomplishes one of his missions, this champion moves to another dimension to begin saving the universe again.33 With La casta de los metabarones (1992–2003), Jodorowsky recycles his initial idea that he had when he was planning to adapt Dune (1965) to the big screen. In the same way that he had modified Herbert’s original story in which Arrakis becomes a “gypsy-planet,” his Metabaron also becomes a Wandering Messiah. Chronologically, the first cycle of the Metabarons series begins when the main character returns to his space bunker after a long absence, where his faithful servant-droid is waiting for him. The entire series of graphic novels follows the life of a different generation of the Metabaron family. In the last volume, when the last Metabaron saves the universe, he witnesses the End of History.34 In 2015, Jodorowsky began a new Metabaron cycle in which the first volume begins the same way as the initial tome of the original saga, but in what seems to be a parallel universe. This ability to become the Messiah for different dimensions is confirmed in The Weapons of the Metabarons (2008), a stand-alone graphic novel that explains that at least eight universes are waiting for the Metabaron to save them. Out of all Jodorowsky’s graphic novels, the first (and most famous) hero who was assimilated to a Wandering Messiah is John Difool, the protagonist of his Incal series. In this case, this individual does not even present any intrinsic quality that would make him a good candidate to become the Messiah of the universe. He is a simple private investigator, the son of a prostitute and a scam artist. However, in every cycle where he happens to be the main character, the fate of the known universe depends on this anti-hero’s success. In the first Incal cycle, Difool is given the mission to save the galaxy from a dark entity that is trying to consume all the suns.35 At the end of the series, Difool receives the title of “Eternal Witness.”36 Once his mission is over, history ends, but this Wandering Messiah must find another parallel universe that is waiting to be saved. Every Incal series begins the same way: after waking up from a dream (without memory from his previous adventure), Difool finds out that he must save the galaxy again, but the readers also realizes that the new universe where the Wandering Messiah has landed is not exactly the same as in his previous adventure. So far, Jodorowsky has written four series of graphic novels where John Difool must save the galaxy: Las aventuras de John Difool (1983–1988); Antes del Incal (1988–1995); Después del Incal (2000), and Final Incal (2008–2014). Finally, it is worth noting that the origin of the word “Incal” is a contraction of the English phrase “in-call,” which is another reference to the idea that the Messiah can be found in any individual, according to the (unnamed) Kabbalists cited by Jodorowsky.37

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Another work of science fiction where Jodorowsky resolves the Derridean problem is Las aventuras de Aleph-Thau (1983–1998), a series of graphic novels that he began in parallel to the Incal.38 In the Mudara Universe (as this new world is called), Alef-Thau, an individual who was born without arms and legs must save an entire planet from “inexistence” (annihilation) after finding out that his entire world (including himself) is only an illusion.39 In this new narrative, the author recycles once more the theme of the Wandering Messiah. In the last volume of the series, Alef-Tau saves his world from vampires who want to suck out the vital fluid from all living creatures on his planet. Once he accomplished his mission, the main character wakes up in his apartment in Paris. We are in the presence of the perfect “Wandering Messiah” who must begin a new mission all over again. In his dream, at the first level of narration, Alef-Thau saves his people as well as his planet from space vampires that threaten their existence. At the second level of narration, he saves himself and his friends from annihilation, because they are not mere illusions anymore, but people of flesh and blood who belong to our world. With Las aventuras de Alef-Thau (1983–1998) series, Jodorowsky confirms the figure of the Wandering Messiah as a constant theme in his science fiction graphic novels. In 2009, the author began El mundo de Alef-Thau, a new cycle of graphic novels with the same character.40 The plot of this new series begins in our world (in Paris, more precisely), where Alef-Thau finds himself in a coma after an automobile accident. This new physiological and mental state that is affecting the main character is in fact a gate to a parallel universe that looks like the one he had previously saved in the first cycle of his adventures. Every time the hero makes some progresses in his attempt to save this new world that exists in another dimension, he gets a step closer to waking. For instance, in Resurrección (2009), the first volume of El mundo de Alef-Thau saga, the blind protagonist must defeat again some giant vampiric flying cats who have been sucking the vital fluid out of overfed humans. Once he manages to kill his enemies, he recovers his sight. While these events unravel in the Mudara universe, the comatose Alef-Thau who is lying in his hospital bed manages to open his eyes. If Jodorowsky manages to incorporate in his work of science fiction the idea of Messianic Impossibility that Derrida had initially theorized, he also suggests a solution to this problem by bringing together both the Derridean and Benjaminian proposals in his graphic novels. First, Jodorowsky confirms, as Benjamin had explained in his writings, that the Messiah can come by surprise, at any moment. This possibility is enhanced by another revelation originally found in Kabbalah, that any individual can become the Messiah. Second, Jodorowsky also recycles the Benjaminian precept of the Jetztzeit (the “here and now”).

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CONCLUSION If we critically analyze any narrative that belongs to the “happy end” category, we could also conclude that the Derridean idea of “Messianic Impossibility” can specifically be applied to the following cases: 1) when good triumphs over evil, 2) when a prince must reconquer his throne, 3) when the people support him and recognize in him not only a savior but a legitimate king. In literature, it makes sense for authors to end their narrative at this precise moment. There is actually a difference between what Derrida describes as “the hope for an absolute Justice” (Messianism) and the Law (Messianicity) of Man as well as its interpretations. In the second case, Justice does not always prevail. This means that all the expectations for the establishment of an absolute Justice for everyone that was initially expected with the coming of a Messiah cannot resist the corruption of time after the initial euphory of the relative triumph of good against evil. Various authors in different countries propose a solution that only science fiction can achieve: to transform the hero/Messiah into an “eternal champion” or “Wandering Messiah” who travels to other worlds or between different dimensions or multiverses once his mission is over. Alejandro Jodorowsky is the author of science fiction who has mastered this idea the best. BIBLIOGRAPHY Annestay, Jean. “Dune, le film que vous ne verrrez jamais.” Les mystères de l’Incal., 14–15. Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1994. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation and Earth. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. USA: Createspace, 2016. ———. Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938–1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Captain Herlock: The Endless Odyssey. Leiji Matsumoto. Central Park Media, 2014. Castellanos, Rosario. Oficio de tinieblas. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Cixin, Liu. The Wandering Earth. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021. Daumal, René. Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Translated by Roger Shattuck. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2019. Derrida, Jacques. “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 441–461. ———. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. New York: Routledge, 1994. Grözinger, Karl Erich. “Messianic Ideas in Jewish Mysticism.” Psychology, September 1, 1991, 93–99. Herbert, Frank. Dune. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 1990.

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———. Dune Messiah. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019. ———. God Emperor of Dune. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019. Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Antes del Incal integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1988–1995. ———. Las armas del Metabarón. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2008. ———. Las aventuras de Alef-Thau integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1983–1998. ———. La casta de los metabarones integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1992–2003. ———. La danza de la realidad. Barcelona: Ediciones Siruela, 2004. ———. Donde mejor canta un pájaro. Barcelona: Ediciones Siruela, 1992. ———. Después del Incal integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2000–2014. ———. “Eucharist Sun.” Métal Hurlant #3, 27–37. Paris: Humanoids Publishing, 1974. ———. Final Incal integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2008–2014. ———. El Incal integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1983–1988. ———. “The Invasion.” Métal Hurlant #2, 13–23. Paris: Humanoids Publishing, 1974. ———. Juan Solo integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1995–1999. ———. Metabarón integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2015–2020. ———. El mundo de Alef-Thau integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2009–2016. ———. El niño del jueves negro. Barcelona: Ediciones Siruela, 1999. ———. Los tecnopadres integral. Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1998–2002. Jodorowsky, Alejandro, dir. La danza de la realidad. Abdkco Films, 2013. ———. La montaña sagrada. Abdkco Films, 1973. ———. Poesía sin fin. Abdkco Films, 2016. ———El Topo. Abdkco films, 1970. Moorcock, Michael. The Eternal Champion. London: Titan, 2014. Petersen Adams, Jill. “Mourning, the Messianic, and the Specter: Derrida’s Appropriation of Benjamin in ‘Specters of Marx.’” Philosophy Today 51, Supplement (2007): 140–147. Plato. The Banquet of Plato. Miami: HardPress Publishing, 2013. Pleyers, Jean. Les Êtres de Lumière, Tome 1: L’Exode. Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1982. Rosàs Tosa, Mar. “Exploración de la noción de mesianicidad sin mesianismo de Jacques Derrida y sus posiciones eticopolíticas.” PhD diss., University Pompeu Fabra, 2011. Scalzi, John. The Collapsing Empire. New York: Tor, 2019. Space 1999: The Complete Series. Directed by Charles Crichton. Shout! Factory, 2019. Ware, Owen. “Dialectic of the Past / Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism.” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2. (April 2004): 99–114.

NOTES 1. “Benjamin’s messianic time, like Derrida’s disjointed time, does more than merely disrupt linear time; it keeps the present structurally open to both the past

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and the future,” Jill Petersen Adams, “Mourning, the Messianic, and the Specter: Derrida’s Appropriation of Benjamin in ‘Specters of Marx,’” Philosophy Today 51, Supplement (2007): 140. 2. In “Dialectic of the Past / Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism,” Owen Ware reformulates Derrida’s analogy in the following way: Whenever we determine the content of justice . . . we obtain law instead. Law is always algebraic, centered on an economy of rules, restitution, divestiture, appropriation, and all the totalizing norms of representation that rest on self-presence. Law seeks to reify the relation to the other in a fixed determination of codes and protocols that strip the other of its singularity and uniqueness. Justice, on the other hand, is impossible, not in a negative sense, but in the sense that it can never have self-presence.

Owen Ware, “Dialectic of the Past / Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism.” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (April 2004): 107. According to Mar Rosàs Tosa in “Exploración de la noción de mesianicidad sin mesianismo de Jacques Derrida y sus posiciones eticopolíticas” (PhD diss., University Pompeu Fabra, 2011) another analogy can be found in the field of semiotics, in which “Messianicity” would the equivalent of the Signifier and “Messianism” could be associated with the Signified (264).

3. In Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), Derrida writes: The effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event, and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.” (35).

4. Such description rings a bell with the Kabbalist ideal of devekut (communion with God) as some kind of social crisis. 5. “This is also the messianic: the messiah can arrive, he can come at any time, from on high, where I don’t see him coming” (Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 [Winter 2007]: 461). In addition, in Spectres de Marx (1993), Derrida also quotes directly from Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History (USA: Createspace, 2016) in a footnote. The inclusion of this well-chosen footnote makes Derrida’s view converge with Benjamin’s: The following paragraph names messianism or, more precisely, messianic without messianism, a “weak messianic power” . . . Let us quote this passage for what is consonant there, despite many differences and keeping relative proportions in mind, with what we are trying to say here about a certain messianic destitution, in a spectral logic of inheritance and generations, but a logic turned toward the future no less than the past, in a heterogeneous and disjointed time. (181)

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6. According to the Derridean definition of the term, any project of Messianicity is doomed to failure or at least disappointment. 7. We would not exaggerate if the people of Latin America were deceived by more false prophecies (religious, political, economic) based on a specific Messianicity than the United States or Europe. Already at the beginning of the Conquest, various indigenous civilizations were “betrayed” by their own myths. That was the case of the Aztecs who had initially recognized in the expedition of Cortes the return of their living god who was supposed to save them and establish an eternal Golden Age. The emancipation from the Spanish realm was again another example of a failed Messianic Time. Indeed, the ruling class that seized power during the post-independence period managed to maintain the economic and social status quo they had inherited from the colonial era. The various revolutions of the twentieth century (in Mexico and Cuba, for instance) and the twenty-first century (neoliberal reforms all over the continent) fell back into the trap of Messianicity and its disillusionment because such political projects did not keep their promise of salvation either. 8. Probably the study of Kabbalah, especially the writings of Azriel of Gerona. We shall quote this Kabbalist in more details in the section on Jodorowsky’s Incal universe. In this specific case, it is very important to distinguish Jodorowsky’s various narratives (novels, films, comic books) that incorporate fantastic elements within a Latin American environment from his works of pure science fiction. In his fantastic worlds set in the Iberian continent (his generational novels and their film adaptations, as well as Juan Solo, a work of sequential art), heroes cannot escape from the fatalistic doom that awaits the end of each messianic cycle (hope, power, disillusionment). However, in his futuristic universes (his failed film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, his Incal universe, his Mudara universe), Jodorowsky indirectly finds a solution to Derrida’s problem by imagining a new type of hero that we could call the “Wandering Messiah.” On the one hand, Jodorowsky recycles the narrative of the failed Messiah in two of his major works set in Latin America that belong to the fantastic genre: his generational novels (and films) based on his grandparents’ testimony as Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in 1920s Chile, and his graphic novel based on his experience as a filmmaker in Mexico. On the other hand, in his science fiction graphic novels, Jodorowsky proposes a resolution to Derrida’s challenge. 9. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Donde mejor canta un pájaro (Barcelona: Ediciones Siruela, 1992). 10. In Donde mejor canta un pájaro (Barcelona: Ediciones Siruela, 1992), the author’s fictionalized great-grandfather (who was originally called Alejandro Levi) buys the identity papers of a Polish official called Jodorowsky to escape from the tsarist pogroms that were prevalent in the Russian Empire at the time the family immigrated to Chile and Argentina. 11. Jodorowsky recycles his subplot in his graphic novel series Los Tecnopadres, which is set in the Incal Universe. 12. Plato, The Banquet of Plato (Miami: HardPress Publishing, 2013). 13. This idea appears at the end of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth (1986), the last volume of the Foundation saga. Thirteenth-century Kabbalist Azriel of Gerona coincides with Plato when he describes Adam as an androgyne.

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14. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Juan Solo integral (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1995–1999). 15. Not only the main character’s name (Juan Solo / Han Solo) but also his physical appearance (a white shirt, a black jacket and a black pair of pants), along with his favorite firearm (a Mauser pistol—which was the original model for Han Solo’s blaster) are obvious references to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. 16. The plot for part two of the Juan Solo cycle is based on the historical event mentioned in Rosario Castellanos’s post-revolutionary novel Oficio de tinieblas (1925). 17. The entire plot of Juan Solo is a retelling of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, set in a Latin American environment. 18. In the following quote by Benjamin, the English translation (“Now-Time”) of Jetztzeit is used: “In relation of the history of all organic life on earth,” writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty-millennia history of homo sapiens equates to something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would take up one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.” Nowtime, which, as a model messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe (396). 19. Contraction of the Spanish words “emperador” (emperor) and “emperatriz” (empress). The English translator of the series coined the neologism “emperoress.” Another recent science fiction writer, John Scalzi, author of The Collapsing Empire (New York: Tor, 2019)), has also come up with an alternate term in English: “emperox.” 20. According to Karl Erich Grözinger, the Kabbalist source that describes the Primordial Being can be found in the writing of Azriel of Gerona: The primordial state—before Adam’s sin—was the state of unity and perfection. Through Adam’s sin this unity was destroyed, and creation fell under the dominion of the contraries and oppositions. Only in the end, in the messianic age, the contraries will be dissolved and united again in absolute unity. Thus the messianic age is the restoration of the primordial state of all creation. . . . When God had created man he expected of him that he should preserve original unity by keeping his own threefold human aspects in unity, namely his human aspects of being father, mother and offspring. These three human aspects he should have kept in complete harmony. But man did not succeed to keep these three aspects in unity and fell into the dominion of the contraries—and with him all creation fell into the realm of the opposites. Creation will remain subdued to this domination of the contraries until the days of the messiah, for the messiah “will be perfect” in all these three human aspects. (“Messianic Ideas in Jewish Mysticism,” Psychology, September 1, 1991, 96–97)

21. Frank Herbert, Dune (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 1990); Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019); Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019). 22. Jean Annestay, “Dune, le film que vous ne verrrez jamais,” Les mystères de l’Incal (Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1994), 14–15.

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23. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Los tecnopadres integral (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1998–2002). 24. Jean Pleyers, Les Êtres de Lumière, Tome 1: L’Exode (Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1982). 25. Space 1999: The Complete Series, directed by Charles Crichton (Shout! Factory, 2019). 26. It is not a coincidence that the title for the first volume of this series is L’exode [Exodus], which is obviously another reference to Western civilization’s Jewish heritage. A topic that is separate from Messianism and that we chose not to cover in this essay. 27. Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021). 28. Michael Moorcock, The Eternal Champion (London: Titan, 2014). 29. Leiji Matsumoto, Captain Herlock: The Endless Odyssey (Central Park Media, 2014). 30. When adapting René Daumal’s Le mont analogue (1944) to the big screen, Jodorowsky did not need to change its ending because the original author had died before finishing writing his novel. In his 1973 post-surrealist film La montaña sagrada, the director was free to imagine his own ending. 31. “For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, 397). 32. For the first cycle, La casta de los metabarones (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1992–2003), Jodorowsky worked with artist Zoran Janjetov. For the second cycle, Metabarón (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2015–2020), the author collaborated with writer Jerry Frissen and artist Valentin Sécher. 33. If we take in consideration these multiple narratives that are an integral part of Jodorowsky’s graphic novels, it is difficult not to think of Benjamin’s concepts of the “multiple histories” versus “universal history.” Let’s not forget that in his Selected Writings (1938–1940), Benjamin associates “universal history” with the Messianic idea: The structural principle of universal history allows it to be represented in partial histories. It is, in other words, a monadological principle. It exists within salvation history. The idea of prose coincides with the messianic idea of universal history. . . . The multiplicity of histories resembles the multiplicity of languages. Universal history in the present-day sense can never be more than a kind of Esperanto. The idea of universal history is a messianic idea. The messianic world is the world of universal and integral actuality. Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist. (404–405)

34. “In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of Messianic Time. . . . Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of History. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers of the train—mainly the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (Benjamin, 401–402). 35. Las aventuras de John Difool, 1981–1989. 36. Coincidence or not, such title clearly rings a bell with Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion.”

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37. In his interview with Jean Annestay, it is probable that one of Jodorowsky’s sources (that he simply calls “the Kabbalists”) (14) might be a letter that the Baal Shem Tov wrote to his brother-in-law, Gershom Kutover. After quoting this Hasidic mystic, Karl Erich Grözinger writes: “It is not really the messiah who brings redemption but it is the mystical Hasidic doctrine by which everybody should be able to work his own unificatory acts and by doing this, bring about the redemption” (98). 38. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Las aventuras de Alef-Thau integral (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 1983–1998). 39. When imagining the Mudara Universe, Jodorowsky was obviously influenced by 1960s counter-culture Buddhism. Moreover, the author also incorporates ideas proposed by various poets from the Chilean literary movement called Creacionismo. 40. Alejandro Jodorowsky, El mundo de Alef-Thau integral (Barcelona: Norma Editorial, 2009–2016).

Chapter 3

When Jews Ruled the Volga Exploring the Novels of the Khazars Steven B. Frankel

Modern science fiction and fantasy have recently developed a tendency to create alternative stories of oppressed people where they have agency and power. Wonder Woman portrays a female society where the woman can defend themselves and have the power to intervene in the larger world but choose not to. In a similar fashion, Black Panther creates the African kingdom of Wakanda which has the military and financial power to conquer the world but chooses to remain isolated as their ethics prevent exerting their power. In this era of Own Voices stories of empowerment and secret or alternative histories where minority cultures rose to prominence, Jewish fantasy is booming, with Jewish space warriors, Nazi hunters,1 and brave warrior vampires.2 The Jews now have the Khazars as an alternate to the docile, shtetl Jew of the Middle Ages. To understand the fiction, it is useful to know something about the historical Khazars. For around three centuries from 650 to 965 CE the Khazars dominated a vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus allowing them to control major trade routes.3 The History of the Jewish Khazars by D.M. Dunlop provides a more academic view of the Khazars while The Jews of Khazaria by Kevin Alan Brook provides a view that reads like a narrative rather than a textbook. Either is a good source for anyone wanting more information. Peter Benjamin Golden’s Turks and Khazars: Origins, Institutions, and Interactions in Pre-Mongol Eurasia offers more detail on customs and daily life. The first thing to address is who the are Khazars and how did they come to be Jewish. The Khazars descended from Scythian tribes and were identified by contemporary sources as Turkic Horsemen that followed a nomadic lifestyle and believed in shamanism.4 While there are all kinds of stories 37

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relating the Khazars to lost or exiled tribes of Jews, the evidence strongly points to a deliberate decision to convert to Judaism by these warrior nomads. Why Judaism of all religions? The Khazars settled in an area bordered by the Byzantine Empire on one side and the Arab Muslims on another. “The adoption of Judaism by the Khazars was one of the most interesting events in medieval European history, and Bulan’s conversion was the beginning of an unparalleled period of greatness and splendor for the Jews of eastern Europe.”5 According to Kitab Tathbit Dala’il Nubuwwat Sayyadina Muhammad (“The Book of the Establishment of Proofs for the Prophethood of Our Master Muhammad”) written by ‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn Muhammad al-Hamdani circa 1009–1010, one Jewish missionary in particular was primarily responsible for persuading the king and his people. “For this was a man who came single-handedly to a king of great rank and to a very spirited people. And they were converted by him without [any recourse to] violence and the sword. And they took upon themselves the difficult obligations enjoined by the law of the Torah”6 Their intimate contacts with Byzantium and the Caliphate had taught the Khazars that their primitive shamanism was not only barbaric and outdated compared to the great monotheistic creeds, but also unable to confer on the leaders the spiritual and legal authority which the rulers of the two theocratic world powers, the Caliph and the Emperor, enjoyed. Yet, conversion to either creed would have meant submission, the end of independence, and thus would have defeated its purpose.7

There is a legend that King Joseph, the ruler of the Khazars summoned a representative of each of the three religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to debate why their religion was the best. According to the legend, Joseph selected Judaism because the Rabbi won the debate, or in an alternate version, because all three agreed that Judaism was valid, while the Imam and the Priest each claimed the other’s religion was false. The story of King Bulan’s conversion to Judaism was embellished by the famed Sephardic poet Yehudah ben Shmuel ha-Levi (circa 1080–1141) in his famous His Kitāb al-Ḥujja wa-l-Dalīl fī Naṣr al-Dīn al-Dhalīl (The Book of Argument and Proof in Defense of the Despised Faith), popularly known as The Book of the Khazars (Sefer ha-Kuzari in Hebrew, Kitab al-Khozari in Arabic). It explains that an angel spoke to Bulan one night while he was dreaming, and he took his people to a secret cave and there converted. As HaLevi writes:

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They brought in Jewish sages and books from different countries. learned the Torah from them. The Khazar books detail all their successes vanquishing their enemies, conquering various lands, discovering hidden treasures [or “securing great treasures,”] and amassing armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands. They also detail how the Khazars loved the Torah and yearned for the Temple— to the point where they erected a facsimile of the Tabernacle that Moses built.8

The historically accepted reason is much more prosaic, but equally interesting. Joseph wanted to retain his independence from his powerful neighbors. He had the military strength to avoid being conquered but realized if he chose Christianity, he would be accepting the authority of the Orthodox Church and be pulled into the orbit of the Byzantines. Similarly, accepting Islam would lead to becoming part of the Caliphate. “Khazar religious tolerance, noted by a number of sources, was not only typical of the pre-Islamic steppe world, but also makes good domestic political sense.”9 Judaism allowed him a religion that supported his desire to settle into a structured society while retaining his independence. Another explanation attributes the selection of Judaism to a flood of Jewish merchants moving into Khazaria when they were expelled from the Byzantine empire. Likely both are true, but which was the primary reason is not accurately known.10 The Khazarian Jews adopted Hebrew including official documents. They adopted rabbinic beliefs and eventually incorporated all the holy books into their teachings. Even after the empire fell, Khazar culture had a long legacy. Part of Kiev was founded by the Khazars in the early ninth century. They called it Sambata, a name associated with Shabbat and the mythical river Sambaton, which refused to flow on the seventh day.11 Jewish symbols on tombs, coins, and engravings last to this day. Turkish words from this time entered Yiddish as loksh (noodle), davenen (to pray), kaftan and yarmulka.12 Most of what we know about the tribe comes from what others have recorded, rather than firsthand records. This is, at least, partially due to the government of the Soviet Union finding the existence of the Khazars to not be compatible with the official history of the USSR that traces itself back to the Rus of Kiev and doesn’t prefer to credit a Jewish tribe from the Steppes as a major contributor. This is used as a plot device in The Wind of the Khazars by Marek Halter to explain why his protagonist, Marc Sofer, has such trouble tracking down their history. In Steven H. Silver’s article “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer,” he details the four main categories of Jewish science fiction, which are “Jewish in name; Jewish humor; wish fulfillment; and serious Jewish science fiction.”13 The warrior Jews of Khazaria certainly existed, but in a post-Holocaust world, it’s unsurprising that a Jewish haven filled with warriors defending one another as well as their European brethren has become a

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subgenre of Jewish fiction—all exploring the history as wish fulfillment for the present. In this tradition, The Wind of the Khazars follows Marc Sofer, a modern Robert Langdon-like academic character14 beguiled by a fetching redhead in the present as well as visions of the historic Princess Attex. His search for their hidden treasures in a lost world adventure is written in the tradition of Indiana Jones or the pulps it imitates. Adding a layer of metafiction, he tells the mysterious lady that writing “results in the magic of sharing” to share his reality with readers.15 The novel flashes between Sofer and a historical figure searching for the mythical Khazars to allow Jews to escape to a promised land. The combination allows the author to summarize historical understanding of the Khazars with a tale that meets the requirements of great historical fiction. It shows the Kingdom of the Khazars, a Jewish steppes tribe who successfully defeat the Byzantines, the Arab invasion of Europe from the Middle East and the predations of the Norse Rus who pillaged along the rivers of what would become Russia during the ninth through eleventh centuries. All this contrasts with the image of the shtetl Jews living in small farming communities and suffering repeated pogroms without offering resistance. Attex, the sister of King Joseph, appears to be based on a princess named Tzitzak who was given to the Byzantine ruler as a wife to solidify relations between the countries. Meanwhile, Joseph, the king of the Khazars when they chose Judaism, entered the historical record when he corresponded with the Umayyad Jewish courtier Hasdai b. Shaprut in the mid-tenth century. He writes that his ancestors “renewed the faith . . . built synagogues and schools of learning, and gathered the wise men of Israel.”16 There are also heavy traces of myth in the life of the king: “Turks believed that the kagans were created in heaven by Tengri, the sky god, and sent to earth to serve Tengi’s mission from the throne.”17 Moreover, the entire legend surrounding his rule, including his eventual sacrifice, fed into mythic themes, as Golden explains: The Turk ethnographic myth with its lupine ancestor, birth in a cave (the place of contact with the supernatural world), the shamanistic elements in the official investiture . . . and the bloodless murder of its rulers who have lost their magical potency, all have numerous parallels with sacred kingships in other cultures.18

“The Khazar Hebrew conversion accounts mention that the Khazar ruler Bulan drove out the ‘magicians (qosmim) and idolators.’”19 After the conversion, only a Jew was eligible to be the Khazar kagan. It’s unclear whether the sacrificial tradition continued under Jewish rule. The interspersed flashback story begins on the eve of Prince Joseph’s Bar Mitzvah. His grandfather tells him, “He who studies Torah fights with the

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minds and the hearts of a whole people behind him,” is an example of the warrior-scholar ethic.20 Still, both are warriors, with Joseph’s new manhood giving him a sword and horse and “the right to march at the head of the Khazar warriors” along with religious duties.21 Though young, he’s mighty with a scramasax. The army likewise fights perfectly, every formation indomitable, every blow striking mercilessly. When a man swims too close to the palace, the soldiers act with deadly precision: “With one fluid movement they raised their bows. Silently, majestically, the arrows flew in a perfect arc toward the drowning man. They all landed on him at the same instant. He sank with the force of the blow, swallowed forever by the muddy waters.”22 The cavalrymen turned to look at them, bending their bows. The deadly points shone in the sunlight. The men from the north shouted, waved their arms, fell to their knees and showed every sign of submission, but the arrows were already in flight. They planted themselves in the ground right in front of them, forming a perfect grille. From one end of the convoy to the other, slaves, boatmen and merchants, no one dared open his mouth.23

Joseph’s fiery sister Princess Attex falls in love with the messenger from Cordoba, Isaac ben Eliezer, though her wedding to a gentile prince of the Byzantines has been arranged to protect their people. (Indeed in history, several dynastic marriages were planned between Khazar princesses and on one occasion the governor of Armenia, but this ended in tragedy and war.)24 Her rabbi aids the pair’s escape, and Isaac goes to return the letter to Cordoba while Attex vows to wait for him in the hidden cave city. However, the Emir’s soldiers, busy fighting the Byzantines, seek the cave entrance to use the place as a stronghold. They murder everyone there, including the brave princess. Isaac, meanwhile, saves the son of the kagan and wins an audience. Though not a warrior, he displays his own desperate heroism: The explosions of fire all around them gradually decreased, but they were floating down the river more quickly than he had hoped. Isaac started swimming toward the bank, fighting to ensure that Hezekiah’s weight did not sink them both. Heart laboring, Isaac felt the river bottom beneath his boots. They had just collapsed on the riverbank, out of breath, when Hezekiah shook him so that he turned around. The Khazar archers had launched two salvoes of fire arrows at the Russian boats, tracing a line of light arcing from the river’s edge to the center of the waterway. One boat burst into flames almost immediately. The fire on the deck spread to the barrels of naphtha. Everything exploded. An enormous ball of fire dilated violently, carrying away masts, seats and rows of oarsmen, throwing them like wisps of straw into the night. The hull split open like a walnut; a

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tongue of fame so pale that it appeared white, covered the surface of the water. A second boat exploded in its turn, and night became day. Isaac murmured a prayer. The Almighty had just saved the Jewish Kingdom of the Khazars. Completely exhausted, shivering and dripping, Hezekiah turned to Isaac, smiling, and said, “Now that you have saved my life my father will have to see you and listen to you!”25

In this audience, he eloquently defends his love using the teachings of the Torah. The kagan sends a message to Cordoba, but with his kingdom under threat in all directions, doubts the messiah is coming to his land and hesitates to offer protection to other Jews, desperate as his situation is. The dreams of a Jewish homeland and refuge crumble. Back in modern times, the treasure-hunter Ephraim Yakubov tells Marc Sofer that Mountain Jews like himself have hidden in the heights of Georgia for 2000 years. Once, his father discovered an immense cave containing streets, a synagogue and a library—the Khazar civilization. After the Soviets buried this history, his family kept the knowledge secret. Yakubov reveals a coin from the place, marked with a menorah, and proposes that, in exchange for a visa, he will make Sofer the cave’s official discoverer. The coin, as investigation reveals, is marked “Bulan, King of the Khazars,” after the leader who had them all convert.26 Sofer researches the Khazars, discovering how the fortress at Sarkel was allegedly inadvertently submerged under a lake in the fifties and a few ruins of the capital, Itil, remain. No secret cave ruins are on record. He also reads about several letters written back and forth between a Khazar noble and the Jews of Cordoba. Another complication is the rise of “New Khazars” Wars are being fought in eastern Europe over oil pipelines and the New Khazars have been bombing them. Whether or not they are Jews, their name links them with the historic ones. Sofer follows the mystery woman through several adventures and finally encounters her again in the cave, where she identifies herself as Sonja Tchobanzade. In the tradition of lost world adventures, she shows him the secret synagogue, with the tapestries and biblical ark still present. Hundreds of spears and a collection of lances and bows await. She also guides him to the entrancing mikvah, a place of magic and beauty. To both of them, the greatest treasure is the packed library. Sonja and her people, meanwhile, are the new Khazars, using the caves as their base. They are peaceful historians documenting the history the Soviets denied and sharing it with the Jews worldwide. Sonja tells Sofer how shocked she was to discover the Jewish history her government had erased. She also shares the history of her own Jewish people:

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When I was a teenager, fifteen years ago, Georgia bore no resemblance to what you saw coming here. Everywhere there were factories, cultivation, fields covered in vines, wheat, flowers . . . there were tractors and agricultural machinery in motion all over the place. We seemed to be rich. Rich and secure. Every day we ate good food and we were sure it was going to last forever. My parents felt safe—but they were Jews, and during the war their own parents had been deported by Stalin—they ought to have known, and acted cautiously, but no. That was, without any doubt, the strength of communism; its ability to make people forget, even Jews! Under such conditions. anything is possible. We lived in a bubble, and it seemed on the inside that no could possibly burst it. That’s why my parents sent me to study in Moscow. They were very proud of me.27

Their other sect is blowing up Azerbaijan installations. Yakubov, meanwhile, has offered up the oil well in the Khazar city. Now the oil companies plan to demolish it. Sonja and her people are determined to defend it. They’ve been writing to governments, professors and newspapers, but in their crumbling country, only the money from the oil matters. Accordingly, Sonja calls on Sofer to publicize their story. In a magical moment, she shares the beauty of the old mikvah with him: The water, perfectly still, fixed in its limpid transparency, could just as well have been a sheet of glass. One edge of the mirror-like surface licked a sandy slope, while to the right it was contained and framed by an amazing structure. What Sofer had taken for a wall was in reality the topmost curve of a large semi-circle whose steps, like those in a Roman or Greek amphitheater, led down underneath the crystal-clear water. The highest of these steps supported half a dozen columns reaching up to the ceiling at regular intervals. The tops of these retained traces of purple and blue paint, while on the pillars themselves could be distinguished, almost intact, subtly interlacing frescos of opulent foliage, roses, hummingbirds, golden butterflies and fruit.28

Here, Sofer can “sense the breath of the ages settle on him and restrict his heartbeat.” The spiritual fervor of the Khazars exudes around him. “Eden! The Garden of Eden before the temptation of the serpent!” Sofer whispers.29 The novel ends with the cave being lost to time and Sofer, saddened and without proof, returning to the civilized world. His adventure mirrors Isaac’s, while both their exotic Khazar loves are lost to the violence of the contested region, their final fates are left to mystery. Gentlemen of the Road began when Michael Chabon decided to write the novel he titled “Jews with Swords,” which he published as weekly installments in the New York Times. As Chabon describes in his Afterword, his fans responded to the pitch with laughter, as they knew Jews had been banned from arming themselves through most of European history. Of course, warrior

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Jews in the wider range of history battled the Roman occupation, served in the Russian army, and fought at Granada, Austerlitz, and Gettysburg. Despite all this, Chabon explains that listeners did not picture the Maccabees but instead “an unprepossessing little guy, with spectacles and a beard, brandishing a sabre: the pirate Motel Kamzoil.”30 This reaction only intensified his desire to share the historic warrior Jews who indeed existed. Chabon identifies one of his great motivations for writing such mixed genre books: “which is to look at some of the genres or ‘sub-traditions’ of popular culture and make their Jewish roots or antecedents explicit; or where there is no strong Jewish tradition, to take that genre and Judaize it and see what happens.”31 Chabon’s mercenary partnership joins east and west: Zelikman, a blond Frankish physician, travels with the Abyssinian32 warrior Amram, who “called himself a Jew, a son from the line of the Queen of Sheba.”33 He wields a Viking axe inscribed with runes naming it “Defiler of your Mother” and is in all ways the epitome of physical might.34 Each has lost family to anti-Semitic attacks. For this reason, Zelikman is armed with a lancet “forged to order by the same maker of instruments who supplied the rabbi-physicians of Zelikman’s family with their scalpels and bloodletting fleams, in sly defiance of Frankish law, which forbade Jews to bear arms even in self-defense, even when an armed gang of ruffians dragged your mother and sister screaming from their kitchen and did rank violence to them in the street.”35 Both, though culturally Jewish through their contrasting backgrounds, have given up on faith. They shatter stereotypes in their partnership, while emphasizing Jews’ diverse and expansive history. In his Afterward, Chabon notes how much Jewish history syncs with adventure stories: The story of the Jews centers around—one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better and worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.36

The pair make their way to Khazaria and are struck by this Jewish paradise in the nebulous region between Western Christians and Eastern Muslims. This is a fabled kingdom of “wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea” where “a Jew rules over other Jews as a king.”37 The beks, or rulers, of Khazaria celebrate Sukkot, as one finds “comfort in the sukkah, in this open-air proof of the affinity between his own fathers and those of the people (by the account of their own book once a wandering horde of

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tent dwellers and cattle raiders) whose faith they had adopted.”38 At the same time, only the bek is allowed to see the kagan, who rules in isolation until the appointed day when he is ritually strangled. Amram calls it a “stupid” system in which “the bek runs the country, and the army, and the treasury; but the kagan runs the bek.”39 This is basically true, though the kagan’s word is law. According to the Arab historian al-Istakhri, when the kagan’s rule began, the nobles placed a silken cord around his neck and decided the length of his rule.40 Before 830, the kagan led the army, though after this, he was said to share rulership with the bek. By 843, the kagan was only a sacral figure.41 Still, he commanded a great army. In 943, the king’s bodyguards, the Orsiyya, numbered 7000 men.42 Historically, Khazaran-Atil on the lower Volga was the center of government and religion, home of the bek and kagan. Atil became the capital around 740. There, the kagan lived in a brick palace with golden gates on an island.43 This was a city that blended Jews, Christians, and Muslims along with their myriad of cultures, poised as it was on the Silk Road between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Chabon’s novel also has the heroes dealing with Jewish Radhanites, likely from Persia.44 Meanwhile, the pair try to restore the young heir, Filaq, who promises religious tolerance. After many surprise twists and last-minute rescues, Filaq takes the throne and reforms the system, becoming bek and kagan at once. The hero-pair, having saved the kingdom, take their winnings and ride off together. Chabon’s novel is uncomplicated historical fiction, exotic only for its character and setting. Nonetheless, the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union adds traces of the fantasy he’s known for by making this a pulp adventure in the tradition of Conan the Barbarian and his many competitors. Fantasy readers will feel at home seeing the multicultural pair battle enemies on their hazard-filled mission. For a less-traditional text, Dictionary of the Khazars is organized as a metafictional dictionary and thus emphasizes the contrasting and contradictory lore the Khazar culture has created. In fact, it is three dictionaries: Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, each containing its culture’s legends of the Khazars and cross-referenced with the others. All three, while focusing on a prophet princess and the legends and folklore surrounding her, take place against a background of war. This takes the Kazars’ military strength for granted, preferring to focus on the mystical side of their culture. Avram Brankovich, described as an author of the original dictionary (1651–1689) is also strong and powerful. “He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast.”45 He’s constantly changing location, shifting languages, like a reflection of his book incarnate. In the evenings he practices with a saber and keeps an exacting list of every move ever recorded.

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The kagan is likewise a figure of fierceness, as Ateh describes his followers in “a life-or-death battle” against her own.46 The story plays with how history is reconstructed, emphasizing the heavy mostly fictitious research used. The publisher even released two versions, dubbed “male” and “female” with fifteen lines different. Texts include an exchange of letters and a betrothal contract, both in the Jewish section. All these collected texts are contrasted with the uncertainty of history, leaving a great deal to question. The male and female versions add an additional layer when considering the audience of the book. Each sees the text being passed to a reader. Next, the male version tells: I could have pulled the trigger at that moment. I could not have had a better one—there was but a single witness in the garden—and a child at that. But it played out differently. I reached forward and took those several exciting pages, which I attach to the letter. Taking them instead of shooting, I looked at those Saracen fingers with nails like hazelnuts and thought of the tree that Halevi mentions in his book about the Khazars. I thought that every one of us is such a tree: the more we grow upwards towards the sky, through the winds and the rain towards God, the deeper we have to sink with our roots into the mud and ground waters towards Hell. With such thoughts I read the pages handed to me by the Saracen with the green eyes. They amazed me and I asked Dr. Muawia in disbelief where he had gotten them from.47

The female version suggests a different reader: As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia here he had got them he said something that astonished me even more.48

Offering the option of either text symbolizes an inclusivity and also a flexibility, varying the text in consideration of its intended audience. The kagans’ hereditary magic makes its way into the novel as well. As described in the seventh-century texts the Zhoushu, the Suishu, and the Beishi, the Turk kagans told stories of descent from a she-wolf. Her cleverest son or grandson, Asina, placed a wolf’s head on his banner. He was said

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to have animal berserker and shape-changing powers.49 In everyday life, the leader continued to wield magic. “The Qaghan possessed qut, the heaven-sent vital force that legitimated his rule and rendered his person sacred.”50 He could use this power for divination in a fire ritual alongside his shamans.51 In the Dictionary, an alternate history, in which a duplicate kagan was fashioned from donated parts but was circumcised as presented is just as real an origin story as the documented account. This new figure grows to giant size so much “that the real uncircumcised kagan looked like a child in comparison” and breaks his chains, “shaking the bars with tremendous force.”52 Ateh, the Khazar princess and patron of the cult of dream hunters, aids her chosen hunters in their ability to ‘‘plunge into other people’s dreams and sleep and from them extract little pieces of Adam-the-precursor’s being, composing them into a whole, into so-called Khazar dictionaries, with the aim of having all these assembled books incarnate on earth the enormous body of Adam Ruhani.”53 Her spirit continues watching over the dictionary with esoteric magic. “She wore, attached to her belt, the skull of her lover Mokaddasa al-Safer, she fed it with hot, spy earth and salt water, and she planted cornflowers in its eye sockets so that in the other world he might see the blue colors.”54 The Jewish version begins with gematria, deconstructing Ateh’s name for its component meanings. It also reclaims her by offering her name in Hebrew letters—Aleph for the Supreme crown of wisdom, Tet for the Sabbath Bride, Hey for the hands of cruelty and mercy.55 As the protective spirit of the book, the princess lives on to the present, eternally twined with text and its meaning. The Jewish section also focuses on the losses and grief: “The cemetery is full of broken menorah-decorated pottery. To the Jews, a broken pottery dish is the mark of an undone, lost person and this is a graveyard of an undone and lost people, which is what the Khazars were at this place and perhaps at this time.”56 Pulling in the tales of Lilith and the sages, it incorporates this less-known legend into Jewish folklore. This complex quilt of beliefs and legends is deliberately blurred by the author, celebrating the Khazars and even the lack of certain knowledge about their origins and practices. The Book of Esther likewise experiments with the Khazars, in this case using them as the basis for a feminist alternate history. In the book’s setting, the Khazars have survived as an empire to the period of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. At this point, they are still positioned in their strategically important territory between the Caspian and Black Seas, controlling access to the oil of the Caucasus. A blend of alternate history and religious mythology combine to tell a tale of female empowerment across a backdrop of an alt-World War II. As such, it’s the most “what if” version of the historical Khazars, bringing them into the twentieth century to explore how a Jewish warrior tribe could have resisted the Nazis. Here, the author channels

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the romanticism of Jews with swords, bringing them to the time when they were most needed. Esther, daughter of the kagnate’s chief policy advisor, is determined to fight. Unable to as a woman, she journeys to the floating village of the kabbalists to entreat them to transform her into a man. She finds the kabbalists and the golem workers they’ve built. While they refuse to change her, the young man Amit confides in Esther that he was born a woman . . . until he Was so desperate to become a scholar that he entered the Mikvah and God granted his prayer. Esther does the same and prays “If it is your will, make me the person who can help lead this country to victory and save the Jewish people. Make me a warrior.”57 Even beyond this, religion and practice are heavy in the story as the Sabbath and prayer times slow her quest and she observes negiah. Cultural expressions also dominate as she calls the invaders “Haman” and God “The Name.” The story uses her religion to explore the longing for self-improvement, as the golems seek the freedom to pray and be accepted by the male characters. It’s a story of the marginalized in many categories rising up to defend their people from the Nazi invasion. Its historical fiction also uses the recent popular subgenre called “dieselpunk”—alternate history with exciting anachronistic technology. Linking with Jewish fantasy, the technology of the story are aerocycles and mechanical horses. Esther is a mechanic and scholar as well as a warrior, using her setting to show off a myriad of capabilities. Dieselpunk is an offshoot of steampunk (the latter has Victorian technology while the former moves its alt-history era up to include the automobile). These genres are based on nostalgia, back to a time when makers were celebrated and technology could be fully understood by all. As author and editor Nick Gevers observes, these genres evoke the excitement of huge surges in technology with the concurrent optimism. “In the process, our contemporary concerns, information technology, lifestyle libertarianism, energy shortages . . . merge with the apparatus of the scientific romance to create a hybrid literature of huge fascination.”58 This nostalgia for the land of the Khazars and the moral clarity of the war add the wish-fulfillment of warrior Jews turning back the Nazis and defining a Jewish haven. Historically, the Khazars stood out because they were so unique: a Jewish majority, Jewish ruled country in medieval times. The population at its peak was likely comparable to the Jews in seventeenth-century Poland.59 “The Hebrew sources on the Khazars [offer] a mixed reaction of enthusiasm, skepticism, and above all, bewilderment. A warrior-nation of Turkish Jews must have seemed to the rabbis as strange as a circumcised unicorn.”60 Their diaspora had been so long, they’d forgotten what it felt like to be a nation with a king.

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Khazar fiction of the twenty-first century emphasizes the history of warrior Jews and the multiplicity of Jewish civilizations through time. Gentlemen of the Road celebrates the haven for the Jews, while sending two very different Jewish warrior partners to its gates. The Wind of the Khazars in particular shows the yearning for this last past and the desire to rediscover it. Meanwhile, Dictionary of the Khazars celebrates the complex weaving of rumors, legends, and magic that make up the corpus of knowledge. All of them off the romance and feminism of a self-determining warrior princess. The Book of Esther goes deeper with feminist possibilities as well as the wish fulfillment of Khazars defeating Nazis. All of these unite to celebrate a lost Jewish culture, exploring their might as well as the lost possibilities. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barton, Emily. The Book of Esther. New York: Duggan Books, 2016. Brook, Kevin Alan. The Jews of Khazaria. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Chabon, Michael. Gentlemen of the Road. New York: Del Rey, 2007. Dunlop, D. M. The History of the Jewish Khazars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954. Gevers, Nick. “Introduction.” Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, edited by Nick Gevers, 7–11. Nottingham: Solaris, 2008. Golden, Peter Benjamin. Turks and Khazars: Origins, Institutions, and Interactions in Pre-Mongol Eurasia. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Halter, Marek. The Wind of the Khazars. Translated by Michael Bernard. New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2003. Hasak-Lowy, Todd. “The Language Deep, Deep in Chabon’s Ear.” J Books, 2009. www​.jbooks​.com​/interviews​/index​/IP​_HasakLowy​_Chabon​.htm. Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. New York: Random House, [1976] 2012. Mihajloviḉ, Jasmina. “Difference Between Male and Female Version of Dictionary of the Khazars.” Khazars.com, May 13, 2013. www​.khazars​.com​/en​/catalog​/ difference​-between​-male​-and​-female​-version​-of​-dictionary​-of​-the​-khazars. Pavić, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words. Translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić. Female Version. New York: Knopf, 1988. Silver, Steven H. “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer.” Uncanny Magazine, February 15, 2021. uncannymagazine.com/article/jew ish-science-fiction-and-fantasy-a-primer.

NOTES 1. The novel Wolf by Wolf or Amazon Prime’s Hunters 2. Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters universe or the Israeli TV show Juda.

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3. Peter Benjamin Golden, Turks and Khazars: Origins, Institutions, and Interactions in Pre-Mongol Eurasia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 26. 4. Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 2. 5. Brook, 96. 6. Quoted in Brook, 95. 7. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976; New York: Random House, 2012), 59. 8. Quoted in Brook, 96. 9. Golden, 185. 10. Brook, 91. 11. Brook, 26. 12. Brook, 206. 13. Steven H. Silver, “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer,” Uncanny Magazine, February 15, 2021, https:​//​uncannymagazine​.com​/article​/jewish​-science​ -fiction​-and​-fantasy​-a​-primer. 14. The star of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and related works. 15. Halter, 10. 16. Quoted in Golden, 184. 17. Brook, 47. 18. Golden, 48. 19. Golden, 205. 20. Marek Halter, The Wind of the Khazars, trans. Michael Bernard (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2003), 16. 21. Halter, 14. 22. Halter, 110. 23. Halter, 110. 24. Koestler, 84. 25. Halter, 231. 26. Halter, 50. 27. Halter, 249. 28. Halter, 256. 29. Halter, 256. 30. Chabon, 198 31. Hasak-Lowy. 32. Modern-day Ethiopia. 33. Chabon, 17. 34. Chabon, 16. 35. Chabon, 19. 36. Chabon, 203. 37. Chabon, 22. 38. Chabon, 133. 39. Chabon, 156. 40. Brook, 48. 41. Brook, 49.

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42. Brook, 50. 43. Brook, 20. 44. Brook, 77. 45. Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, trans. Christina Pribićević-Zorić (New York: Knopf, 1988), 28. 46. Pavić, 68. 47. Jasmina Mihajloviḉ, “Difference Between Male and Female Version of Dictionary of the Khazars,” Khazars.com, May 13, 2013. https:​//​www​.khazars​.com​/en​ /catalog​/difference​-between​-male​-and​-female​-version​-of​-dictionary​-of​-the​-khazars 48. Mihajloviḉ. 49. Golden, 155–159. 50. Golden, 42. 51. Golden, 44. 52. Pavić, 71. 53. Pavić, 38. 54. Pavić, 205. 55. Pavić, 205–206. 56. Pavić, 60. 57. Barton, 159. 58. Nick Gevers, “Introduction,” in Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology, ed. Nick Gevers (Nottingham: Solaris, 2008), 9. 59. Koestler, 151. 60. Koestler 81.

Chapter 4

Kabbalist Rap A Love Song for the Torah in Victoria Hanna’s Music Video “‫”אורייתא‬ Katharina Hadassah Wendl

When Victoria Hanna published a recording of her performance “‫”אורייתא‬ (Orayta; Aramaic for Torah) on October 29, 2014 on YouTube,1 she introduced the world to something new—Aramaic rap. In this performance, she combines acoustics, recordings of her voice, a centuries-old mystical text and her traditional Sephardic pronunciation into an artful composition that truly charmed the audience in Mazkeka—a venue for contemporary art in Jerusalem, Israel.2 Victoria Hanna is an Israeli singer, voice artist and songwriter who launched her first album, which also contains a studio version of “‫אורייתא‬,” on May 11, 2017.3 Two years later, on June 20, 2019, she published the mesmerizing, animated music video of her song “‫ ”אורייתא‬on YouTube.4 In it, she tells in fantastic audio-visual terms about her relationship with Jewish tradition and mysticism. The medium of the music video allows her to use not only her vocals and her musical talent to create art, but also to add visual imagery to illustrate her song. An old mystical text is now not only combined with modern rhythms but also with Jewish visual motives. Kabbalist symbols join hip-hop beats. The lyrics of her song are a rendition of a text found in the Zohar, a central collection of Jewish mystical texts. For Victoria Hanna, the combination of the auditive character of a song and the visual opportunities of the music video opens up a space for numerous references to Jewish motives and Kabbalah. She shows how music videos can serve as tools to reinterpret traditional Jewish texts.5 As Ruthie Abeliovich has shown in her analysis of Victoria Hanna’s performance “Signals” (2005), it is typical of Victoria 53

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Katharina Hadassah Wend

Hanna’s art to include such references.6 It is the confrontation of modernity and tradition, femininity and masculinity as well as form and content that is, as Sarit Cofman-Simhon points out, characteristic of her performances.7 This chapter is guided by the hypothesis that Hanna’s animated music video serves both as a tribute to and a critique of traditional Jewish thought. This is manifested in the imagery of the Torah scroll in the video. In the following pages, I will explore how Victoria Hanna expresses her relationship to the Torah (scroll) in her music video “‫ ”אורייתא‬by analyzing and interpreting select visual features in her video. This close reading is framed by a discussion of the significance of the Zohar within Jewish tradition, an analysis of the Zoharic text she quotes and a portrait of Victoria Hanna’s artistic background. An establishing shot introduces us to the first scene of the video: A Beit Midrash, a place of traditional Jewish learning, appears in front of a dreamy landscape dominated by the moon and a myriad of stars. Zooming into the scene, we see a girl dressed in pink and blue peering through its windows, yearning to see what is inside while Victoria Hanna sings about Rabbi Shimon who weeps and exclaims: “‫אורייתא‬, ‫( ”!אורייתא‬Torah, Torah!). Suddenly, the Torah ark opens and reveals a Torah scroll. The girl is drawn into this scroll and the mystical world of Torah study. And this is the world of the Zohar and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. Aside from the girl, he is the second character featuring prominently in the video, but, contrary to her, he remains invisible—he is only brought to the audience by Victoria Hanna’s voice. THE MYSTICAL WORLDS OF THE ZOHAR The Zohar is the most important medieval book in the realm of Kabbalah. Its authorship—within academia—is attributed to Rabbi Moshe ben Shemtov de Leon (1240–1305) or a mysticist circle of fellow Castilian rabbis surrounding him.8 According to Jewish tradition, though, the Zohar is the work of a famous rabbi who lived about a thousand years earlier and who also features as its main character—Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.9 The book is said to have been transmitted in a secretive manner until Rabbi Moshe ben Shemtov de Leon completed its final editing. As Huss points out, despite these uncertainties of origin and provenance, the Zohar became an authoritative and central text to Judaism over the centuries.10 It inspired countless rabbinic figures, mystics and laypeople alike. Its texts are now part of the siddur, the Jewish prayer book, feature in Jewish communal prayers and are studied by Jews (and non-Jews) across the world. An important aspect of Jewish popular culture, the Zohar’s teachings find artistic expression by creative minds like Victoria Hanna.

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55

As the main feature of her video, the Torah scrolls that appear in three important scenes stand out prominently. They fill the panes and are flanked by their iconic Atzei Chaim (trees of life)—decorative wooden sticks are attached to both ends of the scroll. The camera often zooms into the scrolls, allowing the audience to fall into a different dream-like scene full of Jewish mystical symbols and references. The penultimate Torah scroll features as center of all mystic symbolism and is adorned by a wide range of mystical symbols: the faces of women, plants, fruits, water, hands, the moon, and the letter Aleph as well as excerpts from the Zoharic text Victoria Hanna is quoting. THE TORAH IN THE ZOHAR The Zohar extols the Torah as the ultimate source of knowledge and clinging to God and concerns itself with connections between God and the creation, the human being and the soul. It wants to convey mystical knowledge by linking its readers to a chain of transmission that reaches back to Gan Eden, the first human beings and even creation itself. Mystical speculations about the Hebrew alphabet and the ten Sefirot abound and are central to its reasoning.11 Through studying and dwelling on the Torah, the Zohar posits, one can understand these connections and the ultimate will of God more deeply. This, however, is a painstaking process. God and his wisdom are hidden from human beings. How hard it is to establish this connection to God’s wisdom might be hinted at when Rabbi Shimon is described as weeping before he begins to utter his praises about the Torah—both in Victoria Hanna’s video and in the Zoharic texts she quotes—3:166b. Despite its difficulty, it is upon the kabbalist to uncover the depths of wisdom, discover the wells of Torah and travel the ways of light to find God. Such metaphors involving water, journeys and light are common in the Zohar—and feature in Victoria Hanna’s adaption of a short part of the Zohar. The Zohar uses two terms to talk about Torah—the classical Hebrew word ‫( תורה‬Torah) and the Aramaic word ‫( אורייתא‬Orayta). They are both grammatically feminine, but while Torah means law or instruction, the Aramaic term is connected to the Hebrew word for light—‫אור‬. Studying the Torah is illuminating and brings light into the hidden, concealed matters.12 And this is also something that Rabbi Shimon emphasizes when he exclaims that Orayta—Torah—is the light of all worlds—“‫נהירודכל עלמין‬.”

56

Katharina Hadassah Wend

Female Imagery in the Zohar In the Zohar and the broader Jewish tradition, the Torah is not just grammatically feminine but also adored as such—as woman of valor (Eshet Chayil) in Rashi’s interpretations of Proverbs 31:10 or as a bride betrothed to the Jewish people (Deut 33:4 and Berakhot 57a; Ibn Ezra on Hosea 2:21). Female images, allegories and metaphors abound in the Zohar and femininity is expressed through many different symbols. These have not yet seen a systematic analysis within this kabbalistic body of texts, as Rosen remarks, though selective analyses do exist.13 One of the most important female images in the Zohar, the Shekhinah, has seen considerable research so far.14 The Shekhinah—in pre-Zoharic times merely serving as a synonym for God, a metaphor for His worldly presence—appears in the Zohar most prominently as a royal personification of divinity—Malkhut: the lowest of the ten sefirot. Each of those ten is gendered, a divine emanation that symbolizes one aspect of God. The Sefira of Malkhut serves as a signifier for, among others, the mother/ wife, the daughter, the bride, the female lover and the queen.15 As Roi argues, the unique quality of the Shekhinah, the last Sefira—its ability to connect heavenly and earthly realms—was transposed by the Zohar onto all women.16 It is characterized by its immanence and its continued dwelling with the Jewish people, even in times of destruction and exile.17 The Shekhinah can serve as a resting place for the Jewish people, and it thus also connected to Shabbat.18 These notions of Malkhut inspired the poem Lecha Dodi, commonly attributed to Rabbi Shlomo Elkabetz which invites its singers to welcome the Shabbat queen just like a groom would welcome his bride.19 The tenth Sefira, in connecting heavenly and earthly aspects of the universe, is essential for human beings to connect to God. It serves as a mediatrix. Through keeping mitzvot, humans can play their part in unifying and restoring the world.20 In this vein, Hellner-Eshed argues, is Malkhut in the form of the Shekhinah “the object of the kabbalists’ speculation, as well as the object of their emotional, religious, and mystical longing.”21 The Shekhinah is imagined not only in terms of family relations—as daughter, wife or bride—but is also associated in the Zohar with metaphors of night, earth, the moon,22 water23 and is described as garden and even shrine, as Scholem elaborates.24 Schäfer also describes the Shekhinah as symbolizing the written and oral Torah—while the written Torah represents her divine, the oral Torah represents her worldly manifestation.25 Images like these are visualized in fantastic ways in Victoria Hanna’s work. Before looking closer at her animated music video, this chapter will focus on Zohar 3:166b.

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Zohar 3:166b The original version of the text in “‫ ”אורייתא‬can be found in the third book of the Zohar in the middle of a commentary on Parashat Shelach Lecha (‫שלח‬ ‫לך‬, Bamidbar 13,1–15,41).26 It is part of a bigger, fantastic narrative titled Rav Metivta, which describes the mysterious, dream-like journey of Rabbi Shimon and his companions to Gan Eden. In paradise, they learn about the fate of souls and the afterlife.27 Before this Torah sage of the second century bursts into song (and subsequently falls to the ground—overwhelmed by his emotions), his friends and fellow mystics sit in the Garden of Eden. As night falls, two spiritual messengers arrive and tell him to note down all that he has learned so far on his journey. The messengers need to leave again for their earthly graves where they need to stay until midnight. Afterward, they will be allowed to join God again when He enters the Garden of Eden to rejoice with the righteous souls. They promise Rabbi Shimon, though, that they will return to him on the following day. Rabbi Shimon despairs upon seeing the messengers leave. He starts to cry, probably fearing that the absence of the spiritual beings and his loneliness will make him forget what he had learned. In his yearning, he bursts out into praise—which Victoria Hanna is adapting in her song. After Rabbi Shimon concludes his song, he falls onto the ground and sees his companions in a vision. They motivate him to write down what he learned. Throughout the night, he documents the words he was taught and, as emphasized, does not forget anything from his learning. After having finished the note-taking process, morning dawns and Rabbi Shimon sees a vision of the Temple—the Beit HaMikdash—in Heavenly Jerusalem. He rejoices, but his vision disappears instantly. He meditates and once the messengers return as promised, they greet him and praise him for his work and proceed to teach him new insights of the Shekhinah.28 Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s Praise of Torah in 3:166b Rabbi Shimon’s song starts with a quote from Proverbs (5:19): “‫ת־ח֥ן ּדַ֭ ּדֶ יהָ יְ ַר ֻּו�ָ֣ך בְ כָל־עֵ ֑ת ּבְ֝ אַ הֲבָ ֗ ָתּה ִּת ְׁשּגֶ ֥ה תָ ִ ֽמיד‬ ֵ ‫“( ”אַ ּיֶ ֥לֶת אֲהָ ִ֗בים ְ ֽו ַי ֲע ַ֫ל‬A loving doe, a graceful mountain goat. Let her breasts satisfy you at all times; Be infatuated with love of her always.”29). While the “loving doe” and “graceful mountain goat” in Proverbs 5:19 seem to refer to a beautiful woman and wife, Rabbi Shimon in the Zohar links them to the Torah. Victoria Hanna, on the other hand, omits both the biblical verse and the last sentence of Zohar 3:166b: ‫ אַ ֶּילֶת אַ הָ בִ ים וְ ַי ֲעלַת חֵ ן ּדַ ּדֶ יהָ יְ ַרּוִ וָך בְ כָל עֵת ּבְ אַ הֲבָ תָ ּה ִּת ְׁשּגֶה‬,‫ ּפָתַ ח וְ אָ מַ ר‬.‫ּבָ כָה ַרּבִ י ִׁש ְמעֹון וְ ָגעָא‬ ‫ ִמ ְתּפ ְַּׁשטֵ י‬,‫ ּומַ ּבּועִ ין‬,‫קֹורין‬ ִ ‫ּומ‬ ְ ,‫ ּונְ חָ לִ ין‬,‫ ּכַמָ ה י ִָמין‬,‫ נְ הִ ירּו ְּדכָל עָלְ ִמין‬,‫אֹוריְ יתָ א‬ ַ ‫אֹוריְ יתָ א‬ ַ .‫תָ ִמיד‬ ‫אֹוריְ יתָ א‬ ַ .‫ נְ הִ ירּו עִ ּלָאָ ה (ודא) ִמנְָך נָפְ קָ א‬,‫ ֲעלְָך קַ יְ ימֵ י עִ ּל ִָאין וְ תַ ּתָ ִאין‬,‫ ִמנְָך ּכֹ ּלָא‬.‫ִמנְָך לְ כָל ִס ְט ִרין‬

58

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‫ מַ אן יִ ְזּכֵי‬.‫ימין ִּדילְָך‬ ִ ִ‫ וְ ַי ֲעלַת חֵ ן (גבי) עֵיּלָא וְ תַ ּתָ א ְרח‬,‫ אַ ֶּילֶת אַ הָ בִ ים אַ נְ ְּת‬,‫ מַ ה אֵ ימָ א לְ גַּבָ ְך‬,‫אֹוריְ יתָ א‬ ַ ‫ ּולְ מֵ ימָ ר ִס ְת ִרין‬,‫ מַ אן יָכִ יל לְ ַגּלָאָ ה‬,‫ארְך‬ ָ ָ‫אֹוריְ יתָ א ׁשַ עֲׁשּועִ ים ְּדמ‬ ַ ‫אֹוריְ יתָ א‬ ַ .‫לְ יַנְ קָ א ִמנְָך ּכְ ְדקָ א יֵאֹות‬ .‫ וְ נָׁשַ ק לְ עַפְ ָרא‬,‫ וְ אָ עִ יל ֵריׁשֵ יּה ּבֵ ין ּבִ ְרּכֹוי‬,‫ ּבָ כָה‬.‫ּוגְ נִ יזִין ִּדילְָך‬ Rabbi Shim’on cried and wailed. He opened, saying, “A loving doe, a graceful gazelle—let her breasts ever quench your thirst; lose yourself always in her love (Proverbs 5:19). O Torah, Torah, radiance of all worlds! How many seas, rivers, springs, and fountains spread from you in all directions! From you comes all; upon you depend those above and those below. Supernal radiance surely emanates from you. O Torah, Torah, what shall I say of you? You are a loving doe, a graceful gazelle for above and below. Among your lovers, who will be suckling from you fittingly? O Torah, Torah, delight of your Lord! Who can reveal and utter your secrets and hidden treasures?” He wept, and placed his head between his knees, and kissed the dust.30

Aside from comparing the doe and the gazelle to the Torah, Rabbi Shimon also describes the Torah as illuminating all worlds and compares it to a source of water from which seas, rivers, springs and fountains gush and pour forth, which resonates with imagery ascribed to the Shekhinah.31 The Torah is the source and the center of all. She is adored by her lovers, those who study the Torah and keep her commandments.32 Everything above and everyone below is dependent on her. He transfers the imperative of Proverbs regarding the nourishing breasts of the doe/gazelle into a question: Who from among your lovers merits to suck from the breasts of Torah? Who can uncover the secret teachings of God? Unable to answer these questions, he cries and rests his head between his knees and kisses the ground. This passage elucidates the role of Torah within the Zohar, but also points to the fictional and dream-like aspect of narratives in the Zohar. The Zohar talks about alternative worlds, the unimaginable greatness of God, but to do so, it utilizes associations that its readers can comprehend.33 As the worldly representation of the Divine,34 Rabbi Shimon praises the Torah as the ur-source that is characterized by female imagery—the doe, the gazelle, the breasts. The Torah is sweet, nourishing, loving and motherly and studying her is seen as a key to unlocking and retrieving Divine secrets. This central message can be found in this particular passage, can be attributed to the Zohar as a whole and is also a central message of not just “‫אורייתא‬,” but Victoria Hanna’s oeuvre in broader terms. VICTORIA HANNA AND “‫”אורייתא‬ Having grown up in an ultra-orthodox Sephardic family in Jerusalem surrounded by religious books and texts, Victoria Hanna is today an Israeli singer, voice artist and songwriter.35 The main bulk of her work consists of

Kabbalist Rap

59

performances, songs and music videos that reflect the acoustic and morphemic surroundings of her youth. They are embedded in contemporary modern forms, structures and voices.36 Her interest and passion for song, music and performance as a youth, though, were often scrutinized and not well received. The traditional understanding of Halacha prohibits women from singing or performing in front of mixed audiences or men.37 This concept, termed ‫קול‬ ‫( אישה‬Kol Isha) in Hebrew, was troubling for the young Victoria Hanna: I come from a religious family in Jerusalem, where women were not permitted to sing in front of men. It wasn’t considered modest. But my voice broke out of me, it was stronger than I was. I struggled with this for years. Something inside me believed that I was sinning. Today, I sing throughout the world—texts from the Kabbalistic tradition that were once the exclusive “property” of men. I honour these texts, and attempt to convey them with love and respect.38

Her work is a merging of two worlds, appealing to a diverse audience of people from both religious and secular society.39 The simultaneity of residing in- and outside of Orthodoxy requires her to constantly negotiate issues of identity, feminism and modernity. Many of her performances and songs speak of this conflict and attempt to subvert traditional gender roles while still acknowledging the value of religious texts.40 This is also true for “‫—”אורייתא‬ its text stems from the Zohar, the melodies are informed by her Sephardic heritage and the beats follow twenty-first-century trends in rap and hip-hop. The music label Greedy For Best Music describes the video as: telling Victoria Hanna’s life story in mesmerising kaleidoscopic images; “the daughter of a rabbi, peeking into the men’s section at the synagogue and discovering the rich world of silenced womanhood.”41

As this analysis will show, Victoria Hanna—represented as the girl and woman in the video—discovers these various layers of femininity in the Zohar and in Jewish mysticism in general by engaging in a journey similar to Rabbi Shimon’s adventures in heaven. By escaping and undermining the confines of the mundane world, both are rising up to mystical heights and end up with an overwhelming experience.42 In her video, this experience is connected to her experience as a woman who wants to engage with Jewish tradition and learning, but is restricted in her endeavors by traditional Jewish society. Her subversive turn toward artistic expressions of her relationship to Torah is manifested in this video and especially in scenes featuring Torah scrolls or the word ‫אורייתא‬. The first Torah scrolls appears after the introductory scene described earlier:

60

Katharina Hadassah Wend

“Torah, Torah! Light of all worlds, source of every spring and sea, all wells and rivers from you flow, in all directions” (0:14–0:22) ‫ נהירודכל עלמין כמה ימין ונחלין ומקורין ומבועיןמתפשטי מינך לכל סיטרין‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬

These sequences are characterized by fast cuts: The word ‫ אורייתא‬appears in front of a world map and is surrounded by four moving animations of the artist. Water appears both in the lyrics and in the animation. It is an important metaphor in the Zohar that is often connected to femininity. Night, water and nature scenes follow and appear repeatedly throughout the video. “Torah, Torah!” (0:40–0:58) ‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬

Another Torah scroll appears in green, but it does not have text on it. In the middle of the Torah scroll, a round circle opens up to a nature scene. This scene is subsequently enlarged and shows the female character as she stands on a cliff and sings. Meanwhile, mystical deer roam the valley underneath her, linking back to the Zohar 3:166b: Rabbi Shimon cites Proverbs 5:19 that references a loving (female) deer which he interprets as Torah. The deer is an important symbol within Jewish tradition and, as Hubka remarks, also a reference to the Shekhinah.43 It can be found in both written and artistic Jewish tradition throughout the ages. “Delights of your master, who will reveal your well-hidden treasures?” (2:42–2:46) ‫שעשועים דמארך—מן יכיל לגלאהולמימר‬

The third scroll appears with the words “‫ ”סיתרין וגניזין‬on it—meaning “secrets and hidden treasures.”44 This visual arrangement directly references Zohar 3:166b. Studying the Torah enables its students to learn hidden depths of the word of God, but Rabbi Shimon asks here who will merit to uncover all her secrets.45 The Torah scroll is surrounded by eight faces of the character. On the sides of the fame, it is also flanked by the character’s face. These two faces are subtitled “‫שעשועים דמארך‬,” which is “delight of your master” in English. “your well-hidden treasures” (2:47–2:49) ‫סיתריןוגניזיןדילך‬

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The scene immediately following the one above appears by zooming into the Torah scroll with the words “‫“( ”סיתרין וגניזין‬secrets and hidden treasures”46) on it. A very different setting is revealed: Light, pastel colors of pink and blue dominate. In the middle, a green Torah scroll appears again, flanked by a woman on each side. Behind them, the sun rises above a mountain chain, partially covered by clouds. The clouds cut through the sky while the two women reach out to the Torah scroll—unsuccessfully, though. They cannot grasp the Torah scroll hovering in the air. Their hands become one with the heavens. This scene may allude to the discouragement Jewish women experience(d) to touching Torah scrolls due to fears of transferring (menstrual) impurity onto the scroll. While this is not codified as halacha47 and the Shulchan Aruch explicitly says that all those considered impure may touch a Torah scroll, it became increasingly uncommon for women in orthodox circles48 to be physically close to Torah scrolls, let alone touch them.49 On a more abstract level, this scene may also refer to the discouragement of women’s Torah learning— something that kabbalistic texts also discuss and often advance, as Fishman showed in her analysis of Sefer HaKanah.50 “Torah, Torah! Delights of your master, who will reveal your well-hidden treasures?” (3:25–3:39) ‫סיתרי‬-‫ שעשועים דמארך—מן יכיל לגלאהולמימר‬.‫ מן יזכה לינקא מינך כדקא יאות‬,‫רחימיןדילך‬ ‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬.‫ןוגניזיןדילך‬

The last scene Torah scroll in the video has ‫ אורייתא‬written on it twice. It is surrounded by a number of the character’s faces and colorful patterns. Several close-ups of this arrangement follow: Once, the hair of the woman is foregrounded, then the Torah scroll is the center of the scene again. The camera gradually zooms out and reveals that this scene is part of a surreal, fantastic installation of various Jewish symbols, for example, Hamsas, a crown, grapes and apples, candles and Channukkiyot. Torah seven times—four times (3:20–3:21 and 3:25–3:39) ‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬ ‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬

The following scenes can be seen as a summary of the previous visual images. Twice, ‫ אורייתא‬is repeated in the lyrics seven times in a row. The number seven is an important number in Judaism and Kabbalah in particular,

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referring often to the creation of the world.51 A blue Torah with ‫ אורייתא‬written on it twice appears again briefly. ‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬ ‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫ אורייתא‬,‫אורייתא‬

The very last sequence in the video shows the character’s return to the Beit Midrash. Again, the seven-fold repetition of the word ‫ אורייתא‬takes place twice. The girl, again in her pink and blue dress, is now inside the synagogue. Still dreaming, but a young girl again, she witnesses the Beit Midrash being filled with colorful letters, water, plants and apples—a dream come true. She sees, again, a reflection of her future self in the water. But unlike the adult woman in her dreams, the girl’s face is never shown. There is a waterfall whose water is flowing in the opposite direction, heavenwards, and then downwards again, indicating that her surreal, fantastic dream is about draw close. A few close-ups of the Beit Midrash’s interior follow, then the same girl is shown standing outside, as if everything that she had just seen had not happened at all. The massive building is now empty and moving backward. The wind blows, the girl raises her arms. Then the video abruptly ends with a black screen. INTERPRETING THE TORAH IN AND OF THE MUSIC VIDEO “‫”אורייתא‬ A young girl is drawn to the Beit Midrash, but can only enter it in her dreams, at night when nobody else is around. In these dreams, she goes through numerous mystical experiences which are expressed by the eclectic, colorful visuals in Victoria Hanna’s video. She confesses her love for Torah but eventually needs to return from this supernatural place. Interestingly, the girl in the music video never enters the real, empty Beit Midrash. She is only ever inside in her imagination. The female characters, who often appear multiple times in the same scene, represent Victoria Hanna in different stages of her life, but also highlight the mystical feminine aspect of the Divine, the Shekhinah, that is a central part of the Zohar’s theology and imagery.52 The video starts and ends with the character as a young girl. As a young girl, she was fascinated by Torah and mysticism but was later discouraged from delving deeper into Jewish mysticism. Only as an adult woman she turned again to mysticism, but in an unconventional way that does not just involve mystical, age-old texts, but also rap, hip-hop beats and colorful, mesmerizing animations. The music video “‫ ”אורייתא‬can be read as criticizing the limited opportunities for women to engage in advanced Torah study and mystical texts both in the past and the present.53 Women’s involvement in learning was seen as

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fiction, as a dream, because synagogues and Batei Midrash were and are still widely seen and conceptualized as male spaces in traditional Orthodox Judaism.54 This message is even more emphasized by the scenes involving Torah scrolls. Those appear several times in the music video—only one is visible at a time but serves as a central part of the arrangement. Frequently, the Aramaic word for Torah—‫—אורייתא‬is used in the video. It is the title of the song and central to Zohar 3:166b. The usage of the word ‫ אורייתא‬instead of the more common word ‫תורה‬, which originates in the Hebrew Bible, reflects the Zohar’s and Victoria Hanna’s grounding within rabbinic and mystical traditions—her reality which she expands on and subverts in her fantastic video. The first Torah scroll is—as usual—located inside the ark, making it an entry point for what there is to come. The second Torah scroll pulls the main character and the audience into an entirely new world: The stunning nature and wildlife that can be found in the valley. The third Torah scroll hovers in the air and two women—one on each side—try, in vain, to grasp it. This Torah scroll is inscribed with the words ‫—סיתרין וגניזין‬well-hidden treasures. The final Torah scroll only appears briefly among other fast-cut scenes. The visual arrangement of the third Torah scroll summarizes what Victoria Hanna wants to convey with her interpretation of Rabbi Shimon’s song: Through a visual illusion, the women’s arms reach out to the Torah scroll but fade into the sky. Women may dream of discovering and learning about the well-hidden treasures of the Torah, but they are hindered from doing so by the design of the spaces for Torah learning and Kabbalistic traditions. This is also expressed in the first and last scenes. The first one shows the girl outside the Beit Midrash, just like in the last scene when she raises her arms. This may be interpreted as an attempt to free herself from the constraints of anachronistic gender notions, but also as an embrace of feminine approaches to Jewish tradition and learning. This scene illuminates Victoria Hanna’s remark quoted earlier: I struggled with this [traditional notions about women and their realm of action] for years. . . . Today, I sing throughout the world—texts from the Kabbalistic tradition that were once the exclusive “property” of men. I honour these texts, and attempt to convey them with love and respect.55

She reclaims Jewish mystical texts and makes them her own, as Cofman-Simhon remarks56—she experiences this process as meaningful and empowering. CONCLUSION In her music video “‫אורייתא‬,” Victoria Hanna outlines a female version of the fantastic journey to heaven that Rabbi Shimon undertakes in the Zohar.

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While Rabbi Shimon’s praise of the Torah is framed by a story of heavenly revelation and getting closer to God by roaming through heavenly heights, Victoria Hanna’s female character—a representation of herself—is getting closer to God by engaging with Jewish tradition in a way that has—until recently—almost exclusively been granted to men. Mystical experiences with the Divine through Torah learning enable the character to gain more knowledge about the Torah, which she perceives as so beautiful and overwhelming that she breaks out into the song of Rabbi Shimon. The music video “‫ ”אורייתא‬can be seen as a tribute to the richness and meaningfulness of Jewish tradition, but also as a visual rendition of Victoria Hanna’s struggle with Jewish tradition and her interpretation of it. This struggle is most strikingly visualized by the Torah scrolls which appear several times in the video. The visual arrangement of the third Torah scroll—flanked, but neither touched nor held by two female figures next to it—summarizes her experience and feelings within the orthodox Jewish community and offers a critique of past and contemporary notions of women’s Torah learning. The last scene, in which the main character of the video stands outside the Beit Midrash and raises her hands—suggests both appreciation of the traditional texts and values as well as an individualized approach to make them meaningful to her life. Victoria Hanna approaches old Kabbalistic texts with a modern, feminist perspective. She transforms them to create something new, but also to honor their traditions and history. She tries to fulfill her dream of occupying herself with the deepest layers of Jewish tradition, but in her way: Because these deepest layers speak to her, because she can find meaning in them. And she does so via a love song about the Torah, a rap song capturing not just her dream, but also the one of Shimon bar Yochai. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abeliovich, Ruthie. “Envoicing the Future: Victoria Hanna’s Exterior Voice.” Theatre Research International 34, no. 2 (2009), 159–165. Adler, Elchanan. “Kabbalas Shabbos: Welcoming the Sabbath in Body and Spirit,” Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy, no. 33 (2016), 1–12. Akrap, Domagoj and Klaus S. Davidowicz. Kabbalah. Vienna: Kerber, 2018. Ben Maimon, Moshe. Mishneh Torah. Sefer Ahava. Hilchot Tfilin, Mezuzah, Sefer Torah. 1180. Cofman-Simhon, Sarit. “Performing Jewish Prayer on Stage: From Rituality to Theatricality and Back.” In Performance Studies in Motion. International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, 246–258. Edited by

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Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, and David Zerbib. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Davidowicz, Klaus S. Die Kabbala: Eine Einführung in die Welt der jüdischen Mystik und Magie. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009. Dekel, Ayelet. “Victoria Hanna—Debut Album” Midnight East, May 4, 2017. https:​//​ www​.midnighteast​.com​/mag​/​?p​=36791. Dennis, Geoffrey. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism. Woodbury: Llewellyn, 2007. Devine, Luke. “Active/Passive, ‘Diminished’/‘Beautiful,’ ‘Light’ from Above and Below: Rereading Shekhinah’s Sexual Desire in Zohar Al Shir Ha-Shirim (Song of Songs).” Feminist Theology 28, no. 3 (2020), 297–315. ———. “How Shekhinah Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism.” Feminist Theology 23, no. 1 (2014), 71–91. Fishman, Talya. “A Kabbalistic Perspective on Gender-Specific Commandments: On the Interplay of Symbols and Society.” AJS Review 17, no. 2 (1992), 199–245. Grözinger, Karl Erich. Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—Philosophie—Mystik: Von der mittelalterlichen Kabbala zum Hasidismus. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005. Hanna, Victoria. “‫אורייתא‬,” YouTube video, 03:26, October 29, 2014. https:​//​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=flXrfUTK15c. ———. “‫אורייתא‬,” YouTube video, 03:39, June 20, 2019. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=yRfd7vL8wpc. ———. “The Aleph-bet song (Hosha’ana),” YouTube video, 03:51, February 3, 2015. https:​//​youtu​.be​/Bl1epz3tSSA. Hellner-Eshed, Melila. A River Flows from Eden. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Hubka, Thomas C. “Medieval Themes in the Wall-Paintings of 17th and 18th-Century Polish Wooden Synagogues.” In Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other. Edited by Eva Frojmovic. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Hunt, Peter, and Millicent Lenz. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005. Huss, Boaz. “Sefer ha-Zohar as a Canonical, Sacred and Holy Text: Changing Perspectives of the Book of Splendor between the Thirteenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7, no. 2 (1998), 257–307. Karo, Yosef. Shulchan Arukh: Yoreh De’ah. 1565. Lichtenstein, Mosheh. “Kol Isha: A Woman’s Voice.” Tradition 46, no. 1 (2013), 9–24. Liebes, Yehuda. Studies in the Zohar. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Lipshitz, Yair. “The Stage as a Space for Midrash: Theatre and the Jewish Hermeneutic Project.” In Jewish Theatre. Tradition in Transition and Intercultural Vistas, 11–23. Edited by Ahuva Belkin. Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2008. Martin, Carol. “Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon and Israel.” In Get Real. Documentary Theatre Past and Present, 74–90. Edited by Alison Forsynth and Chris Megson. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2009.

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Matt, Daniel C. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition: Volume Nine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. MAZKEKA. “MAZKEKA,” accessed August 26, 2022, https:​//​www​.mazkeka​.com. Nordstrom, Lev. “Orayta,” June 22, 2019. https:​//​www​.greedyforbestmusic​.com​/ journal​/family​/orayta. ———. “Victoria Hanna—The Album,” August 17, 2018. https:​//​www​ .greedyforbestmusic​.com​/journal​/family​/victoria​-hanna​-the​-album. Of Liadi, Shneur Zalman. Shulchan Arukh HaRav: Orach Chayim. 1814. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Pressman, Hannah. “The Hebrew Alphabet Gets an Orthodox Feminist Makeover.” Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, March 23, 2015. https:​//​jewishstudies​.washington​ .edu​/israel​-hebrew​/the​-hebrew​-alphabet​-gets​-an​-orthodox​-feminist​-makeover. Roi, Biti. “Divine Qualities and Real Women. The Feminine Image in Kabbalah.” Havruta, no. (2010), 62–69. Rosen, Tova. Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Ross, Tamar. ”A Bet Midrash of Her Own: Women’s Contribution to the Study and Knowledge of Torah,” in Study and knowledge in Jewish Thought, 309–358. Edited by. Howard Kreisel. Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University, 2006. Schäfer, Peter. Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Scholem, Gershom. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. ———. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Waskow, Arthur. ”Feminist Judaism: Restoration of the Moon.” In On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, 261–272. Edited by Susanna Heschel. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Wenger, Ayelet. “Hokhmat Nashim.” The Lehrhaus, January 10, 2018. https:​//​ thelehrhaus​.com​/commentary​/hokhmat​-nashim. Wolfson, Elliot. “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1997), 301–343. Wolkenfeld, Sara. “Imagining Ourselves into the Beit Midrash.” The Lehrhaus, January 13, 2020. https:​//​thelehrhaus​.com​/commentary​/imagining​-ourselves​-into​ -the​-beit​-midrash. Zlochower, Devorah. “May Women Touch a Torah Scroll?” In Ta Shma. The Halakhic Source Guide Series, 1–22. Edited by Rahel Berkovits and Devorah Zlochower. New York: JOFA, 2008

LIST OF BIBLICAL AND TALMUDIC SOURCES Deuteronomy 33:4. Ibn Ezra on Hosea 2:21.

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Rashi on Proverbs 31:10. bT Berachot 24a. bT Berakhot 57a. bT Megillah 23a. bT Sotah 48a. bT Kiddushin 70a. Zohar 3:116b. Zohar 3:166a–192a.

NOTES 1. Victoria Hanna, “‫אורייתא‬,” YouTube video, 03:26, October 29, 2014, www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=flXrfUTK15c. 2. MAZKEKA, “MAZKEKA,” accessed August 26, 2022, www​.mazkeka​.com​/. 3. Ayelet Dekel, “Victoria Hanna—Debut Album,” Midnight East, May 4, 2017, www​.midnighteast​.com​/mag​/​?p​=36791. 4. Victoria Hanna, “‫אורייתא‬,” YouTube video, 03:39, June 20, 2019, www​.youtube​ .com​/watch​?v​=yRfd7vL8wpc. 5. For a reflection on how (theatrical) performances can serve as opportunities to negotiate Jewish tradition see Yair Lipshitz, “The Stage as a Space for Midrash: Theatre and the Jewish Hermeneutic Project,” in Jewish Theatre. Tradition in Transition and Intercultural Vistas, ed. Ahuva Belkin (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2008), 11–23. 6. Ruthie Abeliovich, “Envoicing the Future: Victoria Hanna’s Exterior Voice,” Theatre Research International, no. 2 (2009), 159–161. 7. Sarit Cofman-Simhon, “Performing Jewish Prayer on Stage: From Rituality to Theatricality and Back,” in Performance Studies in Motion. International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Atay Citron, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and David Zerbib (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 254–255. 8. Yehuda Liebes, Studies in the Zohar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 88. 9. Klaus S. Davidowicz, Die Kabbala: Eine Einführung in die Welt der jüdischen Mystik und Magie (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 74; Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River flows from Eden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 31–32. 10. Boas Huss, “Sefer haZohar as a Canonical, Sacred and Holy Text,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 7, no. 2(1998): 257–258. 11. Karl Erich Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken. Theologie—Philosophie—Mystik: Von der mittelalterlichen Kabbala zum Hasidismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005), 527–531. 12. Talya Fishman, “A Kabbalistic Perspective on Gender-Specific Commandments: On the Interplay of Symbols and Society,” AJS Review 17, no. 2 (1992), 230. 13. Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 189. 14. Devine offers a detailed overview: Luke Devine, “How Shekhinah Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism,” Feminist Theology 23, no. 1 (2014), 78. Of mention

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is also Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). 15. Peter Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 128–131. 16. Biti Roi, “Divine Qualities and Real Women. The Feminine Image in Kabbalah,” Havruta, no. 3 (2010), 63, 65. 17. Devine, “How Shekhinah Became the God(dess) of Jewish Feminism,” 78. 18. Elliot Wolfson, “Coronation of the Sabbath Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgynisation,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1997), 304. 19. Elchanan Adler, “Kabbalas Shabbos: Welcoming the Sabbath in Body and Spirit,” Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy, no. 33 (2016), 2. 20. Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 174–176. 21. Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden, 35. 22. Arthur Waskow, “Feminist Judaism: Restoration of the Moon,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susanna Heschel. (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 261–272. 23. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 126; Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 176. 24. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 106; Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 174–176. 25. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 129. 26. Zohar 3:166b. 27. Zohar 3:166a–192a. Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 470–471; Daniel C. Matt, The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Volume Nine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), xi. 28. Matt, The Zohar, 96–98; see also Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden, 163–165 for an intra-Zoharic reading of this text. 29. Mishlei 5,19, in Jewish Publication Society, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985). 30. Matt, The Zohar, 96. 31. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 126. 32. Luke Devine, “Active/Passive, ‘Diminished’/‘Beautiful,’ ‘Light’ from Above and Below: Rereading Shekhinah’s Sexual Desire in Zohar Al Shir Ha-Shirim (Song of Songs),” Feminist Theology 28, no. 3 (2020), 298. 33. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005), 7. 34. Grözinger, Jüdisches Denken, 523. 35. Domagoj Akrap and Klaus S. Davidowicz, Kabbalah (Vienna: Kerber, 2018), 102, 246. 36. Carol Martin, “Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon and Israel,” in Get Real. Documentary Theatre Past and Present, ed. Alison Forsynth and Chris Megson (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2009), 83–84.

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37. bT Berachot 24a; bT Kiddushin 70a; bT Sotah 48a; Mosheh Lichtenstein, “Kol Isha: A Woman’s Voice,” Tradition 46 no. 1 (2013), 9–10. 38. Lev Nordstrom, “Victoria Hanna—The Album,” August 17, 2018, www​ .greedyforbestmusic​.com​/journal​/family​/victoria​-hanna​-the​-album. 39. Martin, “Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon and Israel,” 83. 40. See, for instance, Hanna’s performance “The Aleph-bet song (Hosha’ana),” YouTube video, 03:51, February 3, 2015, youtu.be/Bl1epz3tSSA. An analysis of the video is offered by Hannah Pressman, “The Hebrew Alphabet gets an Orthodox Feminist Makeover,” Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, March 23, 2015, jewishstudies.washington. edu/israel-hebrew/the-hebrew-alphabet-gets-an-orthodox-feminist-makeover. 41. Lev Nordstrom, “Orayta,” June 22, 2019, www​ .greedyforbestmusic​ .com​ / journal​/family​/orayta. Emphasis and punctuation according to the website. 42. Hunt and Lenz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, 7–8. 43. Thomas C. Hubka, “Medieval Themes in the Wall-Paintings of 17th and 18th-Century Polish Wooden Synagogues,” in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other, ed. Eva Frojmovic (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 224. 44. Matt, The Zohar, 96. 45. Fishman, “A Kabbalistic Perspective on Gender-Specific Commandments,” 230. 46. Matt, The Zohar, 96. 47. Moshe Ben Maimon, Mishneh Torah. Sefer Ahava. Hilchot Tfilin, Mezuzah, Sefer Torah. 1180; 10:8; Yosef Karo, Shulchan Arukh: Yoreh De’ah. 1565, 282:9. 48. See also bT Megillah 23a; Of Liadi, Shneur Zalman. Shulchan Arukh HaRav: Orach Chayim. 1814, 88:2. 49. Devorah Zlochower, “May Women Touch a Torah Scroll?” in Ta Shma. The Halakhic Source Guide Series, ed. Rahel Berkovits and Devorah Zlochower (New York: JOFA, 2008), 1–22. 50. Fishman, “A Kabbalistic Perspective on Gender-Specific Commandments,” 239–240. 51. Geoffrey Dennis, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism (Woodbury: Llewellyn, 2007), Numbers: 7. 52. Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty, 133–135. 53. Tamar Ross, “A Bet Midrash of Her Own: Women’s Contribution to the Study and Knowledge of Torah,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University, 2006), 310–311. 54. Ayelet Wenger, “Hokhmat Nashim,” The Lehrhaus, January 10, 2018, thelehrhaus.com/commentary/hokhmat-nashim/; Sara Wolkenfeld, “Imagining Ourselves Into the Beit Midrash,” The Lehrhaus, January 13, 2020, thelehrhaus.com/ commentary/imagining-ourselves-into-the-beit-midrash/. 55. Nordstrom, “Victoria Hanna—The Album.” 56. Cofman-Simhon, “Performing Jewish Prayer on Stage,” 257.

Chapter 5

Djinn, Hauntings, and Double Consciousness An Exploration of Mizrahi Magical Realism Valerie Estelle Frankel

Edot ha-mizrach (Middle Eastern Jewish communities) contrast with Sephardic. In fact, exiles of the 1391 and 1492 expulsions sometimes traveled to these communities only to clash with a culturally far different population. The majority are Judeo-Arabic speakers, dwelling in Sunni Muslim countries from ancient times. However, many governments responded to the creation of Israel by expelling their Jews in the 1950s or intimidating them into leaving. In Israel and other lands, these writers told their stories to a new audience, often incorporating magical realism and fantastical creatures. Noted Mizrahi writers include Anwar Shā’ul (1904–1984), Murād Michael (1906–1986), Shalom Darwīsh (1913–1997), David Semah (1933–1997), Ya’qūb Balbūl (1920–2003), Isḥāq Bār-Moshe (1927–2003), Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004), Mir Baṣrī (1910–2006), Ibrāhīm Ovadia (1924–2006) and Sami Shalom Chetrit (b. 1960). A few Jewish writers from Iraq—such as Samīr Naqqāsh and Yitzhak/Isḥāq Bar Moshe (1927–2010)—continued to write in Arabic. Critic Reuven Snir writes sadly that Israeli Jews who speak Arabic are limited to first-generation immigrants (with decreasing numbers) and those who work with the military or security services. “The canonical Israeli-Jewish elite does not see the Arabic language and culture as an intellectual asset. In the field of literature, there is not even one Jewish writer on record born after 1948 who writes in Arabic.”1

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Of course, Mizrahi Jews span a large area. The Jewish community of Baghdad was the third largest in the Ottoman Empire after Salonika and Istanbul with around 50,000 members in 1910. The Iraqi Jewish community dates back to the Babylonian exile and persevered through different periods of hostility and acceptance. Between 1909 and 1948, Iraqi Jews published eight newspapers, with six Hebrew printing presses in Baghdad. In 1935, there were 24 synagogues in Bagdad, and the 1,400-year-old Great Synagogue predated Islam by a century. After millennia of history, the end of the British mandate and start of Iraqi independence in 1932 coincided with Hitler’s rise to power. Nazi propaganda focused on the question of Zionism in the Middle East, inflating hostility. Of course, postwar, Israel was founded, prompting immediate rage from Arabic nations. While this moment provided a refuge for European Jews, it destabilized the lives of Middle Eastern ones. The mass of Jews in Muslim lands had often found a broadly tolerable form of life, with poverty and humiliation softened by the joys of communal existence, and with strong roots of direct affection to lands which had been their home for so many centuries. ln this setting they seem to have relied on some good relationships with their neighbours, and to that extent had managed to ignore the underlying low status to which they had been consigned. But now, in the Nazi context, every kind of assumed protection seemed to have been shattered, as was shown by the eager way in which Nazi hatred for the Jews acted on those who had often seemed so friendly.2

Across the Muslim-ruled world, governments and leaders had taken advantage of hatred stirred up by Nazis and fanned the flames. “It was if the presence of the Nazis, and their supporters the Vichy French, released in the Muslim world a resentment and hatred they had mostly held in check and to which they could now give free expression. It is easy to see this, looking back; and it must have been evident while the release of hatred was actually happening.”3  Many described their suffering and loss through writing, some using the deeper art of magical realism. SAMĪR NAQQĀSH Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004), who was born in Baghdad and emigrated to Israel in 1951, continued to write in Arabic, unlike the other emigres. Naqqāsh describes choosing Arabic as “connected to the new reality here and the trauma we underwent. This resulted in a kind of roadblock between me and not only the language but everything that is Israeli.”4

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Naqqāsh reports trying different techniques, adding, “In my last novel, the narrative is based on parallelism in which several time frames are depicted simultaneously, jumping back and forth in time, from the present to the past and future. All the events are fragmented, and they must be put together by the reader like a puzzle.”5 This celebrated book, Tenants and Cobwebs (1986), depicts life for Iraqi Jews with colloquialisms and holiday customs. It follows the daily lives of thirty characters, eighteen Jews and twelve Muslims, in an apartment complex in 1940s Bagdad. The book explores the subtly rising antisemitism during the Iraqi nationalism followed by the 1941 pogrom known as the Farhûd, and the founding of Israel in 1948. These history-changing events transformed Muslim-Jewish relationships, eventually leading to a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1951. May 1941 shows Nazis herding Jews into the school courtyard. “An angry smoke rose from the Nazi and was aimed at my chest from the mouth of the Angel of Death.”6 Selman Hashwah prays for God to spare him, and another Nazi intervenes as they argue like an angel and a devil. Selman Hashwah concludes, “The angels of mercy triumphed. They freed us, the night of the first of May 1941!”7 As he stumbles away, he decides the sleeping demons have roused and filled the land with death. When he returns home, apparitions greet him: My late mother, a jinni with unkempt hair and bared teeth, sharpened her claws and screamed like a starved wolf, “Kill him, cut him into pieces! I’m hungry. I want to eat!” My own father was an odd and deformed wild animal. His face had one eye above his nose, and a horn grew above his eye. He had a tail like a snake, bent on encircling me. He yelled at me in a voice neither human nor animal, “You killed the prophets! You’re a spy. You signaled to the airplanes. You should die, should die.” My aunt was a ghoul, a demon appearing in ever-changing shapes. Sometimes she resembled an old jinni or a mentally deformed human with an unsatisfied appetite for human flesh. I retreated screaming, barking like a dog. “For God’s sake, I haven’t done anything. Don’t butcher me! Don’t kill me! Don’t eat me!” They hugged me as if they were strangling me.8

The Farhûd, a dreadful and unmitigated assault on the Jews of Baghdad in the summer of 1941, was encouraged by the German ambassador to Baghdad, Fritz Grobba, and the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Unruly mobs, including soldiers and policemen, attacked Jewish homes, killing 190 and injuring more than two thousand Jews. Many women were raped, and hundreds of Jewish businesses were burned and looted. After the Farhûd, ‘Atoyah dreams of a beautiful garden where the Messiah has come and ended prejudice and death. When she asks whether the Farhûdwill ever happen again, she’s laughingly told, “What Farhûdare you talking about? Can’t you see that all people are brothers?”9

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Fantastical imagery abounds as Jews and Muslims who love each other resemble ghosts hiding in the ruins. Amam, Ya’qub’s mother narrates: “At night the ghosts are many. The night is a dark hiding place for humans and ghosts. . . . The ghosts are many. They are human and nonhuman. . . . Baghdad was a desert of danger and fright. The night was a devilish trap—a kiss, a sigh, whispers, hopes, and secrets.”10 The magical imagery also becomes a sign of evil rising. Na’imah, the barber’s wife, seeks a loan for a bribe, and Ya’qub thinks, “Why has Fayig now become cruel like our government: The devil’s fire is flickering in his face . . . There was no mistake; the devil’s exhaust came out of Fayig’s nostrils like black smoke rising from burnt food. For the first time I feared him.”11 As he wonders, “What was happening in the world? Fayig was surely possessed, or the devil had certainly controlled him. The devil was everywhere, and trials and tribulations were spreading like a flood. Didn’t Nahhudi piss on the doorstep of the house again? The devil was stubborn and didn’t surrender easily.”12 People’s imaginary fancies and foes take on life—as Sabriyah dreams she’s on the train to Baghdad. “Suddenly, a shadowy image loomed in front of her and grew into the body of a man, maybe one of the passengers, taking her by surprise. He wore a long garment and skullcap, and he stared at her, shooting arrows that pierced her soul.”13 The graveyard is filled with ghosts. Likewise, Atiyah al-Qarawchi is horrified by the public hanging that exemplifies the growing anti-Jewish sentiment. Threatened for begging in the street and terrified, she collects rotten vegetables from the garbage. “When I opened my ‘abayah and saw scorpions and snakes I was amazed and thought I was out of my mind because I had picked the vegetables with my own hands. I wondered what had happened and how the vegetables had turned into reptiles, ants, and cockroaches. Damn the devil. Help! The whole alley is inhabited by demons.”14 Her world has turned dark and filled with monsters. When Sa’idah Ghawi considers marriage and conversion in order to stay, she narrates, “I touched it—the other destiny. The Torah was there with the ghosts. I used to fast on Yom Kippur. From now on, would I fast during Ramadan? I embraced the Koran in order to escape from the evil spirits.”15 Ghosts and demons are the only lens through which their inner and outer conflicts make sense. As such, the subtle fantasy elements blend naturally into the history and provide a conduit to understanding the conflict. In 1948, Israel’s statehood incited fury from the Iraqi government. Jews were removed from many areas of Iraqi public life, especially the government. Soon enough, Iraq announced it was time for the Jews to leave, ending thousands of years of culture. More than one hundred thousand Iraqi Jews hastened to immigrate.

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Here begin Naqqāsh’s short stories, in Israeli resettlement camps. Many of the Mizrahi immigrants “started life in the dreary and sometimes unbearable physical conditions endured by the mass immigrants from eastern countries, but managed, somehow, to make a success of the meagre educational opportunities.”16 There was a colossal shortage of educational facilities and qualified teachers in the camps and early development towns. A social contrast, with baleful effects for the future, soon became evident in the superior ability of Ashkenazi children to take advantage of what was available. They had better conditions at home, and their parents could help with guidance and motivation. The contrast was self-perpetuating. Many [Mizrahi] children simply dropped out of school; compared with Ashkenazi children, relatively few went on to high schools, for which fees were required in those days; still fewer went to college. The social effects of this were disastrous. With poor educational backgrounds, [Mizrahi] youth found it hard to get anything but unskilled work or any jobs at all.17

Naqqāsh tells stories of growing up in Iraq to his grandmother’s stories of jinn and demons (daewat and sa’ali). Among these, Tantal was a fun trickster jinn whose stories were particularly delightful. The narrator’s grandmother adds that the children’s uncle and many others have seen him. “He does not hurt, really, he just likes practical jokes. He appears in all sorts of forms, now a cat or a lamb, now a piece of thread. His jokes are funny.”18 The uncle tells of being in the army and encountering a shackled giant unaffected by bullets, a shocking encounter that left him bedridden for months. Tantal arrived as a short misshapen man who asked for more and more food until the uncle hurled him out. Another time, he was a clingy black cat, banished in the name of God. The narrator becomes obsessed with seeing Tantal himself. As characters claim to have seen him, the narrator is eager to join in the magic. As a shapeshifter, he’s a symbol of instability that will come to represent the family’s own fate. Soon the family is expelled from Iraq and moves to Israel. “Al-Sibaq al-Qadeem suburb had vanished and instead tents replaced uprooted trees. A faded gray tent had replaced our huge mansion.”19 As the narrator is miserable, his uncle tells him Tantal has followed them all from Bagdad. As he adds, “such stories are scary now. We can barely stand up, and if we see things like that now, we’ll be finished.”20 Tantal is a mixture of certainty and uncertainty, despite the apparent absurdity of this contradiction. The demon is at once real and unreal, because he constantly appears and disappears, and changes his shape. In Baghdad, the Jews were able to accept his presence without too much dread, whereas in Israel, having lost their sense of security and confidence, they begin to

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perceive him as threatening. In other words, the fear of Tantal represents the fear of losing the mainstays of life: a stable, traditional lifestyle, a regular livelihood, a secure future, etc.21 As decades pass, the narrator decides Tantal is life’s only certainty and everything else is an illusion. Swimming, he is carried into the deep water, and Tantal finally comes as a lifesaving giant hand. . . . one that teases and lures him farther and farther out. He ends the story rejecting the hand and swimming for the coast as Tantal mocks him from the water. “In Baghdad, too, the Jews were perceived as outsiders, not as an integral part of the Iraqi people—but the sense of alienation that envelops them in Israel is much more profound.”22 When a friend tells the narrator that he believes in science, the narrator replies that he believes in Tantal, because Tantal is truth and certainty, contrasted with a world of illusion. His stories are often Kafkaesque, using transformation to show alienation. For instance, in the title story of the collection I, They and Ambivalence, the Jews who immigrate to Israel lose their humanity and turn into sheep. Other characters transform into bugs and crickets in Israel, emphasizing their dehumanization. Naqqāsh explains, “Reality is not something with a beginning and an end, with a fixed point of view. I would claim that what is called the absurd, symbolism, the fluidity of a style with no beginnings or endings—all of this disorder is our reality. This is our life.”23 An excerpt from The Angels’ Genitalia (1991) takes the narrator through Ben Gurian Airport, where he’s regarded with suspicion. The security barrier divides people and provokes fear “until it seems as if this fear came down from heaven with Harouth and Marouth, the two sinful angels, to lodge itself within the human soul.”24 He wonders if he looks like a terrorist and as they try to trick him into false confessions, a massive stream of consciousness takes over. As he thinks: Those very events drawn, or rather, chiseled into my memory as it were a marble slab. Between the rising of two suns and their miserable setting. They’re crowded and painful. Like my name and the look on this man’s face. They aren’t shrouded by the fog of the ethereal creatures stretched out in graves within foolish minds hovering over legendary skies. The demonic hand of an “angel” passed through the front lines of my wit at the end of that day and wiped the dust off, then a crystalline light sparkled and faded before this beginning that still stumbles and limps like my wooden leg.25

In The Day the World Became Pregnant and Miscarried, a 1980 collection, three stories follow Iraqi Jews immigrating to Israel. In the title story, human relations devolve into bestial ones and the synagogue where they celebrate Yom Kippur is filled with sinners who likewise revel in sin. All

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this emphasizes local hypocrisy and explores how much society has divorced itself from individual rights. Not only do the characters fail to transcend themselves during the holy moments of the Closing Prayer, they give in to their basest instincts or discover the most despicable truths. One character, an ageing man named Isḥāq ‘Īdā, loses himself in erotic fantasies about the boy praying next to him, while the protagonist, Shaul Hillel, discovers that his wife is being unfaithful to him. The reality described in the story is repulsive, sordid and corrupt. Fleeing from the synagogue, the protagonist is moved to ask: “Is the moment of the world’s destruction coming near?” Though Shaul Hillel attempts to escape, the symbols of corruption prevail, with tragic results.26 In the story “Willow Night,” after the Israeli immigration, the narrator’s father, younger brother and grandmother all perish. Naqqāsh adds, “All the disorder of writing is reality. We cannot even control our own thoughts, we can’t even know what we will think about in the next moment. The past, the future, everything gets mixed up, that is reality.”27 The reality in the story is silent, frozen, barren and devoid of emotion, whereas the world of childhood, which the narrator attempts to recreate, is innocent and whole, “a world that has the wings of angels wrapped around it. We filled that world with innocence and joy brimming over” (p. 163). The narrator yearns for “the fragrance of the earth in which God planted the Garden of Eden and later destroyed it because of man’s sins.” (p. 173)28

In another, two sisters care for Menashe the ragman, a demonic, corrupting influence. Their goodness was formed in Bagdad, but their new home is a disappointment: even as they try to pluck red and blue suns and replant them in their new reality, they are unsuccessful. It ends on an optimistic note, which likewise involves a metamorphosis: the arm of the younger sister becomes like “the branch of a tree in early spring, wearing fresh green leaves . . . The palm, filled with the gift of their legendary love, becomes like a spring of sweet healing waters, in which a hundred thirsty, trusting beaks are dipped.”29 This sort of corruption, found in a callous, degrading Israel, is a focus of many of the stories, highlighted by hallucinations from the bible and fantasy. In his “Prophesies of a Madman in a Cursed City” the narrator stumbles through the streets only to have God command him to go and wed. He staggers through the wasteland tormented by God’s commandments and wanders into a den of sin. As he tells God: I see a wasteland, my Lord, filled with bodies, and I see the bodies; they are the bodies of men and women. And they are naked as you created them, shamelessly exposed. And behold, the naked bodies are rising to their feet. The men, my Lord, are seeking the women, and the women, my Lord, are seeking the

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men. I see them all craving flesh and in this frenzied, delirious craving, the male is drawn to the female and the female drawn to the male. Some kind of unstoppable match is taking place in which the players make no distinctions between one another nor is anything loathsome to them. A father refrains not from coupling with his daughter nor does a sister recoil from mating with her brother. Each cleaves to the other. Then the wilderness returns heaped with naked, enmeshed bodies.30

Next, they worship a golden calf as the narrator cries out to Him and despairs. He’s the prophet, but cannot change the world around him. He calls Gomer, his destined bride, a “sorceress with bloodsucking fangs” and brings her the blood she longs to drink.31 She betrays him to the police, and his children become lascivious sinners. As he stumbles through the landscape, God orders him to flee. He does. “And all the citizens of that city are after me, the city in which people are dead and God has a heart of stone, the Devil does whatever finds favor in his eyes.”32 Naqqāsh’s story “The Death of Santa Claus” follows an unpopular teacher, Grasia Farhud, who wears a Santa Claus costume. As the father lies about, depressed, he promises to see Santa is punished, but the young narrator understands that his father has lost all power. “While the teacher tries to hide her corrupt nature under the guise of a saint, the boy Napoléon Kaku is her complete opposite, for his unclean exterior hides a pure soul. Both these characters convey the same message: that corruption and purity are not physical traits but rather spiritual ones, which cannot be discerned by the eye.”33 Meanwhile, seeing through the lies of human existence represents growing up and is directly compared with leaving the Garden of Eden. MORE AUTHORS Isḥāq Bār-Moshe (1927–2003) writes a story of a child afraid of lurking mysteries in “al-Sirdāb” (The Cellar). Indeed, his grandmother has told him a genie dwells there. Throughout his childhood, he’s intensely curious but holds back from going in, instead questioning everyone else who visits the space. At last, he ventures down. “The narrator’s obsession is highly reminiscent of the retreat and seclusion striven for by medieval Muslim ascetics (zuhhād) and mystics (ṣūfīs), who sought to escape the world of human passions in order to find refuge in the divine essence.”34 When he finally attempts it, he sees the genie in a striking mystical encounter with the divine truth: He felt his eyes almost pop out of their sockets. His body turned to stone and his eyelids were motionless. Then he felt a wondrous stillness abounding in his soul

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and purifying his thoughts and cleansing his blood and turning the air around him into a startling display of glowing light. Actually, this was the light of the gloom. His eyes were glued to the light that emanated from the silvery void of her mysterious eyes; then he was able to see, through the light of her eyes, the fullness of her body. Was this the body of a child or of a grown woman? The perfect harmony of her body was a thing greater than any of the beautiful pictures he knew. The eyes gazed deeply into his soul, shining and serene, radiating a silvery light.35

This is a moment of transcendence, a transformative experience for the child. For Bār-Moshe, “Some of his stories also include themes from modern Arabic science fiction and fantasy literature, especially with regard to the encounter with the higher essence. The combination of the mystical drive, sexual energy, and fantastic zeal is found in his stories as well as in the writings of other modern Arab authors.”36 Shlomo Avayou, who emigrated to Israel from Izmir, Turkey, as a teenager, grew up speaking Judeo-Spanish. As he translates Spanish into Hebrew, he experiments with poetry of boundary-crossing, even as he creates other pieces like Judeo-Spanish opera La boda de los huercos (“The Wedding of the Spirits”). In his poem “Wildweed,”37 he describes how “God’s blaze laid the city waste.”38 Even as the people flee, fire purifies the flesh of the city. In “You Have to Abandon Jerusalem,”39 he watches diggers at the walls and wonders whether they expect to find “the shadow of the shekhina” or an angel’s wing.40 He describes how the entrapping walls don’t make this a place of beauty and freedom as much as confinement. Albert Swissa from Morocco writes of his family’s expulsion after a thousand years there in “Escaping the Cauldron Unscathed” from his first book, Bound. He describes the transition of assimilation with magic, explaining, “In our eleven-member family’s two-room apartment there was space enough for the thousands of letters that floated in the air and joined to form word-objects, word experiences.”41 As he goes on, he clutches the shreds of magic around him as they crumble away in the transformative times: In the final analysis, for good or ill, there is one very damaging fact: in the cauldron of the generation that founded the state, whole cultures melted into oblivion, were eroded, vanished—life experiences, gestures, customs, sights, smells, sounds, languages, people—all, among them the creatures of my childhood, sank slowly into the sea of modernity before my eyes, nothing remaining of them but scant archival shards of folklore. Though this is supposedly the way of the world, I balk at taking comfort in it, and rebuke myself as God rebuked the ministering angels after He had drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea: “My creatures are drowning and you sing songs of praise?!” I am driven almost obsessively to write because it is writing alone, “magic words” alone, that can

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restore us at once to the lost realm of childhood; in writing alone is there the comfort of reconstructing the illusion—so very necessary to our sanity—that our past is not doomed to be lost and forgotten, that it may come back to us with renewed meaning.42

Shoshannah Shababo had a father whose family had come from Cordoba and lived long in Safed, with a mother from Iran. Her story “Simha’s Wondrous Spell” features Yael, wed to the Scholar but infatuated with the Skeptic, who meets with goyim. Simha arrives to offer “fervid women’s magic spells to appease the womb” with fishbones, goat hair, and the blood of a dove.43 Simha puts her in a bath “pouring magic waters over her head and whispering the names of phantoms and witches, spirits and sons of spirits and strange shadows never before heard of.”44 Three wives before her had died, thanks to a curse on the Scholar. Now, this feminine magic is hoped to change her destiny. After this, however, she’s taken over by a dybbuk, flirting and joking brazenly and producing a child that may not be her husband’s. The story ends in disgrace as the scholar divorces her. Such a story celebrates the power of women’s magic even while exploring how it intersects with the superstitious culture of everyday village life. Uziel Hazan was born in Casablanca and emigrated to Israel at age ten in 1955. In his novel, The Mark of Berberia, Caliph is released after twenty years of imprisonment and obsesses over the myth of the mark of Berberia that clings to him as a mark of shame. Hallucinating, “outcast from the tribe of bipeds, he crawled and slithered on his belly. He could not recall the directions of the four winds because he had lost his way, and his memory was extinguished.”45 His striped tsamir falls and he imagines himself as Adam in Eden, though he decides the garden is worthless to him, deprived of memory as he is. “Caliph was like a being from another planet. He did not know his name, he did not remember from whence he had come or whence he should go.”46 Prison leaves him a dissociated animal, unable to function. Here the metaphor of memory loss shows his disassociation after prison, while bible imagery helps him to cope. In his hallucinations, he has beheld the angel of death “just a formless invertebrate of violet-magenta hue.”47 The keys too resemble living creatures to him, swinging like bells of freedom. The savagery here reflects the culture of war that permeates Israeli society and “already creeps into the house with children’s’ toys,” as the author attests in his introduction to the story.48 Gina B. Nahai left Iran as a child just before the revolution and finally reached America. There, she wrote about her community’s experience to share with modern readers. Cry of the Peacock (1991) follows the seer Peacock through a century of Iranian Jewish history. Her great-grandmother, Esther the Soothsayer, lived as a harem maid and was thus unmarriageable

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by other Jews. Still, “she could look in the palm of a newborn child and tell of its destiny, make potions and wrote spells that made barren women pregnant, kept fear out of the hearts of old men, returned husbands gone astray.”49 As Peacock struggles with power and its lack, she finally runs away and convinces one of the more persecuted Jewish men to marry her. She dreams that their child will be wise and dazzling. When their beautiful child is born premature, however, she’s condemned as a harlot and driven away. Peacock, meanwhile, has a vision of her mother Layla drowning in the mikvah well moments before this happens. “Claimed by the ghosts of the drowned women. Claimed by the well.”50 Peacock saves her mother but something vital is lost in the water. Fertility charms and rituals emphasize the desperation to bear a son through Jewish prayer and magic in this saga of a vanished culture. Nahai’s Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (1999) explores women’s lives in the Jewish ghetto of Tehran and the wealthier areas nearby. This magic realism novel begins by describing the narrator Lili’s mother Roxana the Angel, who “had been so light and delicate, so undisturbed by the rules of gravity and the drudgery of human existence, she had grown wings, one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams, and flown into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her.”51 The novel goes on to explain that flying and fleeing her husband and child were predestined for Roxana. When her sister Miriam the Moon comes to tell her their mother has committed suicide, she senses the pain within the house through a fantasy lens. “There are ghosts in this house that have been asleep for a long time. One false move, and they will all wake up and haunt you to your grave.”52 By naming the ghosts, she conjures them, and they begin stealing the fancy décor. With each disappearance, the family fire servants and accuse friends until soon they’re all alone. This isolation reflects their place in society. Miriam also gives Roxana their mother’s tear jar, into which she poured her sorrows. Shut in her room all day, Roxana despairs, then finally makes her way to the window and flies off. Her magic clearly reflects her desperation for freedom, which she finally embodies in this beautiful avian image. Caspian Rain (2007) sees a Jewish family haunted by their dead son, endlessly bicycling. His sister Bahar remembers when Ghost Brother nearly drowned her and she heard a voice that made her run forever—“I’m drowning here, look in the dark and see me.”53 She has grown up less desired than a boy, with parents who would have preferred her death to her brother’s. After she marries a very rich man who doesn’t love her, the culture in Tehran is heavily explored—the rift between rich and poor, the trends, the Western influence. The realities of women’s lives come to prominence, often trapped and abused in a society that won’t protect them. Contrasted with this is the image of the rain, the mist, the Caspian Sea and its exotic green waters. As her deafness progresses, Bahar’s daughter Yas finally learns the truth—each generation,

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her family has denied the condition out of shame. Still there is hope as Yas compares her life to a fairytale: ‘I do believe that I can be real in spite of the damage, that I can find my way through the dark and thorny woods . . . and emerge, if not whole, triumphant nevertheless.”54 She tells her story to lay a bridge back to her mother and let her mother see her at last. FINAL THOUGHTS Middle Eastern Jewish stories offer fantastic imagery, but generally in contemporary settings. The magic is eastern spirits and sorcery, but also appears in the magical realism style. Some writers share a distinctly feminine magic, of silent resistance and household charms. Whatever the approach to fantasy, the authors use it to mourn their homelands, stolen from them in the postwar unrest. Of course, this split becomes a source of pain, as the writers consider how much they’ve lost. Turning this dual identity into a melancholy joke, Gagou, an autobiographical novel by Tunisian writer Guy Sitbon, who left with his family in the sixties, ends with the following dialogue: “Let’s be clear: are you Jewish or Arab?” “Both.” “Half and half?” “No, both, fully.” “And when they fight each other, what side are you on?” “On the wailing side.”55

BIBLIOGRAPHY Avayou, Shlomo. “Wildweed.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, 255–256. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. ———. “You Have to Abandon Jerusalem.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, 259–260. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. Bār-Moshe, Isḥāq. “The Cellar.” In Arab-Jewish Literature, edited by Reuven Snir. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018. Boudraa, Nabil and Joseph Krause. North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Elimelekh, Geula. “Kafkaesque Metamorphosis as Reflected in the Works of Samir Naqqash.” Journal of Semitic Studies LVIII/2 (Autumn 2013): 323–342. doi: 10.1093/jss/fgt005

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Hazan, Uziel. “From The Mark of Berberia.” In Keys to the Garden:  New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay, translated by Marsha Weinstein. 1991, 134– 140. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. Nahai, Gina B. Caspian Rain. San Francisco: MacAdam Cage, 2007. ———. Cry of the Peacock New York: Crown, 1991. ———. Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1999. Naqqāsh, Samīr. “From The Angels’ Genitalia.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay. Translated by Ammiel Alcalay and Ali Jimale Ahmed, 124–132. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. ———. “Prophesies of a Madman in a Cursed City.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay. Translated by Ammiel Alcalay and Ali Jimale Ahmed, 111–124. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. ———. “Signs in the Great Disorder: An Interview with Samir Naqqash.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay, interviewed and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, 101–111. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. ———. “Tantal.” In Contemporary Iraqi Fiction, edited and translated by Shakir Mustafa, 116–129. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. ———. Tenants and Cobwebs. Translated by Sadok Masliyah. 1986. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Raphael, Chaim. The Road from Babylon: The Story of Sephardi and Oriental Jews. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Shababo, Shoshannah. “Simha’s Wondrous Spell.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay, translated by Marsha Weinstein, 1–9. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. Snir, Reuven. “The Arab Jews: Language, Poetry, and Singularity.” Qantara, December 18, 2009. en.qantara.de/content/the-arab-jews-language-poetry-and-singularity. ———. Arab-Jewish Literature. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018. Swissa, Albert. “Escaping the Cauldron Unscathed.” In Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited by Ammiel Alcalay. translated by Marsha Weinstein, 187– 191. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996.

NOTES 1. Reuven Snir, “The Arab Jews: Language, Poetry, and Singularity,” Qantara, December 18, 2009, en.qantara.de/content/the-arab-jews-language-poetry-and-singularity. 2. Chaim Raphael, The Road from Babylon: The Story of Sephardi and Oriental Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 214. 3. Raphael, 214. 4. Samīr Naqqāsh, “Signs in the Great Disorder: An Interview with Samir Naqqash,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. and trans. Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 108. 5. Naqqāsh, “Signs,” 109. 6. Samīr Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, trans. Sadok Masliyah (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 92.

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7. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 93. 8. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 99. 9. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 111. 10. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 211. 11. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 256. 12. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 249. 13. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 83. 14. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 254. 15. Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, 286. 16. Raphael, 246. 17. Raphael, 246. 18. Samīr Naqqāsh, “Tantal,” in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction, ed. and trans. Shakir Mustafa (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 118. 19. Naqqāsh, “Tantal,” 123. 20. Naqqāsh, “Tantal,” 125. 21. Geula Elimelekh, “Kafkaesque Metamorphosis as Reflected in the Works of Samir Naqqash,” Journal of Semitic Studies LVIII/2 (Autumn 2013): 335. 22. Elimelekh, 335. 23. Naqqāsh, “Signs,” 106. 24. Samīr Naqqāsh, “From  The Angels’ Genitalia,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Ali Jimale Ahmed (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 124. 25. Naqqāsh, “Angel’s,” 127. 26. Elimelekh, 328. 27. Naqqāsh, “Signs,” 106. 28. Elimelekh. 329. 29. Elimelekh. 329. 30. Samīr Naqqāsh, “Prophesies of a Madman in a Cursed City,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Ali Jimale Ahmed (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 113. 31. Naqqāsh, “Prophesies,” 115. 32. Naqqāsh, “Prophesies,” 124. 33. Elimelekh, 333. 34. Reuven Snir, Arab-Jewish Literature (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018). 35. Isḥāq Bār-Moshe, “The Cellar,” in Arab-Jewish Literature, edited by Reuven Snir (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018). 36. Snir, Arab-Jewish Literature. 37. Shlomo Avayou, “Wildweed,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. and trans. Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 255–256. 38. Avayou, “Wildweed,” 255, line 2. 39. Shlomo Avayou, “You Have to Abandon Jerusalem,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. and trans. Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 259–260. 40. Avayou, “You Have,” 259, line 4.

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41. Swissa, Albert. “Escaping the Cauldron Unscathed,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, trans. Marsha Weinstein (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 189. 42. Swissa, 190–191. 43. Shoshannah Shababo, “Simha’s Wondrous Spell,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, trans. Marsha Weinstein. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 4. 44. Shababo, 4. 45. Uziel Hazan, “From The Mark of Berberia,” in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay, trans. Marsha Weinstein (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 138. 46. Hazan, 138. 47. Hazan, 135. 48. Hazan, 133. 49. Gina B. Nahai, Cry of the Peacock (New York: Crown, 1991), 9. 50. Nahai, Peacock, 120. 51. Gina B. Nahai, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1999), 5. 52. Nahai, Moonlight, 141. 53. Gina B. Nahai, Caspian Rain (San Francisco: MacAdam Cage, 2007), 51. 54. Nahai, Caspian Rain, 285. 55. quoted in Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause, North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 66.

Chapter 6

Alternate History and Jewish Anxiety in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America Ilana Goldstein

In many of his novels, Philip Roth explores the limits of history and historical representation through his re-narration and reconstruction of the past. In Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, he rewrites history and Charles Lindbergh wins the election instead of FDR. As the real-life Lindbergh was not quiet about his anti-Semitic sentiments and was an admirer of the Nazis, Roth offers readers a horrifyingly believable counter-history in which Lindbergh is able to slowly segregate, demonize and convert Jewish people. Lindbergh’s America sends Jewish-Americans into a “perpetually fearful” state, which leads to the disintegration of the Jewish community within the novel, as they all must find their own means to survive in what could be another genocide. What is reflected in the novel is the post-Holocaust fear within Jewish-Americans, namely the fear that “it could happen here.” While the novel is in fact speculative fiction, it brings forward the very real anxiety experienced by many Jewish-Americans; they dare not stand apart from American mainstream culture, lest they be outed as the “other.” The Plot Against America offers an alternate history which, posthumously, has become far closer to reality than Roth could have ever imagined. In an interview with Hermione Lee for The New Yorker, Roth is asked if the novel is, in any way, a reaction to the Bush Administration and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Roth replies, “Yes, what Bush [was] doing to America disgusted me, just as it has scores of millions of others. But no, this weight has not infiltrated my work as a writer. The Plot Against America is neither an allegory nor a metaphor nor a didactic tract; [it] is about what 87

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it is about, which isn’t now but then.”1 And yet, as the past inevitably permeates the present, what happened “then”—which in The Plot’s case is the unabashed rise in anti-Semitism and looming threat of Jewish persecution— cannot be removed from the “now.” Behind the thin veil of fiction, the themes of political fearmongering, complicity of bystanders, and unacknowledged Jewish persecution feel even more real. Now seventeen years removed from the publication of the novel, the unbridled rise in hate crimes against People of Color, the proliferation and widespread distribution of conspiracy theories, and the emergence of an outspokenly racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic US president have made The Plot Against America a shamefully realistic text. As recently as January 6, 2021, fanatical hatred reached a pinnacle, with those who prefer anarchy to democracy breaching the Capitol Building, seeking to overthrow the government while donning Nazi regalia and sweatshirts reading “Camp Auschwitz.” The “perpetual fear” Roth seeks to highlight through his creation of an alternate history becomes, in a sense, a warning of the dangers minorities constantly face under the ruling class of white supremacy and fanatical Christianity. T. Austin Graham, in his article “On the Possibility of an American Holocaust: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,” asserts that “The Plot Against America . . . belongs to a more recent class of alternate histories that ask whether Americans themselves might not have been vulnerable to the lure of fascism, needing only a push to turn against and repress their fellow-citizens.”2 Graham continues: The family sees America’s Jews subjected to persecution and faced with the possibility of something even worse, but the novel does not attribute all of the danger to Lindbergh’s government, whose actions are mostly limited to surveillance and reshuffling the population. Perhaps more immediately troubling to the Roths is the apparent change in the collective American psyche, with the possibility of an American Holocaust seeming especially likely when average citizens take matters into their own hands.3

Graham’s article, published in 2007, was written only three years after the creation of Facebook and less than a year after the creation of Twitter, both of which offer a platform for radical messages of hate and intolerance. The “push to turn against” now occurs daily online, pushing hateful rhetoric and pedaling ancient conspiracy theories to demonize minorities in America. Roth’s creation of an alternate reality, in which America becomes overwhelmingly reliant on white supremacy and the suppression of non-Christian religions and value systems, offers a fiction that lingers frighteningly close to reality. As Sami Schalk notes in Bodyminds Reimagined, “Speculative fiction allows us to imagine otherwise, to envision an alternative world or future in

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which what exists now has changed or disappeared and what does not exist now, like the ability to live on the moon or interact with the gods, is suddenly real.” Schalk notes that, for marginalized people, speculative fiction can create a “future or alternative space away from oppression[.] Speculative fiction can also be a space to imagine the worst, to think about what could be if current inequalities and injustices are allowed to continue.”4 The Plot Against America is certainly an example of the latter, with the radicalization of white supremacy and anti-Semitism as an increasingly claustrophobic source of Jewish oppression. In Steven H. Silver’s article “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer,” he details the four main categories of Jewish science fiction, which are “Jewish in name; Jewish humor; wish fulfillment; and serious Jewish science fiction.”5 While the first two categories of Jewish science fiction are reliant on relevance of Jewishness and Jewish culture to convey the narrative, the latter two categories are more applicable to The Plot Against America. As Silver notes, Jewish wish fulfillment is commonly conveyed in fictional narratives that seek to “rewrite the Holocaust” and “serious Jewish science fiction” tries to tackle “the questions of Judaism. These stories look at the survival of the religion and culture as well as raise questions that Jewish scholars will have to face at some point in the future.”6 Roth accomplishes both in The Plot Against America; he presents an alternate history adjacent to the unfolding Holocaust in Europe and calls into question the stability of Jewish cultural identity in the American landscape. As Elaine Safer notes in her article “The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility,” the novel “draws attention to the disparity between romantic ideals of equality and justice for all as opposed to the fear and submissiveness of the people who fail to speak out because they are afraid of the consequences.”7 Safer continues to note that The Plot Against America “details the appearance of a fascist and anti-Semitic movement in the United States in the early 1940s, one that many people chose to ignore. The self-deceiving hypocrisy and complacency of a nation that claims to believe in the values and civil liberties in its Constitution is the butt of Roth’s satire.”8 While scholars like Safer focus on the symbolism of Roth’s American Holocaust fantasy, Graham discusses the academic merit of the alternate history Roth presents in The Plot Against America. He poses the question, “how should we go about debating such a hypothetical issue, and why do so at all? The American Holocaust did not happen, at least not in the form that Roth suggests that it could have. Why and how, then, should we talk about something so counter-factual?”9 Graham’s question of historical authenticity highlights a common theme in many of Roth’s novels. As many of his novels reflect some aspects of his own life, Roth often blurs the lines between personal experience, creative embellishment, and historical accuracy. One prime example of Roth’s mingling of history and fiction is his aptly named

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semi-fictional–semi-autobiographical novel The Facts. Written through the narration of one of Roth’s alter-egos and protagonists Nathan Zuckerman, Roth recounts moments in his life that influenced his writing and worldviews. And yet, as the novel is narrated by a fictional character, Roth forces the reader to question Roth’s perception of “the facts” and view the text through a skeptical lens. In the “Preface,” which is written as a letter from Roth to his fictional alter ego and frequent protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, Roth explains, “I have always used the past as the basis for transformation, for, among other things, a kind of intricate explanation of myself to my world.”10 As Morley asserts in her article “Memories of the Lindbergh Administration: Plotting, Genre, and the Splitting of the Self in The Plot Against America,” “Roth is preoccupied with, as is evidenced throughout many of his texts, the processes and reliability of historical memory and the store we place in explaining ourselves through historical memory.”11 In The Facts, Roth recalls conversations with his father in which his father tells him of Roth family’s struggles, which would later influence much of Roth’s work. He recalls, “with bankruptcies, illnesses, and in-laws, with marital dissension and bad loans . . . It wasn’t the first time I was hearing these stories. Narrative is the form that his knowledge takes, and his repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.”12 Roth’s conflation of narrative and knowledge stems from family storytelling, so Roth’s ability to create narratives is reliant on both the knowledge of his lived experience and creative imagination. Roth’s tension between history and fiction can also be seen in his novel The Ghost Writer.13 In the novel, his protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, struggling with his Jewish identity and responsibility to the Jewish community, resurrects Anne Frank and creates an alternate narrative where she escaped Nazi persecution and assumed a new identity to survive in America. Whether it be the plot or an implicit struggle, Roth uses most of his novels as a platform to raise questions about Jewish-American identity and the anxieties that drive Jewish-American culture after the Holocaust. He also presents the frustration experienced by younger generations of Jewish-Americans in the expectation to commemorate, and simultaneous inability to access, the traumatic past persecution of the Jewish People. Many second-generation Holocaust writers feel pressured to represent history without the experience or direct knowledge to contribute to their work. What is lost in historical memory is therefore established in artistic representations of history. Through his artistic expression, he is able to form a relationship with the past. As Graham notes, Roth is “a writer whose most reliable quality is his refusal to be reliable in the least. His most highly-regarded works almost habitually address familiar binaries, oppositions, and taboos, ultimately tearing them down and asserting that true

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knowledge lies somewhere in the hazy middle.”14 The Ghost Writer, the first of the “Zuckerman Trilogy,” highlights two main questions with which secondgeneration authors and artists were faced: first, is it possible to take creative license and “use” the Holocaust to provide a more meaningful product for the individual writer? And second, is it acceptable to provide honest depictions of not-so-perfect Jewish-American life in an era marked by negative depictions of the Jewish People? Roth consistently struggled with these questions in his literature and in his real-life Jewish community. Roth’s call to read between the lines offers readers an opportunity to assess fiction as a form of history and regard history as fiction. In this chapter, I will pose the questions: How does speculative fiction highlight real-life Jewish-American trauma? At the end of the novel, Roth provides a detailed list of the non-fictional American political leaders and non-fictional anti-Semitic historical events; why does Roth include the real history after presenting readers with an alternate version? I will argue that the “fact” beneath the fiction that is The Plot Against America, regardless of imaginative license and embellishment, is the traumatized response to living in perpetual fear. Many of the events illustrated in The Plot Against America oscillate between well-documented “snapshots” of both European and American persecution in the 1930s and 1940s and images crafted to portray the cause of perpetual fear in America. In the novel’s postscript, Roth provides a “Note to the Reader” and asserts that “The Plot Against America is a work of fiction. This postscript is intended as a reference for readers interested in tracking where historical fact ends and historical imaginings begins.”15 By including this statement, Roth implies that, even though he alters the events of history, there are elements of truth and fact within his fantasy. Morley notes that “[in] appropriating history for his plot, Roth conspires against a simplistic reading of the text as either/or, causing the reader to question the grounds of the narrative and the foundation of what he or she believes to be true.”16 By stripping the narrative of historical accuracy, readers of the novel are challenged to find the truth behind the fiction; for example, there was indeed a historical figure named Charles Lindbergh and he did in fact gain fame in both America and Nazi Germany for being both a pilot and an anti-Semite. As Safer points out, in 1941 at an America First meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, “Lindbergh made his most notorious speech against the ‘Jewish race’ as acting ‘for reasons which are not American.’ He decried the threat of Jewish groups: ‘Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.’”17 Roth’s choice to make Lindbergh a U.S. president highlights the lengths that people will go to create an American hero out of an outspoken bigot.

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Roth includes Lindbergh and several other historical figures in the postscript, including FDR, controversial columnist Walter Winchell, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Henry Ford. Winchell, whose fictional character serves as the voice of national anxiety and outrage during the Lindbergh Administration, was in fact a historical critic of Charles Lindbergh for his ties to high-ranking Nazis. Historically and fictionally a fearless critic and gossip columnist, Winchell’s fictional character suffers the fate of being assassinated after a short run for president. By “killing off” Winchell, Roth highlights the death of free speech in moments of upheaval and national unrest. While the real Winchell died of prostate cancer in his seventies, the fictional character’s death reflects the frenzy by which any mob can be swept away with the support and encouragement of a charismatic leader. And finally, Roth includes a character named Henry Ford, who perhaps mirrors his historical counterpart the most out of anyone in the novel. Not only did the historical Ford publish an anti-Semitic newspaper to expose the “Jewish problem” in the U.S., but he gave all of his employees copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the primary texts for conspiracy theories and demonization tactics of the Jewish People. His character, as reflected in the novel, needs little additional fictionalization; the caricature of an anti-Semite already held significant power over the American public as the man who revolutionized American transportation. Fictionally and historically, American citizens turned a blind eye to Ford’s dangerous rhetoric and actions for the sake of economic growth and American industrialization. Another reality that Roth places under the microscope is the threat of assimilation into American culture; many Jewish communities did and do suffer from the anxiety that, the farther the Jewish People stray from one another and historical traditions, the more susceptible to corruption and erasure we become. Zygmunt Bauman argues that “the permanent and irremedial homelessness of the Jews was an integral part of their identity virtually from the beginning of their diasporic history.”18 Bauman asserts that the perpetual sense of foreignness or homelessness is integral to Jewish identity, but is also a distinction that enables anti-Semitic rhetoric, as Jews are forever seen as the “other.” He continues to claim that “A most spectacular distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora was the sheer length of historical time through which these particular ‘foreigners in our midst’ retained their separation, both in the sense of diachronic continuity and synchronic self-identity.”19 However, as Roth illustrates in The Plot Against America, just as many European Jews had become fully assimilated into mainstream European society, American Jews had also assimilated to the dominant, white, and Christian American culture. And yet, they were still viewed as the menacing other and used as a scapegoat for American involvement in the two World Wars. As early as 1920, Henry Ford had already asserted that German-Jewish bankers caused World War I,

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printed the first of ninety-one articles “exposing ‘The International Jew: The World’s Problem,’” and serialized the text of the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion “while claiming the document—and its revelation of a Jewish plan for world domination—to be authentic.”20 Additionally, in 1941, Lindbergh claimed in his speech “Who Are the War Agitators?” that “leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”21 Here, both Ford and Lindbergh have emphasized and demonized Jewish otherness, foreignness, and betrayal of American patriotism. In the actual events of American history, Ford eventually stopped publishing the Dearborn Independent and his and Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic rhetoric was pushed to the outskirts of American politics, while in The Plot Against America, they were successful in demonizing the Jews to the point of potential genocide on American soil. Again, Roth prompts readers to look at historical facts and imagination to highlight a deeper truth; regardless of the outcome, Ford, Lindbergh, and countless other political voices embedded their anti-Jewish propaganda into the minds of everyday Americans. When one of Roth’s protagonists, Philip, who happens to be a fictional depiction of his younger self, is first confronted with the concept of a “Jewish national homeland in Palestine,” he thinks, “We’d already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school . . . Our homeland was America.”22 This reflection by the semi-fictional Philip mirrors a sentiment Roth addresses in The Facts. Though The Facts can also be viewed as a work of fiction, somewhere beneath the two works exists the true thoughts and beliefs Roth tries to obscure in much of his work. He notes: Growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to me indistinguishable. Remember that in those days there was not a new Jewish country, a “homeland,” to foster the range of attachments—the pride, the love, the anxiety, the chauvinism, the philanthropy, the chagrin, the shame—that have, for many American Jews now over forty, complicated anew the issue of Jewish self-definition. Nor was there quite the nostalgia for the old Jewish country that Broadway later began to merchandise with the sentimentalizing of Sholom Aleichem.23

Safer notes that “Philip’s fear of horrors after the fascistic government takes over contrasts with his earlier sense of peace with himself, his religion, his family, and his country. Prior to 1940, Philip and his Jewish American family are at ease with their American homeland and their Jewishness.”24 Roth points to the unspoken threat posed by everyday American people who do not like

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Jewish people in The Plot Against America. While the younger generations see America as a place to thrive and cultivate their own identities, even as it might cause them to stray from the Jewish community, the older generation fears that there can be no real safety because the world had always sought to persecute the Jews. As Marianne Hirsch notes, “The growth of our memory culture may . . . be a symptom of a need for individual and group inclusion in a collective membrane forged by a shared inheritance of multiple traumatic histories and the individual and social responsibility we feel toward a persistent and traumatic past.”25 Within more traditional communities, the memorialization of Jewish persecution began long before the Holocaust. Tragedy is a prevalent theme throughout Jewish history, so Jewish-Americans came to understand their history as a series of catastrophic events. As Diner lays out in detail, these events included, but were not limited to, “the Crusades with their bloody extirpations of the Jews of the Rhineland, . . . the vast massacres in Poland in the seventeenth century, the pogroms that commenced in the 1880s in Russia.”26 The tragedies throughout Jewish history have become a source for commemorative practices and can be found in the Jewish Bible. Using the cultural trauma of nomadic Judaism as a foundation, The Plot Against America is also reflective of the “Jewish psyche” and the fear that, at any moment, history could repeat itself. But what Roth is able to accomplish by creating the character of Philip is a glimpse into the process of realizing anti-Semitic potentialities in the United States. As Safer notes, Philip “gradually realizes that because he and his family are Jews, they are treated as aliens in their own country. It is as though the United States had declared war on them.”27 Once Philip recognizes that the U.S. government has condoned and enhanced anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence, his view of the country he formerly believed was his homeland became warped by fear. On the first page of the novel, Philip reflects on his experiences during the Lindbergh Administration and thinks, “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.”28 It is worth noting that Philip does not refer to himself as Jewish, but rather as the “offspring of Jews,” which highlights his belief that he had no choice but to exist as a Jew in America. The statement also reflects his perception throughout the novel that, until the overt oppression of Jewish-Americans began, he saw himself and his family as simply Americans. And yet, “the effect of the anti-Semitic treatment is painfully viewed through the eyes of Philip, who reacts as only a young boy would. He tries to divorce himself from history, from being a Jew.”29 Philip even tries to sneak into a Catholic orphanage, believing that his best chance

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to be accepted in society is to remove himself from his Jewish family and assume the identity of a white, Christian American. While Philip watches the gradual rise in American anti-Semitism, he also watches his brother Sandy seek to break away from the family under Lindbergh’s initiative to send Jewish people to rural locations to assimilate into the acceptable white, Christian culture of America. After Sandy returns from Kentucky, after having been successfully “integrated” into American society, he is received by his family with anger and fear. After an argument with his parents, Sandy calls his father paranoid, a word that Philip did not yet know or understand. When Philip asks Sandy what “paranoid” means, his brother replies, “Somebody afraid of his shadow. Somebody who thinks the whole world’s against him. Somebody who thinks Kentucky is in Germany and that the president of the United States is a stormtrooper.”30 The disconnect between Sandy and the Roth family further illustrates the dismissal of Jewish trauma and fear of persecution. Sandy seeks to “gaslight” his family and assure them that Lindbergh’s America is not meant to exterminate the Jews, but help them adapt to the accepted form of American culture. The tension between Sandy and his parents also highlights the fear that, if Jewish-Americans cannot recognize the present dangers of existing as Jews in America, they cannot prepare for the worst. Graham argues that “for Roth, protection against something like a Holocaust first demands that the victims be able to conceive of one, an ability that most people, including and perhaps especially Americans, seem not to have.”31 By denying Jewish fear and dismissing it as paranoia, Sandy represents the blissfully ignorant American public. As Sandy continues to belittle the fears of the Jewish-American community, Philip’s awareness of Jewish fear and perception of the present dangers becomes heightened with every day of the Lindbergh Administration. Chapter 9 of The Plot Against America is titled “Perpetual Fear,” though the entire novel deals with the concept.32 As the mass efforts to displace and forcefully assimilate Jewish communities gain momentum, Philip reflects, “The fear was everywhere, the look was everywhere, in the eyes of our protectors especially, the look that comes in the split second after you have locked the door and realize you don’t have the key.”33 Those in the JewishAmerican community who can recognize the growing danger feel that the worst has yet to come and the apex of anti-Jewish hate crimes and fear tactics has yet to be reached. It should be noted that the chapter marks the date as “October 1942,” the same year that Nazi leadership planned and began the “Final Solution,” which led to the extermination of over 90 percent of Polish Jewry. While The Plot Against America focuses solely on the fictional potential for an American Holocaust, the parallels in historical timelines cannot be ignored. Before the mass murder of European Jews began, they were first demonized

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by politicians and blamed for World War I. They were then placed in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps, to slowly normalize the absence of Jews in society. Once the Jewish People were accepted as a threat to society and taken away, the Nazis were able to carry out their plans for extermination of the Jewish People. On a similar trajectory, Lindbergh, Ford, and countless other vocal American anti-Semites blame World War I, as well as the call for the U.S. to fight against the Nazis in World War II, on the Jews. Jews are soon after denied service in restaurants, turned away from hotels, and constantly threatened with violence. Then the Lindbergh Administration create the “Homestead” programs that remove Jewish-Americans from their communities and transplant them to rural locations in states historically known for intolerance. Though the characters in The Plot Against America do not possess the knowledge of the atrocities going on in Europe, Jewish-American communities can sense that the only possible next step is the extermination of Jews. And yet, this moment of tension is quickly diffused as Roth veers off of the expected trajectory and aggressively seeks to return to actual U.S. history. Lindbergh vanishes in his airplane and his Vice President, the historical isolationist U.S. Senator Burton L. Wheeler, declares martial law, which quickly leads to a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes. Philip reflects on this period as even more dangerous than the Lindbergh Administration, as white, Christian Americans take their violent hatred of the Jews into their own hands. He notes, “This time around, though, those violently defending their lands from usurpation and their way of life from destruction weren’t Indians led by the great Tecumseh but upright American Christians unleashed by the acting president of the United States.”34 But just as the American Christian mob threatens to carry out the genocide the government could not, Lindbergh’s wife gives a radio address, claiming that Vice President Wheeler had her imprisoned in a mental hospital and calls for new elections to take place. Roosevelt is returned to his role as President of the United States of America and history is snapped back into existence with such speed that some of the novel’s critics believe that the ending of the novel is too confusing. Graham notes that “History as the reader knows it then picks up with the return of Roosevelt, the looming American Holocaust quickly deflates, and the validity of Mr. Roth’s fears are buttressed but not entirely proved.”35 Thanks to this, Roth has not provided readers with an answer to the question “could it happen here”? Instead of creating an American Holocaust, Roth instills a message that is much more sinister. The point of The Plot Against America is not to imagine an American Holocaust, but to highlight just how little it takes for a society to become radicalized under the rule of a charismatic, apolitical, and openly hateful government. The fact that the fictional America is so swiftly returned to historical America “is less a sign of hope than of dread, an indication that the nation can take a frightening turn in an instant and with

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superficial explanation dismiss it almost as quickly.”36 In moments of nationwide panic, whether due to war, terrorist attacks, or countless other manmade catastrophes, there must always be a scapegoat. Conversely, in moments of peacetime, marginalized communities must brace for the next widespread panic and live with the knowledge that, to historically demonized and marginalized communities, there is no such thing as “peacetime.” In The Plot Against America, the Roth family must come to terms with their identities as the Jewish other in a landscape pervaded by the ghost of the Holocaust. During the interview with Hermione Lee, Roth reflects on his novel The Ghost Writer, but also more broadly on the pervasive and haunting presence of the past which becomes unavoidable in the present. He notes, “‘Haunted by the past’ is a commonplace phrase because it’s a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, ‘haunted,’ the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.”37 Roth goes on to reference a Chekhov character who claims “nothing passes,” meaning that nothing that has occurred, good or bad, can simply exist in the past. This notion that “nothing passes” is as central as it is invisible in The Plot Against America; the Holocaust that took place in Europe is replaced with looming genocide in the United States, but the novel cannot exist without the events of history. The Holocaust haunts Roth’s narrative, despite the novel’s simultaneous timeframe. The historical implications of global anti-Semitism allow for a fantastical “plot” to reflect the real perpetual fear felt by many Jewish-Americans. Roth, like many Jewish-American writers from the mid-to-late twentieth century, grapples with the weight of the Holocaust in ways that bring reality closer. Just as Silver noted, Jewish science and speculative fiction often recreates the events of the Holocaust in a way that is both relevant and “real” to the writer. As Bauman notes: Today, more than at any other time, the Holocaust is not a private property (if it ever was one); not of its perpetrators, to be punished for; not of its direct victims, to ask for special sympathy, favours or indulgence on accounts of past sufferings; and not of its witnesses, to seek redemption or certificates of innocence. The present-day significance of the Holocaust is the lesson it contains for the whole of humanity.38

His assertion that the Holocaust is not “private property” highlights the argument found many of Roth’s novels, particularly The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. The story of the Holocaust belongs to no one person; to take responsibility for the narrative of the Holocaust is to make the Holocaust real on a personal and individual level. The drive to study the Holocaust and commemorate the trauma and loss experienced by the first generation

98

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requires the second generation to draw from personal experience and project their own traumas through narrative, film and art. The “truth” of the Holocaust can never be fully captured. As no author, artist or filmmaker can gain totally access to the horrors of the Holocaust, the reimagination of past traumas becomes a form of witnessing. As Silver notes, Jewish speculative fiction offers “a representation of the common bonds that exist within the Jewish community, not necessarily accepting or denying the shared beliefs . . . but exploring them.”39 As is apparent in The Plot Against America, in the aftermath of innumerable generations of Jewish persecution, one common bond among the Jewish People is perpetual fear. However, as Silver continues, “The stories are also a way of announcing that ‘we are here,’ representation within a larger framework which often overlooks groups which are perceived as minorities.”40 As abrupt and controversial as the ending of the novel is, it does not simply offer a glimpse into Jewish perpetual fear; readers are left with an imperfect society capable of ripping itself apart and persecuting marginalized communities, and yet, we are still here. Perhaps one of the “truths” in the aftermath of the Holocaust is that, despite their best efforts, the Nazis did not silence the Jewish People. Through the “comingling” of fact and fiction, Holocaust writers have the freedom to express Jewish trauma, while amplifying the after-effects of genocide and anti-Semitism. So, while The Plot Against America is not a historical account of the events of the Holocaust, nor is it an allegory for the political moment in the U.S., the reigning message of this piece of speculative fiction remains the same; regardless of overt or covert anti-Semitism, the Jewish People live with a sense of perpetual fear. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Collins, Arda. “Age Makes a Difference: Hermione Lee Talks with Philip Roth About His New Novel, Exit Ghost.” The New Yorker, September 24, 2007. www​ .newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2007​/10​/01​/age​-makes​-a​-difference. Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Graham, T. Austin. “On the Possibility of an American Holocaust: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 63, no. 3 (2007), 119–149. doi.org/10.1353/arq.2007.0014. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Alternate History and Jewish Anxiety in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America 99

Morley, Catherine. “Memories of the Lindbergh Administration: Plotting, Genre, and the Splitting of the Self in The Plot Against America.” Philip Roth Studies, 4, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 137–152. Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. London: Vintage International, 1997. ———. The Ghost Writer. London: Vintage International, 1979. ———. The Plot Against America. London: Vintage International, 2004. Safer, Elaine B. “The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility?” In Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, 147–162. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Schalk, Sami. “Introduction.” In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Silver, Steven H. “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer.” Uncanny Magazine, February 15, 2021. uncannymagazine.com/article/jew ish-science-fiction-and-fantasy-a-primer.

NOTES 1. Arda Collins, “Age Makes a Difference: Hermione Lee Talks with Philip Roth about His New Novel, Exit Ghost,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2007. www​ .newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2007​/10​/01​/age​-makes​-a​-difference. 2. T. Austin Graham, “On the Possibility of an American Holocaust: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 63, no. 3 (2007): 120. doi.org/10.1353/arq.2007.0014. 3. Graham, 121. 4. Sami Schalk, “Introduction,” in Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. 5. Steven H. Silver, “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer,” Uncanny Magazine, February 15, 2021, uncannymagazine.com/article/ jewish-science-fiction-and-fantasy-a-primer. 6. Silver. 7. Elaine B. Safer, “The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility?” in Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 152. 8. Safer, 152. 9. Graham, 119. 10. Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (London: Vintage International, 1997), 5. 11. Catherine Morley, “Memories of the Lindbergh Administration: Plotting, Genre, and the Splitting of the Self in The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 137–152, 144. 12. Roth, The Facts, 16.

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13. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (London: Vintage International, 1979). 14. Graham, 123. 15. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (London: Vintage International, 2004), 364. 16. Morley, 146. 17. Safer, 159. 18. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 19. Bauman, 34. 20. Roth, The Plot Against America, 378. 21. Roth, The Plot Against America, 388. 22. Roth, The Plot Against America, 4–5. 23. Roth, The Facts, 122. 24. Safer, 150. 25. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 33–34. 26. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 27. Safer, 150. 28. Roth, The Plot Against America, 1. 29. Safer, 158. 30. Roth, The Plot Against America, 227. 31. Graham, 125. 32. Roth, The Plot Against America, 328. 33. Roth, The Plot Against America, 329. 34. Roth, The Plot Against America, 357. 35. Graham, 142. 36. Graham, 145. 37. Collins. 38. Bauman, 206. 39. Silver. 40. Silver.

Chapter 7

Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhes A Groundbreaking Yiddish Science-Fiction Novel Stephen M. Cohen

The literary genre of science fiction developed fully in Western Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, and some of these works were translated soon after publication into Yiddish. Jewish authors have been prominent in English-language science fiction from the twentieth century onward, and Jewish topics or characters occasionally appear. Yet original science fiction in a Jewish language, Yiddish, remains rare to this day. Leybl Botwinik, a childhood fan of English-language science fiction, born in Montréal after World War II and raised in a family steeped in Yiddish culture, decided that the lack of science fiction in his home language deserved redress, and so penned ‫( ‏די געהײמע שליחות‬Di Geheyme Shlikhes, The Secret Mission/La Mission Secrète), a short novel intermixing concern for the loss of Yiddish language and the rise of Jewish assimilation, plus adding time-travel and Jewish mythology.1 Botwinik has been part of an ongoing movement starting in the last third of the twentieth century to change Yiddish literature’s focus from Eastern-European life to post-Holocaust life. This chapter reviews the inherent Jewish, Yiddishist, nostalgic, and science-fiction components of Botwinik’s work to create a contemporary novel worthy of study since it was published in 1980. By the close of the nineteenth century, the genre of “scientific romance” as exemplified by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had reached maturity. Such fiction slowly made its way eastward into the Yiddish-speaking lands of the 101

102

Stephen M. Cohe

Pale of Settlement as ‫( ‏װיסנשאַ ֿפטלעכע ראָ מאַ נען‬visnshaftlekhe romanen, scientific novels) of translations of Verne’s works, starting with ‫‏ ‏דער לוֿפט־באַ לאָ ן‬ (Der Luft-balon)2 in 1870 from Jules Verne’s Cinq Semaines en Ballon,3 and westward to America also with translations of Verne.4 The only original Yiddish scientific romances of that era were Avner Tanenboym’s several works published in New York.5 Starting in the twentieth century, Jewish science fiction authors became a prominent source of the genre, including luminaries such as Isaac Asimov, Jack Dann, Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Joe Haldeman, Cyril Kornbluth, Stanisław Lem, Barry Malzberg, Rachel Pollack, Joanna Russ, Robert Sheckley, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Harry Turtledove. There have been English anthologies of science fiction with Jewish themes, such as Jack Dann’s Wandering Stars6 and More Wandering Stars,7 a children’s anthology called Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids,8 and Teitelbaum and Lotten’s Zion’s Fiction, Israeli stories in translation.9 Leybl Botwinik, the author of Di Geheyme Shlikhes, is also the editor of CyberCozen, the Israeli science-fiction fanzine. As such, he often writes about the history of the genre. He divides twentieth-century Yiddish science-fiction writing into three separate geographic areas: The New World (the Americas and Anglophone countries), the Old World (Europe), and the New-Old World (Soviet Bloc) and three distinct eras: Pre-Holocaust, Post-Holocaust, and 1970s to the Present.10 Pre-Holocaust in the New World, the Yiddish-speaking immigrants were mostly concerned with establishing their livelihoods. To do that, they needed to assimilate and adopt the language of their new homes, and thus Yiddish became a nostalgia language. The exception is within the left-wing Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist movements, who dreamed of utopias. In the Old World there was less assimilation, but more isolation of Jews from science-fiction ideas. The New-Old World started out with Yiddish as the official Jewish language, but during the 1930s there were antisemitic crackdowns, hence Yiddish became largely political. The chance for growth in Yiddish technical language (necessary for quality science fiction) began, especially in the New-Old World for use in schools,11 but was quickly snuffed out during the Holocaust. Not until the 1920s, when Hugo Gernsback, a Belgian-American Jew, invented the term “scientifiction”12 (now called “science fiction”), did the rare original Yiddish science fiction begin to re-appear. Perhaps the first true original Yiddish work was ‫זײט סמבטיון‬ ַ ‫( ‏אױף יענער‬Af yener zayt Sambatyon, On the other side of the Sambatyon) by Lazar Borodulin in 1929,13 which incorporates Jewish mythology of the Sambatyon River (which did not flow on the Sabbath, beyond which were exiled the Lost Ten Tribes by the

Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhe

103

Assyrian King Shalmaneser V). The Sambatyon River was so well-known in the ancient Jewish world that even the historians Pliny the Elder and Josephus mentioned it. The legend was not forgotten through the medieval period; Abraham Abulafia in the late thirteenth century set out on a journey to find the river, and Nahmanides discussed the river. Thereafter the Sambatyon was a theme in Jewish culture, to the point of parents even calling a misbehaving child a “sambatyon.” Simultaneously, Solomon Bogin published ‫( ‏דער ֿפערטער אינטערנאַ ציאָ נאַ ל‬Der Ferter Internatsyonal, The Fourth International).14 Two more original sciencefiction novels followed in the 1930s: Leon Kussman’s ‫( ‏נאַ רנבונד‏‬Narnbund, Fools’ Union)15 in 1931 and Y.L. Goldshteyn’s ‫‏צוזאַ מענברוך אָ דער איבערבױ‬ (Tsuzamenbrukh oder iberboy, Breakdown or Construction) in 1934 in Warsaw.16 A children’s book by Eda Glasser, ‫רײזע צו דער לֿבנה‬ ַ ַ‫( ‏א‬A Rayze tsu der Levone, A Trip to the Moon)17 appeared in 1940. To use Botwinik’s classification of Yiddish science fiction, Post-Holocaust in the Old-New World meant the continuation of Yiddish as a political tool; and in the New World assimilation continued with less and less use of Yiddish in general except in a nostalgic sense. There were almost no Yiddish speakers in the Old World. After World War II, the only original Yiddish science-fiction book was Velvl Tshernovetski’s ‫‏ערֿב דער ֿפערטער װעלט־מלחמה‬ (Erev der ferter velt-milkhome, Eve of the Fourth World War)18 in Buenos Aires in 1959. Appearing in Uriel Weinreich’s English-Yiddish dictionary, the word ‫( ֿפאַ קטאַ זיע‬faktazye, a portmanteau of ‫ ֿפאַ קט‬fakt and ‫ ֿפאַ נטאַ זיע‬fantazye)19 only was invented likely in the 1960s for “science fiction.” By the 1970s and thereafter, the number of science-knowledgeable Jews increased dramatically. Through Sovetish Heymland and promotion of cosmonaut and space topics, some Yiddish science-fiction stories began to appear. A new generation of Soviet Yiddish writers arose. Meanwhile in the New World, some of the older and newer writers started trying their hand at science-fiction and science-fiction-esque literature. We should note, however, that certain elements of science-fiction—even if not true modern science fiction—have long been a part of Jewish storytelling. For example, robotic figures include various legends about golems—lifelike beings made of earth or clay—dating back to Talmudic times and occasionally appearing through the medieval period, though the most famous story is that of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague in the late 1500s and his golem. Space travel is an integral part of Yitskhok Leybush Peretz’s story “‫( ”‏אױב נישט נאָ ך העכער‬Oyb nisht nokh hekher, If not still higher),20 when the Rebbe of Nemirov apparently disappears and flies to the heavens. Time travel appears in the fantasy ‫( ייִ נגעלע־רינגעלע‬Yingele-Ringele, Little Ring-Boy).21 Even alternate-universe utopias have their presence in Jewish literature, such as Elhanan Leib Lewinsky’s ‫( ‏מסע לארץ יׂשראל בשנת ת״ת‬Masa L’Eretz Yisrael

104

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Bishenat Ta″t, Journey to the Land of Israel in the Year 5800),22 Theodor Herzl’s famous Altneuland (Old New-Land)23 which encapsulated the new Zionism, and Kalman Zingman’s novella ‫( אין דער צוקונפט־שטאָ ט עדעניא‬In Der Tsukunft-Shtot Edenya; In Edenia, a City of the Future)24 of an Eastern Ukrainian city full of multicultural tolerance in the 1940s. At the writing of this chapter, Di Geheyme Shlikhes falls between the Vilnius of David Botwinik’s youth and the present day. Thus, with forty to fifty years on either side of Botwinik’s book, we can examine its context in Yiddish science fiction, and science fiction in general. LEYBL BOTWINIK’S FORMATIVE YEARS Leybl (or Leon) Botwinik was the eldest son of composer and teacher David Botwinik (born 1920 in Vilnius, Lithuania; 1920 Vilna–2022 Montréal) and his wife Silvana Di Veroli (1923 Rome–2018 Montréal)25 born in Montréal in 1959. As a child of a Holocaust survivor, Leybl grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household along with two younger brothers, Alexander (or Sender) and Jack (or Yankl), and attended the Peretz Yiddish day school. His childhood, was, in fact, multi-lingual: At home he spoke Yiddish with his father and Italian with his mother; he absorbed English and French from his Canadian background and education, and Hebrew from the day school. The Yiddish that affected his writing, particularly Di Geheyme Shlikhes, was that taught in the Peretz school, and—of course—the Yiddish dialect from Vilnius as his father spoke, a variety of Northeastern Yiddish, Litvish. His youth was steeped in culture, from literature to music, from Jewish philosophy to language. His father told many stories of his youth as a soccer-player and musician in Vilnius.26,27,28 Leybl Botwinik was interested in science and technology, and read English-language science fiction from a young age. Among his earliest and favorite science-fiction influences was Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters,29 in which human agents secretly battle invading alien parasites as a metaphor for Soviet-style communism. Another was the classic H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine,30 in which a Victorian man travels thousands of years forward in time to a differentiation in species between workers and upper-class. A third influence was the American television series The Time Tunnel,31 in which a secret United States government project sends scientists into the past and future. Botwinik began writing his own science-fiction stories at around age 12 or 13.32

Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhe

105

THE ORIGIN OF DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES During the 1979 summer vacation while Botwinik was at Concordia University studying Computer Science, a Yiddish story competition was announced in Montréal, and Botwinik decided to enter. Botwinik says that his motivation for this particular story was three-fold: 1. Because there was no physical way to visit the Vilna of his father’s youth after the Holocaust, he wanted to re-enter the vibrant Jewish life of “ ַ‫( ”ירושלים דליטא‬Yerushalayim deLita, The Jerusalem of Lithuania, a popular nickname for Vilnius) through writing. This is in contrast to visiting his mother’s family and locale in Rome, which is possible to this day. In addition, he wanted to re-create the lively atmosphere in Jewish Vilnius for other people to experience—at least in a small way. As Marianne Windsperger notes about Yiddish post-war literature, “The collective remembrance and the culturally produced images of the shtetl are marked by the nostalgia for a world that after the Second World War has been ultimately lost and cannot be visited again.”33 2.  He wanted to write a science-fiction story, but in the language of his home, in Yiddish, in order to promote modern literature in that language. 3.  He wanted to explore how a person from his father’s generation would react in an abrupt jump to post-Holocaust Jewish life, both from the standpoint of assimilation and the rise of the State of Israel. Botwinik spent two months writing the story. He did not win, but he was a runner-up.34 After he fleshed out the story, his father published the book. Leybl himself typeset the text and added a color cover jointly designed with a high-school classmate, Yehudis Brochfeld, who was more graphically inclined than he.35 The small paperback of 101 pages, measuring only 4¼″ × 6¾″ (10.8 cm × 17.2 cm), was printed by Adler Printing (see figure 7.1). A Synopsis of the Book Initially the story flips back and forth between Vilnius in September 1983 and Vilnius from 1930 to 1933. Noyekh, Berl, and Yisroel are three young men in 1930s Vilnius, orphaned brothers, now living in a rooming-house owned by the pleasant Mrs. Gurvits. Noyekh is the tinkerer, fascinated with physics, mathematics, and electronics. He works out a theoretical model for a ‫צײטשּפאַ נע ‏ר‬ ַ (tsaytshpaner, Time-Crosser). After several years of failed experimentation with vacuum-tube electronics, Noyekh procures unusual new electronic parts and instruction manuals from America via a mysterious

Figure 7.1 Book cover. Botwinik, Leybl. Di Geheyme Shlikhes (Fantastishe Dertseylung). Montréal: David Botwinik, 1980. Source: Courtesy of Leybl Botwinik.

Leybl Botwinik’s Di Geheyme Shlikhe

107

Reb Itsik Alter, an old, bearded businessman supposedly with sales contacts in the United States. The new parts work as planned, and Noyekh tries out his tsaytshpaner in the Zakret Woods in 1933 with his younger brothers as witnesses. His calculations are not precise enough to say if he will return to Vilnius in five years (1938) or fifty years (1983), so he tells his brothers to come back to the forest in 1938—or in 1983 if necessary. He doesn’t reappear in 1938. His brothers, later grandfathers, tell Noyekh’s story to their two grandsons, Moyshe and Zalmen. Moyshe and Zalmen, now young men themselves, travel to Soviet Vilnius in September 1983 to meet Noyekh, their great-uncle from the past. Noyekh appears in his time machine in 1983, steps out into the woods in the middle of the night, and mistakes Moyshe and Zalmen for their grandfathers. Moyshe and Zalmen quickly destroy the tsaytshpaner to avoid its capture by the KGB. The brothers tell Noyekh a brief history of Jewish life and the decline of Yiddish from 1933 to 1983, and bring him to a local monument commemorating the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Noyekh is shaken but determined. Then they leave the USSR, drive across Europe, and take an El Al jet from Rome to Ben Gurion airport in Israel. The brothers show their uncle what the modern State of Israel is like, how cultural norms (such as feminism) have changed, and what wonders modern technology has created. Moyshe then reveals several small parts he rescued from the now-destroyed tsaytshpaner: transistors. Moyshe and Zalmen suddenly wonder how Noyekh acquired—in 1933—transistors and instructional manuals, when such electronic parts weren’t invented until 1948. They immediately decide to return to 1933 Vilnius to find Reb Itsik who brought Noyekh the components and ask him. Reb Itsik Alter is unavailable, but has left them a note to come to the isolated Sinai Mountains in 1981, where all will be revealed. Hidden in a cave in the desert, Reb Itsik explains to the young men that he can travel through time, and obtained the transistors and instructions from America in the early 1950s. He is a member of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who now live on an Earth-like planet in another solar system. The Lost Tribes have fractured into a traditionalist minority who seek to follow the ancient paths, opposed to the assimilationist majority. Meanwhile, as a traditionalist, he’s busy writing the complete history of the Jewish people in a ‫‏סֿפר הדם‬ (Sefer Ha-dam, The Blood Book), to understand and preserve all of what has occurred on Earth. He and other agents travel through Earth’s eras to gather historical knowledge for the book to help them convince the assimilationists to return to the Torah. The assimilationist government, however, wants to destroy the Earth and the traditionalists’ project to preserve Jewry. The story ends with Moyshe, Zalmen, and Noyekh accompanying Reb Itsik back to his home planet to battle the assimilationists.

108

Stephen M. Cohe

SCIENCE-FICTION COMPONENTS OF DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES Machine-induced time-travel is a well-known and often integral component of many science-fiction stories, starting with Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock that Went Backward,36 Wells’s The Time Machine, a variety of movies and television episodes in the Star Trek series, the Doctor Who television series, and even Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything,37 as well as Di Geheyme Shlikhes. The tsaytshpaner itself is described as a booth- or shower-sized box into which a time-traveler enters, containing many electrical components, though the only particular electronic parts directly mentioned are vacuum tubes (in the first, abortive attempt), transistors (in the successful version), and resistors. Noyekh is described as a science- and technology-oriented youth, interested in physics, mathematics, and electronics. Another interesting technological device described in Botwinik’s work is the computer, or seykhel-aparat (‫‏ׂשכל־אַ ּפאַ ראַ ט‏‬literally, “wisdom-apparatus”) which Reb Itsik Alter uses in his cave in the Sinai Mountains. The seykhel-aparat is described as box with a television-like screen sitting on a table, with a vast memory storage inside.38 Computer terminology was limited in Yiddish at the time Botwinik wrote his book, and so (like many science-fiction writers), he invented his own futuristic terms. Botwinik notes that in other unpublished stories, he abbreviated seykhel-aparat to ‫‏ׂש״אַ ‏ּפ‬ (“sap”), which he deliberately chose to be reminiscent of Homo sapiens and hence artificial intelligence. He also invented a term for Computer Science based on this coinage, ‫“( ׂש״אַ ּפשאַ ֿפט‬sapshaft”).39 Such futuristic coinage is common among science-fiction authors, such as Isaac Asimov (“Multivac,” “molecular valves,”40 and “positronic brain”41). Note that, only in the late twentieth century, the Yugntruf organization actively sought neologisms for computer terminology, well after Di Geheyme Shlikhes. (See, for example Adam Whiteman’s column “‫[ ”‏אױֿפן עקראַ ן‬Afn Ekran, On the Screen].42) In addition, a futuristic three-dimensional display technology that the seykhelaparat uses, indoor lighting, and interstellar rockets are mentioned.43 NOSTALGIC YIDDISH COMPONENTS OF DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES One of Botwinik’s explicit reasons for his book is to take himself and readers back to his father’s youth in Vilnius, a center of Ashkenazic culture and life in the early twentieth century. Through writing about the time and place, he

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attempted to immerse himself in the stories his father told of life there. He wanted to show how Jewish life was enriched by all-encompassing use of the Yiddish language, that all activities were imagined and discussed in Yiddish, including business, street life, and youth sports. Much of the discussion between Noyekh and his great-nephews in the early 1980s is devoted to lamenting how bereft modern Jewry is with the steep decline in the use of Yiddish. The one small bright spot Botwinik noted was the growing study of Yiddish among young people. To illustrate this, Botwinik specifically uses dialogue between Noyekh (who speaks Litvish dialect, Leybl’s own native speech) and an Israeli police officer, who speaks “‫( ”אין אַ קאָ רעקטן ּכלל־ייִ דיש‬in a korektn klal-Yidish, in a correct Standard Yiddish), from learning Yiddish at a university.44 Leybl Botwinik remarks that Di Geheyme Shlikhes was originally planned to be one in a series of stories. Unfortunately, that never happened because he “got busy with life.”45 NAMES OF SOME CHARACTERS IN DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES Botwinik, like many authors, wrote what he knew. That is, three brothers live together (just like him and his two brothers in real life). Noyekh rhymes with ‫( מו ‏ח‬moyekh, brain), and represents Leybl himself. Leybl also notes that Noyekh is a short name (‫נח‬, two letters), hence easier for him to typeset. Berke ‫בערק‏ע‬, based on Sender’s teenage interest in soccer, is Leybl’s younger brother Sender/Alexander, and was supposed to be ‫‏בערקע באַ טערײקע‬ ‫(‏‬Berke Batereyke). A ‫( באַ טערײקע‬batereyke, flashlight) is energetic, and the names are similar in sound. Furthermore, when Leybl was young, he often signed his papers humorously “‫ דער ייִ דיש ליכט טרעגער‏‬,‫”לײבקע באַ טערײקע‬ (Leybke Batereyke, der yidish likht treger, Leybke Flashlight, the Yiddish light-bearer). Berke is also in memory of his father David’s cousin Berke Shapiro, who died during the Holocaust, possibly as a member of the Lithuanian arm of the Red Army battling the Nazis. Yisroel is Leybl’s youngest brother Jack/Yankl, named from Genesis 35:10 (God renamed Ya’akov as Yisrael; Yankl is a Yiddish nickname for Ya’akov). Originally the character was planned to be called Yankl Gedankl, but Leybl decided not to use his own brother’s actual name in the book. The mysterious dealer, Reb Itsik Alter, is a descriptive: we learn toward the end of the book that Reb Itsik really is very old; ‫( אַ לטע ‏ר‬alter) means “the old one.”46 As to the moniker “Shmulik” Botwinik gives to the seykhl-aparat,

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he doesn’t remember why exactly, but it may have been ego: Leybl’s middle name is Shmuel.47 Jewish Themes in Di Geheyme Shlikhes Botwinik both describes and lauds the natural culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, spoken in their natural Jewish language, Yiddish, in a city densely populated by Jews: Vilnius. The Holocaust hangs over the entire story, although the Nazi atrocities are not mentioned in depth. This literary device parallels how David Botwinik talked of his experiences in Lithuania before studying music in Rome and then emigrating to Canada. He has never spoken to his family about precisely how he survived World War II in Eastern Europe. Botwinik uses outer space as an allegory for the mythological Sambatyon river, which separates the exiled Lost Tribes of Israel from the rest of Jewry.48 In Di Geheyme Shlikhes, interstellar travel (currently impossible within a human lifetime according to physics) is required to reach the Ten Tribes, rather than crossing an impassable, undiscoverable river from Jewish legends. Botwinik explores the question of assimilation to joining non-Jewish culture versus hewing to Jewish tradition: a conflict that has wracked Judaism for centuries if not millennia, and become only louder in the past couple of centuries, showing through Botwinik’s Ten Lost Tribes themselves partitioned into the Assimilationists versus the Traditionalists, locked into warfare. The Traditionalists’ secret mission (the eponymous book title)—to observe how the rest of Jewry on Earth is resolving (or not) this question— is the over-arching heart of Di Geheyme Shlikhes. In the novel, the Jewish observers remain outside Earth’s detection, following a Star Trek-like policy of non-interference with alien civilizations. Even Botwinik’s language itself uses specifically evocative Jewish terms here and there. For example, as the young men enter the desolate caves in Sinai, he describes the dim light like “‫‏( ”דער שדים־טאַ נץ ֿפון די שאָ טנס‬der sheydem-tants fun di shotns, the demon-dance of the shadows),49 using the ancient Jewish word ‫( שד‬shed; demon, spirit).50 In another scene, Botwinik explains that the seykhel-aparat’s memory storage unit is the size of a “‫צדקה־‏‬ ‫( ”‏ּפושקע‬tsedoke-pushke, charity-box),51 recalling a common-place item often seen in Jewish homes and businesses. Botwinik’s choice of Yiddish as the language of the published story (instead of, say, English, which would have reached a wider audience) was “an ideological decision.” He notes that it was equally a purely logical one (thinking both as a Jew and as an SF writer). Knowing Jewish history, one realizes that a Jew often has to escape one land for another. That is, it could be (and really was—when I was a new Israeli immigrant) that

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would find myself in a number of years later in another country, whose language of daily discourse is not English. So how would my children and grandchildren be able to read and enjoy my English writings, in case I were, let’s say, in France, and years later in another place (South America, for example)—and, oh, I am really in Israel. Furthermore, as an SF writer, I write more for the future generations, and I think that there will be Yiddish-speakers in 100, 1000, and in a million years from now. Concerning English I cannot say. (Once Latin was, then later Spanish, and then French were the most important languages . . . maybe eventually it will be Chinese—who knows?) Yiddish is forever, written in the blood of martyrs.52

The book’s cover itself (figure 7.1), based on an idea conceived by Leybl Botwinik, depicts a modern city (not necessarily Tel Aviv) dimly lit only by artificial light, contrasted with the warm, sunny drawing of pre-war Vilnius illuminated naturally. The cover is an allegory of modernity lacking the brightness of Jewish culture snuffed out during the Holocaust. One of the final comments that the hero Noyekh makes in the book is “‫( ”אָ ן אַ נעכטן איז ניטאָ קײן מאָ רגן‬On a nekhtn iz nito keyn morgn, Without a yesterday there is no tomorrow),53 referring to keeping both Jewish tradition—and knowledge of the language of Yiddish. MODERNITY IN DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES The main character Noyekh explores the social and technological changes in the half century since the 1930s. He is surprised and frightened by the easy availability of travel by jumbo jet to anywhere in the world. He is amazed by television and computers.54 One particular humorous scene is when Noyekh goes out alone from a hotel room into a Tel Aviv street and unwittingly jaywalks. When a policewoman writes him a ticket, Noyekh is surprised in multiple ways: He can’t imagine that women serve on a police force, nor that Jews serve in positions of legal authority55 (let alone be in charge of their own destiny in their own land).56 His response is to chat her up. When he returns to his hotel room, his grand-nephews demand to see this ticket. In reality the policewoman slipped him her telephone number instead. This further shocks him: with the rise of feminism, women can be forward with men.57 We learn from this particular scene that not only the technological aspects but even the social aspects of daily life have irrevocably changed since Eastern Europe of the 1930s. Moving suddenly and disjointedly through time is inherently disruptive to the participant.

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Contemporary Reception of the Book A short review of Di Geheyme Shlikhes by Paul Glasser appeared in Yugntruf, the young people’s Yiddish organization’s journal, soon after the book was published. Glasser comments: The author deeply appreciates the Yiddish language, and he discusses a very painful matter for today’s Jews: What will consist of the Jewish future? And his contribution to Yiddish literature can be appreciated, because not often do we get to read a small faktazye [science-fiction] book in Yiddish. Congratulations to him! May he write more in Yiddish.58

Contemporaneous to Glasser’s review is another by Yoysef Kerler, the editor of Yerusholayimer Almanakh, who chose not to use the neologism faktazye: Here lies in front of me now his dear little first-born book . . . I am sure that there won’t be only one reader . . . and it must be said that this fine young man masters first of all the art of structurally developing and integrating the subject, an art which today professionals have unfortunately forgotten. . . . And another advantage—Leybl Botwinik believes in what he himself depicts and what he speaks to us, thus it’s no surprise that he forces us to believe in these fantastic situations of his fantastic story . . . Leybl’s prose is to the point. One could even say—a bit too much to the point, too dry and not just because he is a student of computer science, but also because he tries to ground technically the “time machine,” which the main hero constructed. But between the dry lines of prose the young heart of an enthusiastic Jew beats. The impression is, that between these dry lines of prose, electrical sparks flash here and there.59

Yugntruf, whose full name is “Yugntruf—Yugnt far Yidish” (Call to Youth— Youth for Yiddish), is an organization for young people devoted to promoting the active use of Yiddish,60 so it is not surprising that Glasser’s review concentrates on the existence of Yiddish per se and the joyful fact of a science-fiction book in that language. In contrast, the Yerusholayimer Almanakh was a literary journal, more in tune with Yiddish stylistics rather than its mere existence, hence Kerler’s focus on prose and use of language. Both reviews are right: the existence of a modern, thoughtful Yiddish work of science fiction was cause for joy, but also the book was clearly an earnest young writer’s attempt to delve into issues of Jewish and Yiddish continuation. Kerler also inserted a bit of stereotype into his review—that computer scientists are not good at florid writing and write only the minimum of what needs to be said, mimicking their computer programming.

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YIDDISH SCIENCE FICTION AFTER DI GEHEYME SHLIKHES By the 1980s, the lone Soviet-backed Yiddish journal ‫סאָ וועטיש היימלאַ נד‬ (Sovetish Heymland, Soviet Homeland) began including occasional translations of Soviet science-fiction stories. Boris Sandler, a Soviet émigré to Israel and then the United States, wrote the short story “‫“(”‏צום לעצטן ברעג‬Tsum Letstn Breg,” To the Last Shore).61 Ethel Niborski-Trinh, a young Israeli writer who is a native Yiddish speaker, wrote at age 12 the novella ‫די אוממעגלעכע װאַ קאַ ציע‬ (Di Ummeglekhe Vakatsye, The Impossible Vacation)62 in 2014, a story about a trip to the Moon. We must note the unusual short Israeli animated video ‫( ניגון‏‬Niggun, Tune)63 created by Yoni Salmon and Alon Rothem, in which a secular archeologist and a Hasidic rabbi (astronauts who both speak only Yiddish), travel through space to find the remnants of old Earth. Salmon says of his video: In my point of view, Jews were never meant for space travel. Judaism is a very “earthly” religion and the Jewish tradition has a lot to do with space and time as they are approached, while standing with two feet on the ground . . . Space is also a factor in Judaism and mainly situated on earth: In space a Jew will not know when to pray or where to address his prayers. That is why I, and Alon Rothem co-creator of the film, wanted to send Jews into space to rethink these dimensions of Judaism under different circumstances.64

As these last science-fiction projects appeared, Yiddish was no longer to be lamented over, but a language framing the characters as specifically Jewish. Di Geheyme Shlikhes falls squarely in the gap between the Post-Holocaust and Modern eras of Yiddish science fiction. The book uses Yiddish as a language for conveying the story, but Yiddish itself is part of the story—an entirely new aspect of science fiction. Yiddish-learners and those non-native speakers are now a serious segment of the readers of Yiddish literature. They tend to be secular, not Hasidic, and therefore are more familiar with other world languages’ treatment of science fiction, as well as more educated in science and technology. Di Geheyme Shlikhes’s relatively “dry,” non-florid language (as Kerler calls it) makes it easier for Yiddish-learners to understand, helping newcomers to Yiddish literature take the plunge into science fiction plus all of Yiddish literature. Mr. Botwinik occupies an almost unique place in post-Holocaust Yiddish literature: He is a native Yiddish speaker who was educated in science and technology, a writer, and an avid science-fiction reader raised in an actively Jewish household. These attributes allowed him to create a hard science-fiction story that combines Jewish themes with well-known

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science-fiction plot devices. Thus for many current Yiddishists and Yiddishspeakers, Di Geheyme Shlikhes now almost has a reputation of being a cult classic. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For many discussions and help with the general ideas and layout of this chapter as well as moral support for this project, I thank Dr. Mara W. Cohen Ioannides. For biographical and informational discussions about the book, thanks are due to Leybl Botwinik and Alexander Botwinik, as well as copies of CyberCozen magazine from Leybl. For providing me with a copy of Di Geheyme Shlikhes, and pointing me to Yugntruf’s online archive, I am indebted to Meena-Lifshe Viswanath, and for ideas about directions for this chapter, I give thanks to Dr. Samantha Zerin. BIBLIOGRAPHY “About Us.” Yugntruf. https:​//​yugntruf​.org​/about​-us​/​?lang​=en, 2021. Adams, Douglas. Life, The Universe and Everything. New York: Pocket Books, 1991. Asimov, Isaac. “Reason.” Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941. ———. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956. Bogin, Solomon. Der Ferter Internatsyonal: Fantastishe Dertseylung. New York: Maks Yankevitsh, 1929. Borodulin, Lazar. Af yener zayt Sambatyon: Visnshaftlekher un Fantastisher Roman. New York: A. Slutzky, 1929. Botwinik, David, interview by Jordan Kutzik. “David Botwinik’s Oral History,” National Yiddish Book Center, December 13, 2011. https:​//​www​.yiddishbookcenter​ .org​/collections​/oral​-histories​/interviews​/woh​-fi​-0000215​/david​-botwinik​-2011. ———. Fun khurbn tsum lebn: Naye yidishe lider/From Holocaust to Life: New Yiddish Songs with English Translations. New York: League for Yiddish, 2010. Botwinik, Leybl. Di Geheyme Shlikhes (Fantastishe Dertseylung). Montréal: David Botwinik, 1980. ———. “Yiddish SF&F 101*—Part 2,” CyberCozen 23, no. 2 (February 2021): 8. Cohen, Stephen M. “Chemical Literature in Yiddish: A Bridge between the Shtetl and the Secular World.” Aleph 7 (2007): 183–251. ———. “Khemye: Chemical Literature in Yiddish.” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 29, no. 1 (2004): 21–29. Dann, Jack, ed. More Wandering Stars. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981. ———. Wandering Stars. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Einbinder, Stuart C. “Find a Grave Memorial no. 193839028.” October 8, 2018. https:​ //​www​.findagrave​.com​/memorial​/193839028​/silvana​-botwinik. Accessed January 18, 2021.

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Elbe, Leon. Yingele-Ringele. New York: Farlag Matones, 1929. Gernsback, Hugo. “A New Sort of Magazine.” Amazing Stories, April 1926, 3. Glasser, Eda. A Rayze Tsu Der Levone. New York, 1940. Glezer, Hershl. “Di Geheyme Shlikhes fun Leybl Botvinik.” Yugntruf (1981): 22. Goldshteyn, Y.L. Tsuzamenbrukh oder iberboy: fantastisher roman in fir teyln. Warsaw: Farlag “Bikher,” 1934. Heinlein, Robert. The Puppet Masters. New York: Doubleday, 1951. Herzl, Theodor. Altneuland. Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902. James, Edward and Farah Mendelsohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids. New York and Jerusalem: Pitspopany Press, 1999. Kerler, Yoysef. “Shehekheyonu.” In Geklibene proze (eseyen, zikhroynes, dertseylungen). Jerusalem: Yerusholayimer Almanakh, 1991, 258–259. Kressel, Matthew. “Turns Out a Jewish Blessing Inspired the Vulcan Salute.” Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, Wired, October 15, 2015. https:​//​www​.wired​.com​/2015​/10​/ geeks​-guide​-matthew​-kressel. Kussman, Leon. Narnbund. New York: Farlag Atlantis, 1931. Lewinsky, Elhanan Leib. Masa L’Eretz Yisrael Bishenat Ta"t. Odessa: D’fus Dukhna, 1892. Lubin, Daniel. “Strangers in a Strange Land: Jewish Sci-fi, Afrofuturism and Visions from Palestine.” Vashti, January 12, 2021. https:​//​vashtimedia​.com​/2021​/01​/12​/ jewish​-sci​-fi​-afrofuturism​-palestinian​-speculative​-fiction. Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sh.Y. Abramovits). Ale Verk fun Mendele Moykher-Sforim, vol. 6. Warsaw: Farlag “Mendele,” 1928, 1–136. Mitchell, Edward Page. “The Clock That Went Backward.” ForgottenFutures.com. http:​//​www​.forgottenfutures​.com​/game​/ff9​/tachypmp​.htm​#clock. Niborski-Trinh, Etele. Di Ummeglekhe Vakatsye: Roman. Baltimore: Kinder-Bibliotek, 2014. Peretz, Yitskhok Leib. “Oyb Nisht Nokh Hekher.” Der Yud, 1900, 12–13. Rothem, Alon. Niggun. Produced by Yoni Salmon. 2017. Video, 12:31. https:​//​vimeo​ .com​/333318157. Salmon, Yoni. “Niggun—by Yoni Salmon.” Fantasy Animation. https:​//​www​.fantasy​ -animation​.org​/current​-posts​/2019​/5​/9​/niggun​-by​-yoni​-salmon. Silver, Steven H. “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer.” Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018. https:​//​uncannymagazine​.com​/ article​/jewish​-science​-fiction​-and​-fantasy​-a​-primer. Tanenboym, A. Di Shvartse Kunst: a Visnshaftlekher Roman. New York: Hibru Pob. Ko., 1899. ———. Doktor un Tsoyberer. New York: Farlag fun Yehudah Katsenelenbogen, 1899. ———. Tsvishn Himl un Vaser: A Visnshaftlekher Roman. New York: Y. Sapirshteyn, 1896. Teitelbaum, Sheldon, and Emanuel Lotten, eds. Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018.

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The Time Tunnel. Directed by Irwin Allen, featuring James Darren, Robert Colbert, Whit Bissell, John Zaremba, and Lee Meriwether. Aired 1966–1967. 20th Century Fox Television. Tshernovetski, Velvl. Erev der ferter velt-milkhome, Hines-di kenign fun Mars, fantastisher roman. Buenos Aires: El Magazine Argentino, 1959. Vaytman, Odem. “Afn Ekran.” Yugntruf 61 (April 1987): 17 ———. “Afn Ekran.” Yugntruf 63 (April 1988): 18–20. Verne, Jules. Cinq semaines en ballon: Voyage de Decouvertes en Afrique par Trois Anglais. Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1863. ———. Di farlorene shif, oder A rayze arum di velt in 80 teg. Translated by A. Tanenboym. New York, 1896. ———. A Rayze arum di velt in 80 teg. Translated and reworked by A. Tanenboym. New York: Hibru Poblishing Ko., 1895?. Weinreich, Uriel. Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research / McGraw Hill, 1968. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. London: William Heinemann, 1895. Windsperger, Marianne. “Retelling the Shtetl: Recovering Yiddish in Contemporary American Literature.” In Ex(tra)territorial. Les territoires littéraires, culturels et linguistiques en question/ Reassessing Territory in Literature, Culture and Languages, edited by Didier Lasalle and Dirk Weissmann, 83–95. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Yuni, Shoshke-Rayzl. “Yiddish Kompyuteray ‫קאָ מּפיוטערײ‬-‫ייִ דיש‬: A Users’ Guide to Yiddish on the Internet.” Accessed January 19, 2021. https:​//​shoshke​.net​/ kompyuteray. Zingman, Kalman. In der Tsukunft-Shtot Edenya. Kharkov: Harkaver Yidish Farlag, 1918.

NOTES 1. Leybl Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes: A Fantastishe Dertseylung (Montréal: David Botwinik, 1980). 2. Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sh.Y. Abramovits), Ale Verk fun Mendele Moykher-Sforim, vol. 6 (Warsaw: Farlag “Mendele,” 1928), pp. 1–136. 3. Jules Verne, Cinq Semaines en Ballon: Voyage de Découvertes en Afrique par Trois Anglais (Paris: J. Hetzel et Cie, 1863). 4. Jules Verne, A Rayze Arum Di Velt in 80 Teg, trans. and reworked A. Tanenboym (New York: Di Hibru Poblishing Kompany, 1895?). 5. A. Tanenboym, Tsvishn Himl un Vaser: A Visnshaftlekher Roman (New York: Y. Sapirshteyn, 1896); Doktor un Tsoyberer (New York: Farlag fun Yehude Katsenelenbogen, 1899); Di Shvartse Kunst: A Visnshaftlekher Roman (New York: Hibru Pob. Co, 1899). 6. Jack Dann, ed., Wandering Stars (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 7. Jack Dann, ed., More Wandering Stars (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981). 8. Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids (New York & Jerusalem: Pitspopany Press, 1999).

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9. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lotten, eds., Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018). 10. Leybl Botwinik, “Yiddish SF&F 101*—Part 2,” 5–8. 11. Stephen M. Cohen, “Khemye: Chemical Literature in Yiddish,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, 29, 1 (2004), 21–29; “Chemical Literature in Yiddish: A Bridge between the Shtetl and the Secular World,” Aleph, 7 (2007), 183–251. 12. Hugo Gernsback, “A New Sort of Magazine,” Amazing Stories, April 1926, 3. 13. Lazar Borodulin, Af Yener Zayt Sambatyon: Visnshaftlekher un Fantastisher Roman (New York: A. Slutzky, 1929). 14. Solomon Bogin, Der Ferter Internatsyonal: Fantastishe Dertseylung (New York: Maks Yankevitsh, 1929). 15. Leon Kussman, Narnbund (New York: Farlag Atlantis, 1931). 16. Y.L. Goldshteyn, Tsuzamenbrukh oder Iberboy: Fantastisher Roman in Fir Teyln (Warsaw: Farlag “Bikher,” 1934). 17. Eda Glasser, A Rayze tsu der Levone (New York: n.p., 1940). 18. Velvl Tshernovetski, Erev der ferter velt-milkhome, Hines-di kenign fun Mars, fantastisher roman (Buenos Aires: El Magazine Argentino, 1959). 19. Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research/McGraw Hill, 1968), 483. 20. Yitskhok Leib Peretz, “Oyb Nisht Nokh Hekher,” Der Yud, 2, 1 (1900), 12–13. 21. Leon Elbe, Yingele-Ringele (New York: Farlag Matones, 1929). 22. Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, Masa L’Eretz Yisrael Bishenat Ta"t (Odessa: D’fus Dukhna, 1892). 23. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902). 24. Kalman Zingman, In der Tsukunft-Shtot Edenya (Kharkov: Harkaver Yidish Farlag, 1918). 25. Stuart C. Einbinder, “Find a Grave Memorial no. 193839028,” FindAGrave, last revised October 8, 2018, accessed January 18, 2021, www​ .findagrave​ .com​ / memorial​/193839028​/silvana​-botwinik. 26. David Botwinik, Interview by Jordan Kutzik. National Yiddish Book Center, December 13, 2011, www​.yiddishbookcenter​.org​/collections​/oral​-histories​/interviews​ /woh​-fi​-0000215​/david​-botwinik​-2011. 27. David Botwinik, Fun khurbn tsum lebn: Naye yidishe lider/From Holocaust to Life: New Yiddish Songs with English Translations (New York: League for Yiddish, 2010). 28. Leybl Botwinik, personal e-mail to author, June 28, 2021. 29. Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters (New York: Doubleday, 1951). 30. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: William Heinemann, 1895). 31. Irwin Allen, The Time Tunnel (20th Century Fox Television), aired 1966–1967. 32. Leybl Botwinik, interview by author, personal interview by telephone, January 12, 2021. 33. Marianne Windsperger, “Retelling the Shtetl: Recovering Yiddish in Contemporary American Literature,” in Ex(tra)territorial. Les territoires littéraires, culturels et linguistiques en question / Reassessing Territory in Literature, Culture

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and Languages edited by Didier Lasalle and Dirk Weissmann, 83–95. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 34. Botwinik, interview. 35. Leybl Botwinik. personal e-mail to author, January 18, 2021. 36. Edward Page Mitchell, “The Clock That Went Backward,” ForgottenFutures. com, www​.forgottenfutures​.com​/game​/ff9​/tachypmp​.htm​#clock, accessed March 3, 2021. 37. Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything (New York: Pocket Books, 1991). 38. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 81, 83. 39. Botwinik, interview. 40. Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question,” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956. 41. Isaac Asimov, “Reason,” Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941. 42. Odem Vaytman, “Afn Ekran,” Yugntruf, 61, April 1987, 17; 63, April 1988, 18–20. 43. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 84, 101. 44. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 55. 45. Botwinik, interview. 46. Leybl Botwinik, personal e-mail to author. February 12, 2021. 47. Leybl Botwinik, personal e-mail to author. February 14, 2021. 48. See, for example, in Executive Committee of the Editorial Board and M. Seligsohn, “Sambation, Sanbation, Sabbation (Sambaṭyon),” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906), 681–683. 49. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 75. 50. See for example in Emil G. Hirsch, Richard Gottheil, Kaufmann Kohler, and Isaac Broydé, “Demonology,” Jewish Encyclopedia, 514–521. 51. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 83. 52. Leybl Botwinik. personal e-mail to author, June 28, 2021; author’s translation from the Yiddish. 53. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 101. 54. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 50. 55. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 55. 56. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 43. 57. Botwinik, Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 55–57. 58. Hershl Glezer, “Di Geheyme Shlikhes fun Leybl Botvinik,” Yugntruf, 51–52, 1981, 22; author’s translation. 59. Yoysef Kerler, “Shehekheyonu,” Geklibene proze (eseyen, zikhroynes, dertseylungen) (Jerusalem: Yerusholayimer Almanakh, 1991), 258–259; author’s translation. 60. “About Us,” Yugntruf.org, yugntruf.org/about-us/?lang=en, 2021, accessed February 26, 2021. 61. As quoted in Leybl Botwinik, “Yiddish SF&F 101*—Part 2,” CyberCozen 23, 2 (February 2021), 8. 62. Etele Niborski-Trinh, Di Ummeglekhe Vakatsye (Baltimore: Kinder-Bibliotek, 2014).

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63. Alon Rothem, Niggun, produced by Yoni Salmon, 2017, accessed February 10, 2021, vimeo.com/333318157. 64. Yoni Salmon, “Niggun—by Yoni Salmon,” Fantasy Animation, accessed February 12, 2021, www​.fantasy​-animation​.org​/current​-posts​/2019​/5​/9​/niggun​-by​-yoni​ -salmon.

Chapter 8

Ancient Jewish Elements in Twenty-First-Century Alfredian Fanfiction Martine Mussies

This chapter examines Jewish elements in three fanfictions featuring Alfred the Great (848/849–899): “Petite Histoire” (2022) by LeaZen, “Palomita” (2022) by murasaki97, and “Holy Land” (2022) by chiaraplacidi. Based on the depiction of King Alfred in the popular Netflix series The Last Kingdom, these authors created new stories in which they weave identity markers from Jewish culture and traditions. In doing so, these authors add another layer to “Alfredism” (the intertextual storytelling around King Alfred) and suggest new interpretations of Jewish elements. THE STORYTELLING AROUND ALFRED THE GREAT Alfred was king of Wessex and king of the Anglo-Saxons from 871 to 899. He is known for his defense of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Danes, which earned him the epithet “the Great.” Alfred was the first king of Wessex to call himself the “King of the Anglo-Saxons.” According to historical sources, he was a learned man, who encouraged education and improved the legal system and the military structure of his kingdom.1 Due to his piety, he is considered a saint in some Catholic traditions, but was never officially canonized.2 Ever since the very first writings about him—such as Asser’s 893 hagiography “Vita Ælfredi regis Angul Saxonum”—Alfred the Great has been used to inspire people as a mirror of the Zeitgeist—the defining spirit or mood of the particular period in which the 121

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authors of these publications lived.3 This storytelling around Alfred the Great is so remarkable that a new word has been invented for it: Barbara Yorke has coined the term “Alfredism” to describe the reputation and public image of King Alfred from the post-Conquest period, through the Victorian era, to the present.4 Many amusing stories about King Alfred arose, for example of him being disguised as a minstrel playing his harp to infiltrate a Danish camp or as a kitchen boy to a Saxon housewife (where he may or may not have burnt some cakes). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Alfred the Great is used in fanfiction, which consists of the fictional writing by fans of, and featuring characters from, particular media. This is a circular development, for existing perceptions about Alfred have co-created his image in popular media. Whereas in most traditional text traditions the distinction between authors and readers is crucial, fanfiction blurs these boundaries as various fans often work together on one work of fiction, rewrite each other’s work and act as ghost-writers for each other.5 This dynamic complicates the relations of the authors to the text, of the text to the readers and thus of the authors to the readers. Although published and cited, a text will remain potentially unfinished. Similar to a video game, in which “players co-write their stories by the in-game choices they make,”6 in fanfiction there is no final version, as everyone can add their own associations. The readers and writers of fan fiction are thus participating in the form of what Axel Bruns calls a “produser community,” in which users become producers of content, and use and production are intertwined, so that the old distinction between producers, distributors, and consumers no longer applies.7 In this way, a new web of meanings emerges.8 Based on the depictions of King Alfred in popular media, like Netflix series The Last Kingdom, fans rewrite stories to address themes on their personal and political agendas, such as by having the King approve acts of bisexuality,9 or disapprove of Brexit.10 Most of the fanfiction featuring King Alfred is politically left, progressive and feminist.11 As a reaction to this, the corpus sporadically provokes extreme right-wing comments or even rewritings.12 The depiction of Alfred in fanfiction serves as a mirror of the Zeitgeist, in which the portrayal of Alfred keeps shifting, like a kaleidoscope. At the same time, we see a great deal of continuity in the descriptions and associations, such as recurring elements and ongoing developments. One of these red threads is the comparison with King David. ALFRED VS. DAVID, OR A TALE OF TWO KINGS? The story of David is found in four books of the Bible: the first and second book of Samuel (from 1 S.16:1), the first book of Kings (up to 1 Kings 2:11)

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and the first book of Chronicles (from 1 Chron. 10). King David is regarded as one of the bible heroes, and the Gospel writers go to great lengths to show that Jesus is a direct descendant of David (or, to be more precise, that his non-biological father Joseph is a descendant of David). He is also known in Islam, where he is called Dawud (Arabic: ‫ داود‬or ‫ داود‬Dāwūd) and is considered a prophet and a king. As a simple shepherd from Bethlehem, David was anointed King of Israel. He defeated the Philistine giant Goliath, fought against the heathen nations and brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. He played the zither and is regarded in both Jewish and Christian tradition as the poet of many of the Psalms. For example, Psalm 51, known in the West as the Miserere, is considered David’s penitential psalm, written after he had been reminded by the prophet Nathan of the sin he committed with Batsheba. David is regarded as the founder of worship in Jerusalem. Historically, King Alfred has often been compared to the Biblical David, mainly because of pietism.13 Already in the very first sentence of the first biography of King Alfred, author Asser (a Welsh monk from St David’s) referred to him as “the worshipful and pious ruler of all Christians in the island of Britain.”14 By describing Alfred as a deeply spiritual man with a thirst and passion for God, the idealized Alfred thus resembles David, who was the anointed one, and “a man after God’s own heart” (Acts 13:22; 1 Sam. 13:14). The two kings—David and Alfred—are connected through the King of Kings, Jesus, who, “as to his earthly life was a descendant of David” (Romans 1:3). Jesus, who lived around 1000 years after David, was called “David’s Son” as a Messianic title and prophesizes the arrival of his successor: “I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built” (Luke 6:47–49). For many people, this fits the description of Alfred the Great who is also often seen as an ideal king. Alfred the Great reigned over all his lands just like “David reigned over all Israel; and David administered justice and righteousness for all his people” (2 Samuel 8:15) as Alfred aimed for with his translation project. As such, the descriptions of the beloved King Alfred are in line with those in the Torah about good kingship, such as in Proverbs 16:13: “Righteous lips are the delight of kings, And he who speaks right is loved.” The idea of lineage and heritage from David to Alfred is worked out further in various pieces of fanfiction. Oftentimes, this is done via the insertion of a “watching scene” as a clearly recognizable example of the connection of Alfred to David. Various authors of fanfiction paralleling these heroes have the female protagonist taking a bath or changing her clothes, while the fictionalized King Alfred is watching. These scenes allude to the Biblical

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story in which David looked from a roof to the bathing Bathsheba, and “the woman was very beautiful to look upon” (2 Samuel 11:2, KJV). This moment has been a fertile ground for theological debates for centuries, about what bathing means, what nakedness means and who is (most) to blame. But in their stories, the fans surpass all opinions, assessments and measurements to explore this voyeurism without judgment. For example, in the 2021 story “King Alfred and Viking Queen Lagertha” by author izah_moh, the female protagonist Lagertha is naked by the river, changing clothes after swimming with a female friend, while Alfred looks at them.15 The story “Vikings” by ariyanastories opens with a similar scene, in which Gisla is naked in another wing of the house, which is visible from the King’s quarters. In all instances, King Alfred is the voyeur, the one who watches and enjoys—shamelessly— while allowing the women to be comfortable in their nakedness.16 Of a certain degree, although thematically connected, not all stories in which a man looks at a bathing woman are necessarily related to the biblical story of David and Bathsheba, but it provides a strong indication, which then can be confirmed by the presence of markers of Judaism in the contextualization of the story. In the case of the short love story “Vikings” (2021) by an author under the pseudonym of ariyanastories, this is done at the very ending: “Alfred sat by her bed and waited for her to fall asleep, stroking her hair softly and listening to her breathing as it slowed into a subtle breathy snore. Slowly, quietly, he stood up and leaned over to place his lips upon her forehead. ‘You shall be known here as Gebirah.’”17 In the last paragraph, the male protagonist—King Alfred—speaks to his beloved—Gisla—in her sleep. He promises her that in his new kingdom she will be the “Gebirah.” In the Tanach (Jewish bible), Gebirah (‫גְ ּבִ ָירה‬‎) is a female version of the word for “Lord,” also meaning “Great Lady” and “Queen Mother.” According to Amber Richardson, “The Gebirah was the most influential woman in ancient Israel, not only at court but within the kingdom as a whole.”18 By the insertion of this Hebrew word as conclusion, the author places the story as a whole in a Jewish context. Ariyanastories is far from the only author to reiterate as well as change elements of Jewish culture and heritage in her stories to strengthen the association of King Alfred with the biblical King David. This idea of Alfred as a king in the tradition of David is so prominent in Alfredian fanfiction that it has also influenced other fandoms, such as the one surrounding The Lord of the Rings, in which King Aragorn is now described with identity markers of King Alfred, to anchor his kingship.19 The direct comparison with a beloved person from the Torah can be seen as a clear insertion of a Jewish element. In addition, there are more hidden Jewish identity markers to be found in present-day Alfredian fanfiction. In order to explore this phenomenon, this chapter examines three case studies

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of Alfredian fanfiction with Jewish elements: “Petite Histoire” (2022) by LeaZen, “Palomita” (2022) by murasaki97, and “Holy Land” (2022) by chiaraplacidi. A close reading of these three stories, with special attention to the Jewish elements interwoven by the authors will shed new light on how twenty-first century-writers of fanfiction engage with Jewish heritage. These three examples have been selected because their storylines exemplify the genre. All the case studies discussed take place in the fictional world of The Last Kingdom, a Netflix series based on Bernard Cornwell’s historical book series The Saxon Stories (2004–2020), centering on a fictional depiction of Alfred of Wessex as the first king of the Anglo-Saxons and the “creator” of England (in Cornwell’s historical interpretation). Moreover, non-English fiction was deliberately chosen because of the language gap: research on fanfiction focuses mainly on English-language stories. CASE 1—“PETITE HISTOIRE” (2022) BY LEAZEN The first case study of this chapter is the 2022 story “Petite Histoire” [Short History] by a French author under the pen name of LeaZen. In the corpus of Alfredian fanfiction, this story is exceptional for three reasons. Firstly, because of the language, as the short story is written in French. By far the most fanfiction about Alfred is written in English, by native as well as non-native speakers. The second, much smaller category are the stories in Spanish (both from Spain and Latin America), such as “El rey Alfred” by Venezuelan Tumblr user marithesoprano and “Palomita” by murasaki97, which is discussed later on. Far less common are stories in Italian and French. The second reason that this story stands out is because of its length. Confirming its title, “Petite Histoire” counts only 350 words, where most Alfredian fanfic is at least twice as long. The third aspect in which this story is exceptional is because it is written from the perspective of the first person singular. Often referred to as “ego insertion,” this perspective is very common in fanfiction in general, but rather rare in the stories about King Alfred. Moreover, even within the corpus of ego inserting fanfic, this case is notable because no information about the narrator is given. The reader knows nothing about the name, gender, background, or appearance of the main character. “Petite Histoire” begins when the first-person narrator arrives at a castle and the guards won’t let him or her in. It is only after one of the guards sees that the narrator is wearing a star that he goes to fetch the king. This star is not further specified in the story: “L’un des deux baisse son regard sur moi et aperçoit l’étoile que je porte.”20 In French (similar to many other languages, for example Dutch), the concept of “porter” can refer to many different ways of carrying or wearing, for example in (but not limited to) clothing, jewelry or

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separate objects. This means that the star on the protagonist can be a star on a piece of jewelry (necklace, bracelet), a fabric star embroidered on clothing (evoking the badge various countries required of the Jews) or a kind of magical object held in the hand. Many fantasy and fairytale heroes and heroines have a star, often symbolizing heavenly favor, so that seems nothing special. But when re-reading this story, after all the more explicit Jewish references that will be mentioned later on, it makes sense to interpret the opening scene in a Jewish context as well. It could well be that the star refers to a Jewish star, some representation of the “Star of David” (‫ מגן דוד‬Maĝen David). Although it was originally used in many different contexts (for example among the Egyptians, Indians, Chinese and Peruvians), this symbol—with six points—is nowadays seen as a general symbol of Judaism. Most notably, these stars are known from the badges that Jews were ordered to wear from 1939 to 1945 by the Axis powers (which was also the case at various times during the Middle Ages by some caliphates, and during the Medieval and early modern period by some European powers). After recognizing the Jewish identity marker, the guard calls the king. In this way, the star functions as a passport. As Maureen Quigley explained, the concept of the key granting authority to pass is a powerful medieval topic, that also manifests itself in other contexts, such as passports, table d’or, badges and actual keys, like the house keys one gives to a new partner.21 As soon as King Alfred appears, the narrator is impressed. The king is described as “un homme magnifique” (“a magnificent man”), with beautiful dark-brown hair and shiny eyes. Then King Alfred begins to speak. He tells about his two daughters, whom he has lost. Their names? Zeruiah and Abigail. This is of course no coincidence, as their Biblical namesakes are connected to King David. The Bible’s extensive documentation of King David’s life and reign makes it challenging to keep track of the hundreds of characters involved. Still, Zeruiah is mentioned twenty-six times overall in the Tanach,22 twice as often as Nehemiah. This occurs in four different books. The genealogy of King David, contained in 1 Chronicles 2:3–16, contains her tale. Here, David has two sisters and seven older brothers, also named in 1 Samuel 16:10–11. As the three sons of Zeruiah (Joab, Abishai, and Asahel) are David’s nephews, Zeruiah is one of David’s two sisters. This clarifies several otherwise perplexing occurrences or incidents during David’s reign. Amasa was the son of a woman called Abigail—not David’s wife by that name but David’s other sister (1 Chronicles 2:16). So Amasa was David’s nephew. This is why David asked Amasa, “Are you not my own flesh and blood?” (2 Samuel 19:13). Unfortunately for Amasa, Joab (the son of Zeruiah) killed his cousin to regain his role as head of Israel’s army. The fact that Joab was David’s nephew explains why David would not execute him despite his crimes but had Solomon kill him—as Solomon did not have

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the same direct familial ties. Biblical royal politics were often motivated by family connections and relationships. Influential people rarely killed or punished close relatives unless they were a direct threat. In these circumstances, David would have shamed his sisters if he had executed Amasa or Joab. The identities of David’s two sisters help us comprehend his acts or lack of action on multiple occasions. By the insertion of these two names, author LeaZen thus shows how thinking about family connections are crucial in understanding the story of this and other biblical monarchs. In this story’s bathing scene—which breaks convention, as King Alfred is not just watching, but washing his beloved—the King tells how he once found himself on the battlefield, in between the two fractions: “Alors je me suis installé, là, avec ma harpe, entre les deux tribus rebelles et je me suis mis à jouer.” [“So I sat there with my harp between the two rebel tribes and started to play.”] Subsequently, the war was called off. As explained above, this harp playing can be read as a reference to King David. In the “canon” (the original series) of the fictional world of The Last Kingdom, in which all these three fanfictions take place, the idea of King Alfred playing the harp is never mentioned. In earlier “Alfredisms,” however, it is, especially in the stories about Alfred going incognito as a harpist to infiltrate a Danish camp. (This “memory” by the re-imagined King Alfred might, however, also hint at paganism, for it resonates with Celtic stories on how the druid stood between the armies on the battlefield and calmed the warriors with music.)23 CASE 2—“PALOMITA” (2022) BY MURASAKI97 “Polomita”—or in English “little dove”—is a Spanish Last Kingdom fanfic in which King Alfred meets a character named Hild. In both The Saxon Stories and The Last Kingdom television, Hild is a recurring character. She is a nun, later an abbess, and her character might be inspired by Hild from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation IV.23–4, nowadays revered as St Hilda. In the narrative by murasaki97, the king visits Hild in her new abbey. The story comprises one scene, one afternoon long. An omniscient narrator recounts a meeting between Alfred and Hild, with subtle romantic undertones, mainly set up as dialogue, with some remarks about the characters’ postures, their thoughts and the environment in which they find themselves. The fanfic opens when the two main characters meet in front of the abbey. From the dialogue we learn that Hild is renowned in her field (which may or not may be a wink to Hildegard von Bingen) and that Alfred wishes to learn from her to teach his people, for “No hay arte más noble que el arte de enseñar” [The art of teaching is the art of all arts].24 This statement by the re-imagined King Alfred is a direct translation of a well-known quote by

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the historical King Alfred. In the original Old-English: “Se cræft þæs lareowdomes bið cræft ealra cræfta.” In response, Hild answers that the King is very welcome, because “usted es uno de nosotros, como las hojas de un olivo que viven a través de los inviernos y los veranos” [You are one of us, just as the leaves of the olive tree do not fall off either in summer or in winter]. This is a quote from the Talmud, Menachot 53b, that continues this sentence with “neither shall the Jewish people be cast off, either in this world or in the world-to-come.” It is used as an explanation for Jeremiah 11:16, in which God calls the Jewish people “a leafy olive-tree, fair with goodly fruit.” The olive tree is an important symbol in the bible, seen as a sign of hope in the tale of Noah. From this historical biblical story, the olive branch, sometimes in the beak of a white dove, became a widespread symbol of peace and new life. Hild asks about “the books,” and Alfred hands over two Bibles: one in Hebrew and one in Greek. The next sentence poses interesting statements that tap into historical and theological debates: “Alfred hablaba animadamente sobre cómo poder interpretar correctamente ambos textos para combinarlos y sacar más provecho de los mismos, aunque también defendía las traducciones literales de los textos hebreos y quería impulsar más su uso.” [Alfred talked animatedly about how he could interpret both texts correctly in order to combine them and get more out of them, although he also defended the literal translations of the Hebrew texts and wanted to encourage their use.] Historically, Alfred wanted to (in modern parlance) “democratize” access to “those books most necessary for all men to know,” defined as works that would lead them to become better, wiser people (such as the Pastoral Care, the Boethius, and the Soliloquies). The translations that are attributed to Alfred change over the years, but he is indeed associated with translating some Biblical passages, like the first fifty Prose Psalms. Moreover, his Dōmbōc [law code] begins with an introduction containing a translation of the Ten Commandments followed by the Law of Moses (Exodus 21:1–23:19) and the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12). As far as we know, King Alfred did not translate the Bible as a whole— and it would be unlikely that he did without leaving us any traces. Moreover, there is no evidence for the historical King Alfred reading Greek and Hebrew or having such texts. There are traces of Greek in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, such as the Greek prayers transliterated into Latin letters in the Athelstan Psalter (an Anglo-Saxon manuscript written in Francia and taken to England shortly afterward). Scholar Bernice Kaczynski stated that “many literate persons [had] a simple familiarity with the alphabet, and with words or phrases culled from glossaries, Bibles, and liturgies.”25 Still, the chances of the King reading both Hebrew and Greek well enough are negligible. We know that the king only learned to read and write when he was older, and that he had help translating Latin. This characterization of the fictional Alfred in the story

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is therefore not based on the historical Alfred, but on one of his examples: Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In the context of this chapter the “merging” of Alfred and Augustine is remarkable, because Augustine’s writings show an ambivalent attitude toward the Jewish people, their culture and their customs. His sermons for the common people are often negative about the Jews, while he also often consulted contemporary Jews in Roman North Africa, with whom he was acquainted.26 By pasting this reference after the reference to the olive tree, the author of this story seems to suggest that Judaism has played a crucial positive role in the development of Christian theology, in line with the conclusion of Van Oort: “Bij Augustinus vindt men met vaste hand de grondlijnen getekend van een theologie die stelt dat er zonder het Oude (= Eerste!) Testament géén sprake kan zijn van christelijke theologie” [“With Augustine, one finds with a firm hand the outlines of a theology that states that without the Old (= First!) Testament, there can be no question of Christian theology”]. This appreciation is in line with the omitted sentence from the Talmud discussed earlier: “neither shall the Jewish people be cast off” and the symbolism of the olive tree. This symbolism is reinforced in the last few sentences, when Alfred calls Hild his “palomita,” which makes her blush. “Si dice que soy la rama del olivo,” explicó Alfred con naturalidad, “entonces usted debe ser la paloma que trae la paz. ¿No es ese el orden de las cosas?” [“If you say I am the olive branch,” Alfred explained matter-of-factly, “then you must be the dove that brings peace. Isn’t that the order of things?”] After the first literal translation of a quote by the historical Alfred, the author regularly keeps referring to him, for example by having Alfred explain how his loyal servant Asser helped him to understand the Latin texts. By re-evoking the ideal learned king from the intertextual storytelling around King Alfred, murasaki97 adds a new layer to the phenomenon of “Alfredism.” The references to both the historical figure and the church father create the image of a wise and learned Alfred. This Alfred is someone to listen to and take seriously—and he respects the Jewish faith, as a basis for Christianity and hope for the future. Moreover, murasaki97 engages in research agendas around the historical King Alfred as well. For example, when his version of the King explains to Hild that “Pedí que me enviaran libros francos, . . . pero nunca llegaron.” [“I had also ordered Frankish law-books, but they never arrived”], this reads as a pun on the rhetorical question Felix Liebermann posted over 100 years ago: “Why did he not order Frankish law-books to be sent over? He had called living instructors from France, he had been there as a boy, and he certainly was aware of Charles the Great’s Capitulars. But the decrees of the mighty Emperor faded in importance in the mind of pious Alfred when compared with God’s own law.”27 Perhaps this conclusion was indeed too narrow, and

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the fact that Alfred did not consult Frankish books might have had a much more practical reason. CASE 3—“HOLY LAND” (2022) BY CHIARAPLACIDI Despite the English title, this third case study is written in Italian, which is exceptional in the corpus of Alfredian fanfiction. Moreover, what stands out is the quality of the prose, as “Holy Land” is beautifully written. Another remarkable aspect is that it is written in the first person singular from the perspective of the king himself. This is already clear in the very first sentence: “In un tempo di florida pace, io, Alfred, Re di Wessex, mi approssimo alle coste della Terra Santa.” [“In a time of flourishing peace, I, Alfred, King of Wessex, approach the shores of the Holy Land.”]28 The “I, Alfred, King” is a characteristic opening of the historical Alfred, as can be for example traced in the Prologue to his Dōmbōc (the law code discussed above), in which Alfred names himself twice: “Ic ða ælfred cyning . . .” (49.9) and “Ic ða ælfred Westseaxna cyning . . .” (49.10). The premise behind the story by chiaraplacidi is that King Alfred, longing for a wife, goes to the Holy Land to visit a Jewish queen. Already from this starting point, we see many deliberate Jewish identity markers and symbols. Reading on, the importance of the Jewish elements in the story are confirmed when we learn that this queen is called Esther and—as a Jewish queen—the perfect for our re-imagined Anglo-Saxon king: “Quale miglior sposa, per un Re degli Anglosassoni, che una donna proveniente dalla Terra Santa, erede diretta del popolo ebreo che ha partorito il Cristo?” [“What better bride, for a King of the Anglo-Saxons, than a woman from the Holy Land, the direct heir of the Jewish people who gave birth to Christ?”]. In line with the Augustine-influenced Alfred character of murasaki9, the Alfred written by chiaraplacidi also sees that without the Jewish bible, there can be no question of Christian theology. In the narrative, after a long journey, when the King arrives, it is already night and the servants send him to his room. But in the darkness, Queen Esther risks her own life when she goes to the king’s chambers uninvited: “Se devo morire, così sia” [“If I must die, so be it”]. This is a literal citation of Esther 4:16, and a mirror of that Bible scene. As Helena Zlotnick explains: “Esther proceeds . . . to redeem both herself and her people.”29 There are many different, sometimes critical, interpretations of this tale. Dr Elsie R. Stern, for example, proposes that it “is a cautionary tale about life in the diaspora.”30 Alice Laffey explains that “feminist interpreters have begun to see that buried in Esther’s character is also full compliance with patriarchy.”31 This notion is also touched upon in the short story “Holy Land,” when Alfred realizes that Esther did not come to his rooms for love: “È una donna, senza

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potere, denaro o marito in una terra usurpata da infedeli, con solo un titolo a proteggerne l’onore; se l’ha cercato è perché ha visto valore nella sua corona, non in lui. D’altronde lui non è qui perché la ama, ma perché il dovere per il suo popolo lo guida.” [“She is a woman, ithoutt power, money or husband in a land usurped by infidels, with only a title to protect her honour; if she sought him out, it is because she saw value in his crown, not in him. Besides, he is not here because he loves her, but because duty for his people drives him.”] By inserting this reflection, the author makes us understand the context in which the story takes place and that both the female and male protagonist— despite being queen and king—must fit into their oppressive systems. They make love and the next day, when Alfred wakes, he sees Esther taking a bath and watches quietly. As described above, the insertion of a bathing scene in Alfredian fanfiction often acknowledges the parallels between King Alfred and King David. When they have breakfast together, Alfred asks Ester: “Chiedo, con la Benedizione del Signore, che voi possiate essere il mio ezer, la mia sposa” [“I ask, with the Lord’s blessing, that you may be my ezer, my bride”]. By using the word “ezer,” the Jewishness of the setting is confirmed. The word “ezer” (‫ )עזר‬occurs 21 times in the Tanach, in three different ways: for Eve, the first woman, and thus woman as creation (Genesis 2:18 and 2:20), for nations to whom Israel asked for military help (Isaiah 30:5, Ezekiel 12:14 and Daniel 11:34), and for God as Israel’s helper (Exodus 18:4, Deuteronomium 33:7, 33:26 and 33:29, Hosea 13:9, and in the Book of Psalms: 20:2, 30:22, 70:5, 89:19, 115:9, 115:10, 115:11, 121:1, 121:2, 124:8, 146:5). What these Bible texts have in common is that “ezer” is consistently used in a military context. In the beginning of the story, King Alfred was incomplete, just as Adam was incomplete without Eve, as he needed his “ezer,” his complementary warrior at his side. Esther grants him this favor, just as God granted Esther favor and called her to save a nation.32 Alfred tells Esther “possa amarti interiormente prima di ogni cosa con pensiero puro e corpo puro” [“may I inwardly love you before all things with pure thought and clean body”], which is an excerpt from a prayer that the historical Alfred wrote at the end of his translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule. Upon answering, Esther smiles and looks away. She cries. Alfred asks her why and she answers that she had been hoping that he would come, for it had been announced: “E non appena l’abbiamo sentito, i nostri cuori si sono sciolti, e non c’era più spirito in nessun uomo a causa sua” [“And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you.”]—a quote from Joshua 2:11.

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REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS This chapter analyzed Jewish additions in three fanfictions that feature the early English king Alfred of Wessex (848/849–899 CE). By adding these Jewish elements, the authors use their facets (or voices) to construct mashups of cultural Jewishness. In line with the argument of Daria Radtchenko, these Jewish symbols are “simulacra, referring not to the reality of the past, but, finally, to the texts about texts about the past.”33 In the cases discussed, this notion gets an extra layer, as it may well be that these various Jewish references in the pastiches were added by different people, as fanfictions often arise from collaborations (someone suggests a topic and a storyline, another adds some details, a third writes a first draft, which a fourth rewrites and a fifth continues, etc.). While referring to a sign that read “Jewish Forest,” Meike Watzlawik explains how “national, ethnic/cultural, and religious identities seem to be intertwined.”34 As confirmed by the close readings in this chapter, this is also the case with the Jewish elements in Alfredian fanfictions. The three case studies in this chapter are different in language, length and narrative perspective, but remarkably united in their storytelling. Building on the traditions known as “Alfredism,” these works present an idealized version of King Alfred, in line with the characterization of King David. Through the many references and quotations used, these stories become collages of elements: from a favorite storyworld series, from Bible texts, and from other historical sources, which often have a bearing on Jewish culture and traditions. Through their stories, the authors also give the readers food for thought. Blessed with the Star of David, the narrator in “Petite Histoire” may enter a castle, a kingdom, maybe even The Kingdom. Moreover, by the insertion of the two lost daughters—that we can find in the Tanach—it becomes clear how family connections can often assist us in understanding biblical monarchs. In “Palomita,” the Alfred character by murasaki97 explains that both the Hebrew text and its Greek translation could be correct and combined could provide more spiritual insights, and advocates the use of literal translations based on the Hebrew text. In “Holy Land,” between the lines, we find, among other things, a beautiful reflection on the meaning of the word “ezer.” As such, in their works, the authors present a re-imagining of King Alfred that is linked to King David and strongly rooted in Jewish traditions, who shines a new light on discussions within Judaism.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ariyana Stories. Vikings, Princess Giesla [Gisela]’s Acceptance. Fanfiction. net, November 11, 2020, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ princess-giselas-acceptance-2020. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Vol. 45. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Burt, Stephanie. “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction.” The New Yorker, August 23, 2017. www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/the​-promise​-and​-potential​-of​ -fan​-fiction. Campbell, James. “Placing King Alfred.” In Alfred the Great, edited by Timothy Reuter, 19–40. New York: Routledge, 2017. Chiaraplacidi. Holy Land. 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ holy-land-2022-by-chiaraplacidi. Izah_moh. King Alfred and Viking Queen Lagertha. 2021, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/king-alfred-and-viking-queen-lagertha-2021. Kaczynski, Bernice Martha. Greek Learning in the Medieval West: A Study of St. Gall, 816–1022. New Haven: Yale University, 1975. King, Ian, “King Alfred in Early-Modern and Enlightenment Britain: Historiographical Precursors to the Victorian Cult of Alfred.” Senior Thesis, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 2018. Laffey, Alice. An Introduction to the Old Testament: A Feminist Perspective. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. LeaZen. Petite Histoire. 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ petite-histoire-2022-by-leazen. Liebermann, Felix. “King Alfred and Mosaic Law.” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) 6 (1908): 21–31. www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/29777648. McClain-Walters, M. The Esther Anointing: Becoming a Woman of Prayer, Courage, and Influence. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2014. Murasaki97. Palomita. 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ palomita-2022-by-murasaki97. Mussies, Martine. “Aragorn as the Ideal King.” Lembas 41 (2021), 8–12. ———. “‘Dashing and daring, courageous and caring’: Neomedievalism as a Marker of Anthropomorphism in the Parent Fan Fiction Inspired by Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears.” Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura 3, no. 2 (2021): 60–83. ———. “Healing Women: The COVID-19 Crisis and Alfredian Fanfiction.” Journal of the Lucas Graduate Conference 9 (2021), 52–73. ———. “The King & I.” In What Is Medieval? Decoding Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism in the 21st Century, edited by Emma J. Wells and Claire Kennan. Belgium: Brepols, forthcoming. ———. “Not King Alfred’s Brexit.” Transformative Works and Cultures 36 (2021). ———. “Playing (with) Gisla in Mount & Blade.” Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games 9 (2022): 195–224. ———. “Queering the Anglo-Saxons Through Their Psalms.” Transformative Works and Cultures 31 (2019).

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———. “Trolls and Orcs—Some Observations on Extreme Right Content in Spheres of Tolkienesque Fanfiction.” Lembas, 41 (2022): 345–355. Parker, Joanne. “England’s Darling”: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great. 1st ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vwmg4d. Quigley, Maureen. “Virtual Passports: Keys and Paiza as the Signs and Means of Passage in Illuminated Manuscripts and Game Reality.” The International Medieval Congress Leeds, Paper 233-b, 2022. Radtchenko, Daria. “Simulating the Past: Reenactment and the Quest for Truth in Russia,” Rethinking History 10, no. 1 (March 2006): 127–148. Richardson, Amber. “The Gebirah and Female Power.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53, no. 1 (2020): 219–226. www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/63384​ /63384​-h​/63384​-h​.htm​#Page​_2. Stern, Elsie R. “Megillat Esther: A Godless and Assimilated Diaspora.” TheTorah.com, 2014. thetorah.com/article/megillat-esther-a-godless-and-assimilated-diaspora. Taaffe, T. “Alfred the Great.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. www​.newadvent​.org​/cathen​/01309d​.htm. van Oort, Johannes. “Augustine and the Jews: An Introductory Overview.” Verbum et Ecclesia 30, no. 1 (2009): 349–364. Watzlawik, Meike. “Cultural Identity Markers and Identity as a Whole: Some Alternative Solutions.” Culture & Psychology 18, no. 2 (June 2012): 253–260. doi. org/10.1177/1354067X11434843. Yorke, Barbara. “Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries.” In Alfred the Great, edited by Timothy Reuter, 377–396. New York: Routledge, 2017. Zlotnick, Helena. Dinah’s Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

NOTES 1. Ian King, “King Alfred in Early-Modern and Enlightenment Britain: Historiographical Precursors to the Victorian Cult of Alfred,” Senior Thesis, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2018, Trinity College Digital Repository, digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/ theses/689 2. T. Taaffe, “Alfred the Great,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), retrieved November 23, 2021 from New Advent: www​ .newadvent​.org​/cathen​/01309d​.htm. 3. Joanne Parker, “England’s Darling”: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vwmg4d. 4. Barbara Yorke, “Alfredism: The Use and Abuse of King Alfred’s Reputation in Later Centuries,” in Alfred the Great, ed. Timothy Reuter (New York: Routledge, 2017). 5. See, for example, Stephanie Burt, “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction,” The New Yorker, August 23, 2017, www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/the​ -promise​-and​-potential​-of​-fan​-fiction.

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6. Martine Mussies, “Playing (with) Gisla in Mount & Blade,” Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games 9 (2022), 220. 7. Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. vo. 45 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 8. Martine Mussies, “‘Dashing and Daring, Courageous and Caring’: Neomedievalism as a Marker of Anthropomorphism in the Parent Fan Fiction Inspired by Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears,” Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura 3, no. 2 (2021): 60–83. 9. Martine Mussies, “Queering the Anglo-Saxons through their Psalms,” Transformative Works and Cultures 31 (2019). 10. Martine Mussies, “Not King Alfred’s Brexit.” Transformative Works and Cultures 36 (2021). 11. Martine Mussies, “Healing Women: the COVID-19 Crisis and Alfredian Fanfiction,” Journal of the Lucas Graduate Conference 9 (2021), 52–73. 12. Mussies, Martine. “Trolls and Orcs—Some Observations on Extreme Right Content in Spheres of Tolkienesque Fanfiction,” Lembas 41 (2022), 345–355. 13. See, for example, James Campbell, “Placing King Alfred,” in Alfred the Great, ed. Timothy Reuter (New York: Routledge, 2017). 14. William Henry Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred: Together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904). 15. Izah_moh, King Alfred and Viking Queen Lagertha, 2021, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/king-alfred-and-viking-queen-lagertha-2021. 16. Martine Mussies, “The King & I,” in What Is Medieval? Decoding Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism in the 21st Century, ed. Emma J. Wells and Claire Kennan (Brepols, forthcoming). 17. Ariyana Stories, Vikings, Princess Giesla [Gisela]’s Acceptance, Fanfiction.net, 2021. www​.ariyanastories​.com​/post​/vikings​-princess​-giesla​-s​-acceptance; m.fanfiction.net/s/13744025/1/Princess-Gisela-s-Acceptance. Only in the title the name is spelled “Giesla” or “Gisela”; throughout the story, “Gisla” is used. 18. Amber Richardson, “The Gebirah and Female Power.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53, no. 1 (2020): 221. 19. Martine Mussies, “Aragorn as the Ideal King.” Lembas 41 (2021), 8–12. 20. LeaZen, Petite Histoire, 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ petite-histoire-2022-by-leazen. 21. In her 2022 paper Maureen Quigley, “Virtual Passports: Keys and Paiza as the Signs and Means of Passage in Illuminated Manuscripts and Game Reality” at the International Medieval Congress Leeds (Paper 233-b). 22. Jewish bible. 23. A scene also described by Greek historian Diodorus (Διόδωρος) of Sicily (fl. first century BC). 24. Murasaki97, Palomita, 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ palomita-2022-by-murasaki97. 25. Bernice Martha Kaczynski, Greek Learning in the Medieval West (New Haven: Yale University, 1975), 10–11.

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26. Johannes van Oort, “Augustine and the Jews: An Introductory Overview,” Verbum et Ecclesia 30, no. 1 (2009): 364. 27. Felix Liebermann, “King Alfred and Mosaic Law,” Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England) 6 (1908): 23, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/29777648. 28. Chiaraplacidi, Holy Land, 2022, republished at martinemussies.nl/web/ holy-land-2022-by-chiaraplacidi. 29. Helena Zlotnick, Dinah’s Daughters: Gender and Judaism from the Hebrew Bible to Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 88. 30. Elsie R. Stern, “Megillat Esther: A Godless and Assimilated Diaspora,” TheTorah. com, 2014, thetorah.com/article/megillat-esther-a-godless-and-assimilated-diaspora 31. Alice Laffey, An Introduction to the Old Testament: A Feminist Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 216. 32. For more about this reading of the story of Esther, see M. McClain-Walters, The Esther Anointing: Becoming a Woman of Prayer, Courage, and Influence (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2014). 33. Daria Radtchenko, “Simulating the Past: Reenactment and the Quest for Truth in Russia,” Rethinking History 10, no. 1 (March 2006), 127–148. 34. Meike Watzlawik, “Cultural Identity Markers and Identity as a Whole: Some Alternative Solutions,” Culture & Psychology 18, no. 2 (June 2012): 2, doi. org/10.1177/1354067X11434843.

Chapter 9

Free Will, Kabbalah, Human Nature, and Messiah Chaim Cigan’s Time Cruise via Parallel Histories and Identities Michaela Weiss

(JEWISH) SCIENCE FICTION IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA When an obscure Slovak writer, Chaim Cigan, published his debut novel Altschulova Metoda (The Altschul’s Method, 2014) in a Czech publishing house, the book immediately sparked critical interest and controversy over its theme, form, and authorship. Introduced as the first part of the tetralogy Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc (Where Foxes Bid Good Night), the novel features alternative histories, hypnosis, time travel, and aliens in the political and cultural climate of the Eastern Bloc. The narrative represents an unprecedented attempt to revive Jewish literature in Central Europe, while, at the same time, using an original narrative format: blending science fiction, fantasy, materials from historical archives, and a political and mysterious thriller. What significantly contributed to the book’s appeal was the baffling name and identity of the writer. First doubts concerning the authorship emerged only within four days after the publication. According to the bio note included in the book, Chaim Cigan was born in Smolenice, Slovakia, studied at the Technical University in Kežmarok and was employed at the Slovak Ministry of Heavy Industry. Later, he emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a translator.1 Yet, there were no signs of his existence and both the publishers and those reputed to have met him refused to share any details concerning his life. Cigan’s identity and authorship could not be verified even after his death 137

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in 1992, the only remaining relative, his wife Rita, having moved to Australia to join the Aboriginals. The Czech radio editor Zuzana Vlčková then traced the authorship to the Chief Rabbi of the Czech Republic and former Chief Rabbi of the city of Prague, Karol Efraim Sidon, who had previously used the pen name in Židovská ročenka2 (The Jewish Annual) and the monthly magazine of the Jewish community in Prague, Roš Chodeš.3 Sidon later confirmed the authorship, claiming that he wanted to separate his rabbinical post from his science fiction.4 In 1977, Karol Sidon signed the Charter 77, a document set up by Czech dissidents Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík, and Pavel Landovský, which openly opposed the Communist regime.5 As many other dissidents, Sidon lost his job and, in 1978, was forced to emigrate to Germany. In the 1990s, he returned to Czechoslovakia and, within the context of rising interest in the Jewish history, literature, and culture, he became the Chief Rabbi. Where Foxes Bid Goodnight is not his first literary endeavor: he had already published several novels, including Sen o mém otci (Dream About My Father, 1968), Sen o mně (Dream About Myself, 1970), and Evangelium podle Josefa Flavia (1974). English readers could read Sidon’s short story “The Magic Amulet” published in the collection Prague Noir (2018). In 2019, Sidon was awarded the Czech State Award for Literature. His tetralogy marks a landmark in Czech Jewish writing, as well as in European (Jewish) science fiction. While many Czech(oslovak) Jewish writers published their (predominantly) Holocaust-related works, be it Arnošt Lusting, Ladislav Klíma, Viktor Fischl, and Arnošt Goldflam, no major writer emerged at the turn of the twentieth century to secure the continuity of the national Jewish writing. When it comes to the development and reception of science fiction in central Europe, it is incomparable with the Anglo-American tradition. The promising flourishing of the genre in the interwar period—especially via the works of the Čapek brothers6—was put to an abrupt end in the late 1940s. Central Europe was only slowly recovering from the firsthand horrors of the war and the misuse of technology was no fiction. Moreover, science fiction and other popular forms, including fantasy and comics, were seen as politically subversive and decadent because of their inherent potential to undermine the understanding of history and its impact on future developments, as well as its ability to challenge dominant political discourses and master narratives. In postwar Czechoslovakia, science fiction elements, therefore, appeared either in series for children (e.g., Emil, the Robot, 1960 or The Visitors, 1983) or in comedies, which, however, featured serious social issues, including Nazism: I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (dir. Oldřich Lipský, 1969) is set in America at the turn of the third millennium and in 1911 Prague, addressing the question of to what extent an earlier death of Einstein would affect world history. Another such example is the film Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea

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(dir. Jindřich Polák, 1977), which is set in the near future, when time travel and anti-aging pills have become available to masses. A former Nazi hopes to alter the results of the Second World War by traveling back in time and equipping Adolf Hitler with a hydrogen bomb. Czech science fiction started to regain popularity and significance only after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989,7 manifesting the correlation between a political regime and (official) widespread popularity of science fiction. The political danger of the genre lies in its exploration of the “what-ifs” of our civilization. As Asimov noted, parallel worlds or alternative universes challenge “the natural notion that there’s something permanent about things the way they are right now.”8 The discovery of time travel leads to the creation of an infinite number of alternate histories and parallel worlds, which is reflected in the timespan of Cigan’s tetralogy, ranging from Exodus to the twenty-sixth century. By providing alternative scenarios, Cigan explores the facets of human identities and nature, while employing Jewish characters, which is still a relatively uncommon practice in the science fiction genre (especially for European science fiction). The present study explores the forms and methods of time travel, the mechanisms of creation of parallel worlds and their impact on the identities of the novels’ protagonists. ALTSCHUL’S HYPNOTIC TIME TRAVEL, ALTERNATIVE HISTORY, AND COGNITIVE PLAUSIBILITY The first part of the tetralogy, The Altschul’s Method, is set predominantly in 1980s Czechoslovakia and Germany and could read as a speculative historical novel of “normalization” (i.e., the reversal of restoration of the political climate prior to Prague Spring reform9), if the story was not dispersed with grotesque events and science fiction elements: the appearance of aliens and UFOs, reincarnation hypnosis and the creation of parallel worlds. One of the protagonists, Moshe Blumendorf,10 is an art restorer, who is encouraged by the regime to emigrate to Germany. Yet, before he obtains the status of a political refugee, he is notified of his wife’s death. He illegally crosses the border back to Czechoslovakia, determined to arrange a Jewish burial. Discredited as a German spy and followed by the Czechoslovak Secret Police, Moshe accidentally discovers that his wife is not only alive and dating another man, but that she was an active Secret Police agent reporting on his activities. While the novel may seem as a science fiction, or at least a spy thriller, much of it is based on the historical reality of the Eastern Bloc: Moshe (as well as the author Karol Sidon) was encouraged by the regime to emigrate to Germany, just as many real-life Czechoslovak dissidents were. Moshe, however, observes the absurdity of the situation: he can be granted

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political asylum even though he does not have to fear for his life or suffer from hunger like many others, who, however, do not fulfill the conditions.11 In cooperation with a secular Jewish psychiatrist of Czech origin, Robert Altschul,12 Moshe Blumendorf becomes entangled into an intricate web of histories and events from other temporalities and geographical spaces, turning into a restorer of history, memory, and (Jewish) identity. The protagonists must face hidden manuscripts, stolen artifacts, former Wehrmacht officers, and Soviet collaborators, who are misusing hypnosis to silence the witnesses of their criminal past. Cigan’s tetralogy is unique within the context of Jewish science fiction, not only by merging various genres but, mainly, by its unique representation of Jewish characters and the foregrounding of Jewish concerns. As Tidhar notes, despite the popularity of science fiction among Jewish writers, until recently, there were not many fictional Jews in space. The classics of (Jewish) sci-fi, be it Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and others, only rarely portrayed an explicitly Jewish character.13 In Cigan’s series, most characters are Jewish, and it was the Jews who came up with the methods of time travel first via hypnosis and later via hyperspace. Still, Altschul and Blumendorf are unlikely sci-fi protagonists: they are neither heroic, super smart, nor muscular. In the whole series, there are no “muscle-bound macho heroes swaggering and bullying their way through galaxy.”14 Blumendorf is even depicted like “an aging drug addict with a red beard of a scam artist and expression of a maniac”15—though he is valued for his sexual vigor, especially in the parallel worlds. The choice of characters documents Cigan’s sense of humor, but also the realism of the series. It further reflects the tendency of science fiction to sympathize “with the marginal and the different,” offering, as Roberts puts it, “imaginative expression” of minorities.16 Alternative histories prove to be a primary issue for many sci-fi writers,17 shattering the myth of history as a continuity and master narratives. Cigan’s alternative (and parallel) histories are, however, still believable, and potentially possible. The tetralogy not only contains (archival) details from Jewish history but at the same time, explicates alternative versions of historical events. The series relies heavily on metadata, that is, the readers’ knowledge and/or experience of not only the history and the sensibilities of the Eastern Bloc, but the world history as well, especially when connected to Jews. This cognitive relatedness, or “cognitive plausibility,”18 as Suvin suggests, is crucial for the science fiction genre, distinguishing it from fantasy. Science fiction is, therefore, based on the “interaction of estrangement and cognition,” which function in the “imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”19 The issues of Jewish identity, history, and free will, form the backbone of the narrative. Still, as the book series

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manifests, the spaces denoting personal, national, and/or ethnic identity are inextricably intertwined. When Robert Altschul discusses with his twin brother Leo the possibility of hypnosis as a tool to reach previous lives, they open the issue of time travel. The twins eventually agree that the only way to test the theory is to select one major event that would have significant consequences if removed from history: the Exodus. They propose to send somebody back to Moses’s times and persuade him to stay in Egypt. Yet, they cannot agree which path would be more beneficial for the world history and the Jews: Robert argues that, if Jews remained in Egypt, they would assimilate and therefore avoid persecution, as there would be no Jewish nation and no anti-Semitism. In contrast, his brother Leo defends the principle of free will and the necessity of freedom from the Egyptian captivity.20 This conflict between full assimilation and the expression and manifestation of free will, becomes the central idea of the whole series. Reincarnation hypnosis featured in The Altschul’s Method as the major time-traveling tool is based on the movement of the mind. Yet, the hypnotic regression is not the only method available. Moshe Blumendorf starts to escape into parallel worlds after the betrayal of his wife and, even more prominently, her violent death, which he witnesses. His stories from the parallel world, which he willingly shares, lead to his hospitalization at a psychiatric hospital, where he is heavily medicated to stop frequenting the alternative realities. However, as it turns out, it is not only daydreaming and conscious escapes, but also recurrent night dreams that serve as yet another gateway to parallel worlds: these dreams are the result of “a trauma induced by space-time travels and the cabin of the elevator in a dream fulfills the function of a Raumschiff, falling through the time shaft.”21 Besides hypnosis and dreaming, Robert Altschul discovered one more method for entering past lives and traveling through hyperspace with full consciousness: tantric sex. When describing the procedure to Moshe, Robert discloses that after understanding the technique, they could join the stars or enter the mind of any living person in any time zone. During such ecstatic trips, Robert even meets “a strange person composed of letters, which held together only by miracle and looked like a blown-up seal or rather an orca. It was clear that we belong together.”22 The orca that Robert references is the soul of Sidney Kramer, another man from the future, who eventually enters Robert’s body as a dybbuk.23 Kramer is determined to use Altschul’s body and his knowledge to reverse the time travel effects and delete the parallel worlds, which have lengthened the time and marred the announced coming of the Messiah.

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The second part of the series, Piano Live, significantly widens the time travel possibilities due to the control over hyperspace, the timeline spanning from ancient Egypt to the twenty-fifth century. Unlike the first part, it is set predominantly in a parallel world, where Napoleon did not win the Battle of Austerlitz (1805) but signed a peace treaty with Austria a Russia, preventing both world wars. On November 17, 1989, it is not the Czechoslovakian Communist regime that falls, but the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, while Gustáv Husák (the real-life Czechoslovak president between 1975 and 1989),24 a fascist ruler of independent Slovakia, initiates the transport of local Jews into concentration camps and the Czechs choose Muammar Kaddafi as their monarch. Kaddafi inherits a spaceship from his grandfather; however, there is a missing key: a silver chalice, which can turn his grandfather’s spaceship into a vehicle capable of hyperspace travel—and which ends up in the hands of Moshe Blumendorf and Robert Altschul. The history of central European Jews is, therefore, brought into a global consideration of Jewish history, culture, and religion. JEWS IN HYPERSPACE, PARALLEL WORLDS, AND EQUALLY PARALLEL IDENTITIES Hyperspace travel is a form of a faster-than-light transport, based on the nineteenth-century mathematical theory of four-dimensional space, which became popular in the 1930s science fiction pulp magazines, especially Amazing Stories Quarterly (1928–1934) as a form of inter-stellar travel. The inspiration from pulp fiction and its tropes is evident even in Cigan’s tetralogy. Though it addresses serious issues concerning the fluidity of identity, free will, and responsibility of an individual, it, nevertheless, contains multiple references to traditional tropes of popular science fiction magazines and novels, and resorts to (often dark) humor, especially in connection with aliens. When depicting an encounter of Carl-Heinz Jacobi, a son of a Secret Police agent and psychiatrist, with aliens, the scene reads as a parody on popular science fiction texts and films. Despite Jacobi’s belief in alien civilizations, at first he thinks that he has stepped into a movie making scene, shooting a UFO landing in a sharp light. Even after he realizes that there is no hidden camera, he still expects to see the traditional little green men from the films. Instead, there are balls that look like curled hedgehogs with light-green spines moving toward him: “As a representative of mankind, he felt ashamed. As he recalled the scene with full honesty, face to face with the alien intelligence, he shitted himself. In that condition he was removed to the spaceship and underwent vivisection.”25 He is told that they had been scanning his organs since his childhood and that there is no need to be afraid. He

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realizes that his experience is far from unique and becomes a member of the world organization Friends of Alien Intelligence. Still, the “little green men,” or, rather, one little green man, find their way into the tetralogy. Only that this alien creature has a human form, looking like a miniature of Moshe Blumendorf. In Robert Altschul’s hypnotic dream, he introduces himself as “Albus from a star cluster 232 C 3641 in the Sagittarius constellation,”26 which houses the shadows of all living creatures of the universe. As he explains, each planet has its own place where it stores their memory: the Dome of the Future. Albus appears to a group of Dome seekers, including Robert and instructs them to use tefillin,27 which produces light and warmth, especially shel rosh, the head-tefillah, which serves as a (spiritual) torchlight. Only with the help of this spiritual light can they find the way to the pyramid-shaped structure. This scene foreshadows the major setting and concerns of the Part II of the tetralogy, exploring the connection between ancient Egypt and Exodus, focusing mainly on the influence of Imhotep and Akhenaten (known to history as Amenhotep IV) with Moses, and those claiming that he was an extraterrestrial.28 In Cigan’s novels, Akhenaten is not an extraterrestrial but a time traveler from the future, who significantly alters the world history by introducing new technologies and establishing monotheism. Time travel via hyperspace, however, requires an enormous amount of energy that no current civilization can provide. As the series is not set in unknown galaxies or universes, the energy source must be available on Earth. In Cigan’s novels, the source of power is Kabbalah, namely the chanting of divine names. The connection between science fiction, and religion is not new, as Paul J. Nahin suggests: The idea of parallel worlds was employed in Elizabeth Phelps’s popular novel The Gates Ajar (1868). Around the same time, two religious books claiming to be nonfiction presented “hyperspace as the dwelling place of God Himself”: Alfred Taylor Schofield’s publication Another World (1888), which declared God’s hyperspace to consist of four spatial dimensions, and Arthur Willink’s The World of the Unseen (1893), which even suggested “a divine hyperspace with an infinity of spatial dimensions.”29 Multiple dimensions, new fantastic worlds in space, religious (and at that time, Christian) parallels: all this has formed the history of science fiction. The concept of multiple worlds is not foreign to Judaism either. Isaac Asimov affirmed the close connection between Judaism and sci-fi: “We come to the conclusion that the Holy Writings lead the way to science fiction.”30 In Kabbalah, all being is divided into four worlds of emanation, creation, formation, and action. These worlds are not externally positioned, co-existing on different reality planes. As a character of a rabbi in Piano Live, proclaims:

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“God is a master of many worlds . . . and each is a bit different. If you consider free will, it cannot be otherwise.”31 In the book series, the process of hyperspace travel is seemingly simple: after chanting divine names, the body of the traveler turns into text: “He observed with interest, how his body turns into greenish letters, flickering in the hyperspace,” becoming “a complex mathematical equation.”32 The transport is thus based on belief that the time traveler is a “complex of energetic numerical relations, endowed by another energetic complex with a potential to be projected into a specific point of space-time, while his body is, in fact, a virtual reality, belonging to a family of holograms in the memory of the great computer.”33 The major difference between Altschul’s reincarnation hypnosis, which works on the principle of mind, and the transportation via hyperspace is that the latter enables physical time travel. At the end of the twentieth century, this discovery leads to the foundation of ISACS (Institute of Standing Ancient Civilizations Search), which studies linguo-mathematical principles of the world, based on the teachings of the kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia,34 whose book of nothingness contains secret codes to mastering time (and thus to unlimited power). Each hyperspace transfer has unpredicted and undesirable side effects: an uncontrollable creation of parallel worlds. This multiplication lengthens time—and consequently tampers with the coming of the Messiah. What is more, miscalculation of the destination leads to landing in a wrong time and place, amnesia, disorientation, and/or death, as well as limitless multiplication of worlds. Once these parallel worlds discover hyperspace and develop similar inventions, they start producing human doubles: “While some do remember the time and space of their mission, there is an exponentially growing number of those who do not. Due to amnesia and unexpected strangeness of the surroundings, they sooner or later die. It is a terrible thought, though common in nature.”35 What is perhaps more serious is the tempering with the free will of the time travelers. Josi Klein, sent to ancient Egypt to become Amenhotep IV, the promoter of monotheism, becomes aware that his brain is overcome in crisis situations and controlled by a computer program: Still, I wonder, when did they insert the chip into my body and on whose command. Unfortunately, I cannot extract it, and to be honest, I am not sure, it would be for the best. That, however, does not justify the fact that the positron brain was implanted into my body without my knowledge and consent. Nobody bothered to teach me how to control it and even though it probably saved my life, it is still violating the law. I still cannot really tell, when I act according to my free will and when is my behavior controlled by the program. Setting aside

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how degrading this is for a human being, what is, perhaps, more serious, is that I am altering the course of history.36

The incorrect time and space landing attracts the attention of seventeen-year-old Jew Sidney Kramer, who discovers a “time slip connected to the curving of the space-time during the hyperspace jump.”37 The temptation to know the exact destination of all time-travelers inspires him to temper with the past and provide the volunteers with memory chips to speed up the progress. Despite the intricate technical details of the creation of parallel worlds, the main focus of the series remains on the impact of the featured characters and their adaptation to the changing circumstances. As Ben Bova believes: “To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds.”38 The identities of the characters are fluid enough in the first part, complicated by the appearance of identical Altschul twins, memory loss, collaboration with Secret Police, or psychosis. In the second part, the situation becomes even more complex as it turns out that the key characters (and featured historical figures) are, in fact, living in parallel worlds or are agents sent from the future, and as such can be considered “aliens,” though not extraterrestrials. In these alternative spaces, there are equally parallel “I”s of the major characters, who may act differently in different worlds but are still recognizable: Robert (Reuven, Ruben) Altschul, Moshe Blumendorf (Theodor), and Ludmila are all held captive in a Slovak concentration camp, even though Ludmila is a non-Jew and, as an ambassador of Icaria (the parallel USA), she should be immediately freed. What keeps Ludmila behind the barbed wire fence is her sexual insatiability. Due to her size, she cannot find a man who could satisfy her without feeling humiliated, until she meets Theodor. They are all saved from certain death by a very unlikely intervention of Leon (Leo) Altschul and Muamar Kaddafi, who is willing to intervene on behalf of the Jews in exchange for a magical silver chalice, which Ludmila hid in the concentration camp. Kaddafi flies to Slovakia in his salad-bowl-shaped flying saucer and confronts the Slovak minister of international affairs with a hologram parrot, demanding the identification and delivery of the camp prisoner Theodor Blumendorf. The appearance of hologram parrot and the spaceship do not seem to be perceived as anything extraordinary: the characters, curiously enough, consider extraterrestrials to be only fictional characters from legends and rather believe that the spaceship is controlled by people from the future. Once Theodor, Reuven, and Ludmila are safe on board of the spaceship, they let Kaddafi use his laser cannon to destroy the

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concentration camp’s watchtowers, and then disappear in hyperspace. Upon escaping the concentration camp, the company lands in ancient Egypt. There is however, not one Raumschiff hovering in the sky but twenty of them, each carrying their doubles. These human copies, however, do not contain their memory or sense of self, their spaceships thus eventually drop to the earth and their crew dies. Originally, the appearance of parallel worlds was understood as the manifestation of God’s will. The president of ISACS, General Joel Benjamin, firmly believed that each new parallel world was evidence of man’s absolute will to create worlds according to their best and worst conscience. However, the limitless series of worlds and equally limitless line of disoriented doubles without memory, purpose, or identity, did not make any sense to him. All worlds would thus be soon filled with copies of parallel worlds with “erased memory, without identity or with a false identity.”39 The issue of free will and responsibility for the world thus became the issue of uttermost significance. Yet, the creations of parallel worlds and empty zombies could only be stopped by the Messiah (who, in Benjamin’s time, is over 300 years late). Benjamin’s concerns over the not coming of the Messiah and the population of the world by zombies leads him to confide in Kramer and plan a trip back to the thirteenth century to find information about the meaning of Abulafia’s text. While scientists know that the chanting of divine names leads to the transfer from space-time to hyperspace and from hyperspace to a selected space-time, they cannot discover why it is happening in the first place. They make some progress in exploring text on the mathematical level and manage—by slight adaptations of the pronunciation of Hebrew consonants—to reach a more precise landing, yet the principle eludes them. Kramer and Benjamin are determined to save the world by traveling to thirteenth-century Spain, destroying the text, and thus deleting the knowledge of time travel and with it, all parallel worlds and all human-induced alternations that have prevented the coming of the Messiah. Benjamin fulfills his task and all parallel worlds that started by chanting Abulafia’s text are deleted. The world, however, does not fully return to its original course. While the Clintons rule from the White House (busy dealing with the president’s affairs) and Elie Wiesel is the president of the Holocaust Museum, Czechia’s president is not Václav Havel but Alexander Dubček, and Ljubimov (Gorbachev) takes over the Western world and invades Israel. General Benjamin may have deleted the parallel worlds that were created because of the chanting of Abulafia’s text, but what he and Kramer forgot (or were not fully aware of) was that other worlds and identities were created by traveling in the Raumschiff with the use of the silver chalice. The shift in the world is thus manifested by merging of the original and parallel worlds, followed by a global disappearance of

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human copies and their descendants. Even Kramer in his dybbuk form fails at fully reversing the consequences of his actions. CONCLUDING REMARKS The last novel, Outsider, takes the reader back to the current time and features historical figures and events from the last four decades, focusing on the conflicts in the Middle East. The final battle for the future of the world and its full return is closely connected with the conflict between Armilus, a king arising at the end of time forcing destruction and persecution on the Jews and the messiah, the descendant of David, whose victory over the false messiah shall bring salvation. The series does not provide an explicit ending, even though it ends on a hopeful note. Sidney Kramer becomes aware of his death and realizes he will be allowed to enter the world to come. The image of the world is slowly regaining its original form, with the parallel worlds and identities dissolving. The remaining characters who still need to resolve their actions, including Melech (the King), start searching for their inner peace in a desert, equipped with tefillin and a bottle of Living Water. With all laws returning to the former state, the world as well as the protagonists are preparing for the promised restoration. While firmly established in the genre of science fiction (and partially fantasy by introducing the concept of dybbuk into the narrative), Cigan’s series enriches the genre by employing various methods of time travel, ranging from regressive hypnosis, tantric sex, and religious exaltation to the use of hyperspace. Cigan does not feature other planets, universes, or extraterrestrials; he does not rely even on heroes, masterminds, or superstrength. Instead, the engagement with pulp gradually gives way to a political thriller with strong religious elements. In the series, Jews, their history, culture, as well the complexity of the Jewish identity, play a major role, which is still a rare endeavor—if not in the context of American science fiction, then definitely in the European one. Despite the historical and religious concern, the major attention is paid to the unstable nature of Cigan’s (Jewish) characters, whose multiple failings are portrayed realistically and with compassion in the original, as well as in the parallel worlds. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper is a result of the project SGS/10/2022, Silesian University in Opava internal grant Text from Current Linguistic and Literary Perspectives.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashley, Mike. Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Asimov, Isaac. “Introduction.” In More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Jack Dann, 1–4. Nashville: Jewish Lights, 1999. Assmann, Jan. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Bolton, Jonathan. Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Bova, Ben. “The Role of Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow, edited by Reginald Bretnor, 3–16. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Čapek, Karel. Divadelníkem proti své vůli (Becoming a Playwright against my Will). Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1968. Cigan, Chaim. Altschulova Metoda. Vol. 1. Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc. Prague: Torst, 2014. ———. Outsider. Vol. 4. Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc. Prague: Torst, 2017. ———. Piano Live. Vol. 2. Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc. Prague: Torst, 2015. ———. Puzzle. Vol. 3. Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc. Prague: Torst, 2016. Freedman, Carl, ed. Conversations with Isaac Asimov. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Kudláč, Antonín K. K. “Česká žánrová literature (sci-fi a fantasy).” July 12, 2018. https:​//​www​.czechlit​.cz​/cz​/feature​/ceska​-zanrova​-literatura​-sci​-fi​-a​-fantasy. Lebold, Sheldon L. The Legacy of Moses and Akhenaten: A Jewish Perspective. Skokie: Berwick Court Publishing, 2013. Nahin, Paul J. Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect. New York: Springer, 2014. Osman, Ahmed. Moses and Akhneten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus. Rochester: Inner Traditions/Bear, 2002. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2006. Suvin, Darko. The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the History and Poetics of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Tidhar, Lavie. “Jews in Space: On the Unsung History of Jewish Writers and the Birth of Science Fiction.” LitHub, June 14, 2021, https:​//​lithub​.com​/jews​-in​-space​-on​ -the​-unsung​-history​-of​-jewish​-writers​-and​-the​-birth​-of​-science​-fiction. Velinger, Jan. “Prague Rabbi Pens Literary Hit of Season.” Radio Prague International, April 8, 2014, https:​//​english​.radio​.cz​/prague​-rabbi​-pens​-literary​-hit​ -season​-8299198. Vlčková, Zuzana. “Rabín Sidon používá pseudonym kvůli nesouhlasu části židovské obce s jeho psaním.” iRozhlas, April 2, 2014, https:​//​www​.irozhlas​.cz​/node​ /5922661. Westfahl, Gary. “Janeways and Thaneways: The Better Half, and Worse Half, of Science Fiction Television.” Interzone 140 (February 1999): 31–33.

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NOTES 1. Chaim Cigan, The Altschul’s Method, vol. 1: Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc (Praha: Torst, 2014), 476–477. All excerpts from the tetralogy were translated by M.W. 2. Židovská ročenka (The Jewish Annual), no. 5771, 2010–2011, 175. 3. Roš Chodeš, no. 1, 2011, 11. 4. Zuzana Vlčková, “Rabín Sidon používá pseudonym kvůli nesouhlasu části židovské obce s jeho psaním,” iRozhlas, April 2, 2014, https:​//​www​.irozhlas​.cz​/node​ /5922661. For English version, see, e.g., Jan Velinger, “Prague Rabbi Pens Literary Hit of Season,” Radio Prague International, April 8, 2014, https:​//​english​.radio​.cz​/ prague​-rabbi​-pens​-literary​-hit​-season​-8299198. 5. For a more detailed information on Charter 77 and dissent in Czechoslovakia, see Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 6. In the 1920s, the Čapek brothers used science fiction to oppose fascism. While Josef coined the word “robot,” his brother famously used it in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which was staged on January 25, 1921. Karel Čapek then acknowledged the affinity between Golem and his robot by noting that a robot is, in fact, a modern version of Golem, the only difference lies in the mass production of the latter. See Karel Čapek, Divadelníkem proti své vůli (Becoming a Playwright against my Will; Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1968), 303. 7. For an overview and development of Czech science fiction, see, e.g., Mike Ashley, Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016) or Antonín K. K. Kudláč, “Česká žánrová literature (sci-fi a fantasy),” July 12, 2018, https:​//​www​.czechlit​.cz​/cz​/feature​ /ceska​-zanrova​-literatura​-sci​-fi​-a​-fantasy. 8. Carl Freedman, ed., Conversations with Isaac Asimov (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 135. 9. Prague Spring was a period of political reforms leading to greater autonomy and democracy in Czechoslovakia proposed by Alexander Dubček and crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion, which lasted until 1989. 10. Moshe comes from the family of Zieganauers, who built the Cikán Synagogue in Prague. The baroque synagogue was founded by (and named after) Solomon Salkind (or Cikán or Zigeuner) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was one of the tallest buildings in the ghetto. Moreover, Solomon was a real ancestor of Karol Sidon. 11. Cigan, Altschul’s Method, 19. 12. The name Altschul refers to the oldest Prague synagogue, Alt Schul, which was demolished in 1867 and replaced by the Spanish Synagogue. In 1270, another synagogue was built: Altneuschul (Old-New Synagogue), which, according to legends, is the hiding place of Golem. 13. Lavie Tidhar mentions, e.g., Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna (2003), which portrays an alternative history, where Roman Empire did not fall, and the Jews launched into space to search for the Promised Land. See Lavie Tidhar, “Jews in

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Space: On the Unsung History of Jewish Writers and the Birth of Science Fiction,” LitHub, June 14, 2021, https:​//​lithub​.com​/jews​-in​-space​-on​-the​-unsung​-history​-of​ -jewish​-writers​-and​-the​-birth​-of​-science​-fiction. 14. Gary Westfahl, “Janeways and Thaneways; the Better Half, and Worse Half, of Science Fiction Television,” Interzone 140 (February 1999): 31. 15. Cigan, Altschul’s Method, 25. 16. Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006), 29. 17. More famously, e.g., Philip K. Dick’s vision of alternative history in The Man in the High Castle (1962). 18. Darko Suvin, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the History and Poetics of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 21. 19. Suvin, Metamorphoses, 7–8. 20. Cigan, Altschul’s Method, 253. 21. Chaim Cigan, Piano Live, vol. 2: Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc (Praha: Torst, 2015), 475. Raumschiff: a German term for a spaceship. 22. Chaim Cigan, Puzzle, vol. 3: Kde lišky dávají dobrou noc (Praha: Torst, 2016), 84. 23. A dislocated soul, which resides in a body and affects thinking and behavior. 24. Gustav Husák (1913–1991) was the last president of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic who ruled in the period of Normalization, 1975–1989. 25. Cigan, Altschul’s Method, 70. 26. Cigan, Altschul’s Method, 104. 27. Tefillin serve as a reminder of Exodus from Egypt. 28. Amenhopet IV was known for replacing polytheism with Atenism. His inclination toward monotheism gave rise to theories that place the origin of Kabbalah in the times of Exodus and/or identify Akhnenaten with Moses. See, e.g., Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (1998); Ahmed Osman, Moses and Akhneten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus (2002); Sheldon L. Lebold, The Legacy of Moses and Akhenaten: A Jewish Perspective (2013). Others suggest that Akhenaten was an extraterrestrial, see, e.g., Xaviant Haze, Aliens in Ancient Egypt: The Brotherhood of the Serpent and the Secrets of the Nile Civilization (Rochester: Bear, 2013). 29. Paul J. Nahin, Holy Sci-Fi! Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect (New York: Springer, 2014), 53–54. 30. Isaac Asimov, “Introduction,” in More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Jack Dann (Nashville: Jewish Lights, 1999), 2. 31. Cigan, Piano Live, 384. 32. Cigan, Piano Live, 237, 238. 33. Cigan, Piano Live, 323. 34. Abulafia’s writings were never accepted by rabbinic authorities of his time. His mysticism was rediscovered at the turn of the twentieth century: Philip K. Dick proclaimed that he wrote Valis in cooperation with Abulafia’s spirit. Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum uses Abulafia’s name for a computer that randomly produces esoteric texts.

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35. Cigan, Piano Live, 109. 36. Cigan, Piano Live, 76. 37. Cigan, Piano Live, 285. 38. Ben Bova, “The Role of Science Fiction,” in Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow, ed. Reginald Bretnor (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 6. 39. Cigan, Piano Live, 288.

Chapter 10

Contra Torrentem Leo Perutz’s By Night Under the Stone Bridge and Central European Fantasy Cameron Barrows

Dedicated to Georgia Cate Byler “UNDOUBTEDLY THE FINEST FANTASY AUTHOR OF HIS TIME”1 Leopold Perutz’s (1882–1957) oeuvre is a crucial yet often overlooked unique contribution to twentieth-century Jewish Central European fantasy. His novels, short stories, and screenplays are both exceedingly groundbreaking and prescient of historical developments. They encapsulate the complexity and plurality of the Central European zeitgeist and exemplify, in the words of György Konrád, “An aesthetic sensibility that allows for complexity and multilingualism, a strategy that rests on understanding even one’s deadly enemy, a spirit that consist of accepting plurality as a value in and of itself.”2 Perutz forces us to reevaluate the history and relationships of science fiction and fantastical literature as they were influenced by Jewish Central European thought. Perutz is perhaps best known for his prescient anti-fascist novel St. Peter’s Snow, one that foretells the synthesis and use of LSD years before it was discovered and the effects such a hallucinogen would have upon society.3 But it is his later novel By Night Under the Stone Bridge that functions as a synecdoche of his entire oeuvre. Through blending fantasy and Kabbalah practices, this novel exemplifies the zenith of Central European fantastical literature, so this essay allows for the expansion of scholarship of an author 153

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whose English discourse is woefully inadequate. But before we embark on the exegesis of the novel, I would like to begin with a general biography, since this is only scantly covered in the English scholarship. Leo Perutz was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary on November 2, 1882. He was the eldest son of Emilie and Benedikt Perutz, a textile merchant and manufacturer. The family, consisting of Leo, his parents, and three younger siblings, were assimilated secular Jews who did not attend religious services and spoke German instead of Czech. Young Leo was a poor student who was expelled from school for cheating on exams, and despite changing schools and moving to Vienna in 1907, he was unable to attain a degree. After this he enlisted in the Austrian army as an Einjähring-Freiwilliger (one-year volunteer) but failed to pass the final exam to become an officer and resigned, ultimately taking up employment at his father’s textile company. In October 1907, Perutz became an actuary for Assicurazione Generali (the same insurance company Franz Kafka worked for in their Prague office) in Trieste. After a year he moved back to Vienna and worked for the Der Anker insurance company for the next fifteen years. During this time, he began to write fiction influenced by Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel and developed a compensation formula named after him, Perutzsche Ausgleichsformel. This interest in mathematics continued throughout his life, cropping up in the style and structures of his novels. His first novel, The Third Ball, was published in 1916, but during its publication he was conscripted into the Austrian army and transferred to Hungary for training. This process is described by Czech author Jaroslav Hašek: “There they will form march battalions, the soldiers’ll be trained in field shooting, they brawl with the Hungarians and we shall go gaily to the Carpathians.”4 In March 1916, his regiment was sent to the Russian front and in July he was shot in the lung and spent many months recovering in the military hospital. After this he was transferred to the army propaganda office (K.u.K War Press Headquarters) and during this time made the acquaintanceship of Egon Erwin Kisch among other authors. In March 1918 he married Ida Weil and the ensuing decade would be his most prolific, publishing six novels, a myriad of short stories, and screenplays for films. In 1920, his first daughter Micheala was born, and in 1922 a second followed, Leonore. Finally, a son was born in 1928, but his wife died shortly afterward, plunging him into a great depression and withdrawal from literary activities and the Viennese café culture. After Ida’s death, he began to visit occultists in attempts to communicate with her (albeit with much self-doubt). Both this personal loss and the economic crash of 1929 reduced his book sales, as well as the stipend that he continued to receive from his father’s business. With the rise of National Socialism in Germany, his publisher, Paul Zsolnay, was blacklisted for being Jewish and so Perutz could no longer sell his books in his biggest market. In

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1935, Perutz married Grete Humburger. After the Nazi Anschluss of Austria, Perutz and his family first fled to Venice in 1938 and eventually traveled to Haifa, settling in Tel Aviv with his brother Hans. Between 1938 and 1950, Perutz did not publish. He took Palestinian citizenship and spent much time in Jerusalem exploring the streets of the old city. In 1941, some of his novels were translated into Spanish and sold in Argentina thanks to the help of Jorge Luis Borges. In 1950, he returned to Austria, reclaimed his citizenship, and began to publish again. By Night Under the Stone Bridge was finally published in 1953, but the publisher went bankrupt, and the novel could not be widely distributed; during this time he began another novel, The Judas of Leonardo, which was completed posthumously by Alexander Lernet-Holenia. Perutz died in Bad Ischl, Austria, while visiting his dear friend and fellow writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia. BY NIGHT UNDER THE STONE BRIDGE: “IN PAIN AND PENANCE MUST THEY MAKE GOOD THEIR DEBT FOR THEIR EXISTENCE ACCORDING TO THE UNIVERSAL LAW”5 How does the self, the human individual, construct their own past? What is reality? How do reality and the past intersect, and interact with one another? Perutz studies and returns to these modernist questions throughout his novels, ultimately answering them with his own metaphysics of the individual’s relationship to history. In By Night Under the Stone Bridge, Perutz transports us back to medieval Prague. The novel, composed of fifteen chapters, is narrated by Jakob Meisel, the author’s childhood tutor, and begins during a great pestilential disease that is ravaging Prague in 1589 under the reign of Emperor Rudolf II. The novel’s characters include such legendary and historical figures as Rebbe Löw, Johannes Kepler, Barvitius, a young Albrecht von Wallenstein, and arguably the protagonist Mordechai Meisel, a great philanthropist and mayor among the medieval Prague Jews. These great personalities imbue the novel with a historical glint, but Perutz injects the fantastical elements nonetheless through magic and occult metaphysics, magnifying the role minor events have in altering the course of history. The first story/chapter concerns itself with the tale of two Jewish entertainers and vagabonds, Koppel-the-bear and Jäckele-the-fool, who play minor but important roles throughout the novel. They sleep in the Jewish cemetery and take coins off the graves to feed themselves. Perutz juxtaposes the poverty of the two Jewish vagabonds with two Czech noblemen in the next chapter/story. One of the noblemen remarks, “Jews here, Jews there, Jews everywhere . . .

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They’re multiplying so fast that soon they’ll outnumber the Christians in this country . . . I regard their numbers and their wealth as nothing but a bad sign that God has become angry with us Christians.”6 The author does not shy away from such exclamations of antisemitism. This not only reflects the historical positions and opinions of the nobility toward the Jewish inhabitants of Prague, but also offers a commentary on the role this very same antisemitism continued to play in the author’s own lifetime. This is true of the novel itself, for it faced great difficulty in publication due to the antisemitic environment of both antebellum and postbellum Germany and Austria. “His old publisher Paul Zsolnay did not want to publish the manuscript, which Perutz had begun no later than 1938, because it was ‘too Jewish.’”7 Perutz himself writes about the problems of publishing his last and finest novel and the antisemitism he and his work faced in postbellum Austria and Germany, stating: Zsolnay spares the sensitivities of the Viennese rabble who do not like to be reminded that there are Jews they behaved badly towards. But I do not want to wait until—as Zsolnay writes—the German soul opens up to the work of Jewish intellectuals again, and so I sent the book to my friend Jakob Hegner, who should advise me to use a less shitty publisher.8

The novel highlights both the role antisemitism played in shaping Central European history and its subsequent literature and the personal effects this had upon the author himself. It is within this oppressive environment that the novel continues with tales of the inner-workings and intrigues of the imperial court populated with alchemists, traders, noblemen, knights, ghosts, etc. The next chapters/tales continue in a non-linear fashion concerning the fate of a Jewish tradesmen, a Czech noblemen, an alchemist, and a young Rudolf II who happens upon an other-worldly event of two ghosts manufacturing guldens out of air. The spirits responding to Rudolf II’s questioning state: “My subordinates call me the Great and Powerful,” the one who had shown him the way replied. “And my companion here is called the Terrible and strong.” Rudolf II immediately realized from this information, and even more from the informant’s voice, that these two were not terrestrial beings, but ghosts or demons.9

These supranatural entities warn the young Rudolf II of the eventual wealth and his personal debt to Mordechai Meisel. Such beings and events populate the novel, imbuing it with the fantastic which functions as both a stylistic mode and offering the author a vehicle for commentary regarding Central European history and philosophy. This text also offers insight into the routines and daily lives of the inhabitants of the Josefstadt ghetto in Prague before its destruction, where Perutz

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supposedly studied under Jakob Meisel, the narrator of the tales and a relation of the novel’s protagonist. Perutz writes in the epilogue to the novel: At the turn of the century, when I was fifteen and a pupil at high school—a bad pupil, who continually needed extra help—I saw the Prague ghetto for the last time . . . Yes, I knew the old ghetto. Three times a week I made my way through it to the Zigeunergasse, that led from the Breitegasse, the “broad street,” or main street, of the old ghetto, to the neighbourhood of the Moldau bank. My tutor, Jakob Meisl, a medical student, lived there under the roof timbers of the house “At the Sign of the Lime-kiln.”10

Like most of his novels, the interplay between the reality and autobiography of the author and historical fact is twisted and we cannot say for certain if this is further fiction or if Perutz himself was a student of this tutor, a kinsman of the hero of his novel. Perutz the novelist acts as a mystifier and engages in mythopoeia in relation to truth, justice, and history. This artistic license allows for the creation of historical fantasy and the novel with its cast of alchemists, jugglers, soldiers, noblemen etc. offer an alternative chorus to history, one that facilitates escapism into the fantastical. Through these techniques and characters, Perutz brings medieval Prague to life with its fantasies and horrors. Angelo Ripellino expresses a similar sentiment in his book Magic Prague, writing: In the agitated, spiritistic prose of a Meyrink, Leppin or Perutz, a decayed Prague rolls her eyes and twists her mouth into grimaces. She is a centre of mystagogy a repository of cruel sorcerers, bugaboos, monsters of rabbinic day, meshugoim, eccentrics and fierce oriental ghosts much like—during the same period—Bely’s Saint Petersburg. She is a city sketched with the banal purple ink of Meyrink-Nikolaus, who, tempering the degradation of her mephitic streets and peeling houses with an aesthete’s vanity studs the anguish of her dilapidation with festive adornment.11

The way Perutz presents the city and the meanderings of its inhabitants is rooted in the memory of Prague of his childhood. In this text Perutz envisions new forms of landscapes, ones that exist outside history. This in turn allows for the possibility of new social orders which are founded upon new conceptions of sense and time within the city. Perutz fundamentally rethinks the history of urban landscape and how people flow through the modern city in a panoply of ways. Perutz captures not just the movement of history, but also the temporal and population flows, granting a synesthetic quality to the novel. In grounding the novel within historical events, Perutz uses the fantastic to confront the abhorrent antisemitism of Medieval and twentieth-century Europe and presents to the reader how nightmarish fantasy may quickly

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become a reality. This is most evident in Perutz’s use of the Kabbalah within the novel. In the third chapter/story he writes, “But the secret teaching, the Kabbala, gives those who have penetrated to its deepest depths, plumbed its abysses and climbed its heights, great powers of a special kind. He could not use them to save his own life, for that would have mean infringing on the divine prerogative. But he could use them to control these two dogs that refused to obey him.”12 The chapter/tale concerns a Jewish trader who is imprisoned and sentenced to death for buying textiles from a soldier. As he sits in prison, he ponders the wonders of the Kabbalah and hopes to cast a spell to control the dogs that share the cell with him. Perutz writes, “In his mind he explored the whole world of divine powers known to the initiated as the Apiryon, that is, the Wedding Litter, in which the Eternally Shining Ones, who are also known as the Bringers of Insight live—they are the supports and pillars of the world.”13 This is the first instance of Kabbalah within the novel and due to his misunderstanding of Kabbalistic practices and philosophy, the prisoner is able to understand dogs rather than command them. The role of Kabbalah within the novel is twofold, first as a fantastical force and element that allows one to alter nature and secondly as a philosophy of the fantastic that Perutz may use as a touchstone to construct his own unique metaphysics of history and reality. As the novel continues, Perutz uses these themes to question the role of God, theodicy, and how history may be altered by our everyday banal choices. This mystical activity centered around Kabbalistic practices continues with the infatuation of the Emperor Rudolf II with the wife of Mordechai Meisel, Esther. She is a great beauty who must unwittingly visit the emperor in his and her shared dreams and who is the emperor’s one true love. This forbidden love precipitates the events of the novel, and the emperor who is repeatably refused his request eventually demands of the Rebbe, “If you disobey my command, and I get no loving response from her who is ever in my mind, I shall expel all the Jews from my kingdom and territories as a disloyal people, that is my decision and my will so help me God.”14 In response, the great Rebbe Löw transforms her and Rudolf II’s souls into a white rosemary bush and a red rose bush respectively, and both are planted beneath the Charles Bridge. This element of transformation and its botanical nature is an homage to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished novel Master Flea, particularly the second adventure which involves a similar noble romance and transformation. Perutz writes, “Then the Great Rabbi went and planted a rose bush and a rosemary under the stone bridge on the bank of the Moldau where they were hidden from men’s eyes, and over both he spoke words of magic. And a red rose opened on the rose bush, and the rosemary flower nestled up to it. And every night the Emperor’s heart entered into the red rose and the jewess’s heart entered the rosemary flower.”15 Perutz, who was a great admirer of

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Hoffmann, continues with the traditions and motifs of German romanticism but suffuses them with the questions of modernity. As the novel develops the relationship between the Jewish community and the Kingdom of Bohemia, and the Emperor and Esther begin to strain as the novel further distorts these disparate worlds and two souls in communion. Emperor Rudolf II eventually enters into an agreement which grants protection over Mordechai Meisel’s business empire in exchange for a percentage of the profits every quarter. But since the emperor spends so much, he ends up in enormous debt to Meisel, who then takes on the role of loaning money for the personal debts of the emperor. Rudolf II ponders while feeding his lions, “I don’t want to see him, he would only ask for money. They all want money from me, Lichtenstein, Nostiz, Sternberg, Harrach, the kitchen people and the people from the silver store, as well as the preacher in the chapel and his musicians and singers, they all want money and more money and still more money, they all want a share in the secret treasure.”16 This treasure is all Meisl’s handiwork and Perutz’s presentation of such financial exploitation of the Medieval Jews of Prague acts as both a reminder the role Jews and antisemitism played in the history of Central Europe and as a reflection of his personal loss and financial difficulties due to such malignant powers. Later in the novel we again encounter the two Jewish vagabonds, Koppel-the-Bear and Jäckele-the-fool, who are walking near the Old New Synagogue and notice, “Something strange seems to be going on here,” said Koppel-the-bear, who had gone to one of the windows and was looking down. “The candles are lit, and I can hear voices and all sorts of sounds, but there is not a soul to be seen . . . They’ve stopped singing, the ovinu malkenu is over. They are going to call to the Torah.”17

Reminiscent of the Ten Days of Repentance, the two vagabonds listen as the names of those who will die in the next year are called out, and eventually decide that it must be a hoax since Mordechai Meisl is described as a poor man who owns nothing. The historical Meisel personally paid for the paving of the streets of Josefstadt (the Jewish quarter) as well as for the expansion of the Jewish cemetery, a new synagogue, mikveh, etc. Perutz writes concerning the fate of Meisel: Not much time was left. Getting rich had been easy for him, almost a game. But getting poor—was that something he could manage? Gold clung to him, and now he must get rid of it. He must throw it away, spend it, squander it, fling it to the winds to the last half gulden . . . It would buy a poorhouse for the ghetto. A pest house. An orphanage. A new town hall. A house in which to read and study. A big and a small synagogue.18

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Perutz claims in the epilogue that his tutor Jakob Meisel owned Mordechai’s will and upon viewing it himself he realizes, “Both events, the demolition of the ghetto and the emergence from the past of the legendary will, seemed to me to be interlinked and together to mark the end of the story my tutor had told me . . . the story of Meisl’s wealth.”19 This interconnectedness that Perutz writes of is central to the novel and elucidating his personal philosophy, that the role of the minor and fantastical is tantamount to the unfolding of history. This metaphysics that he interweaves with the theology of the Kabbalah imbues the world with awe, preserving the role of mysticism within philosophy. The role of Kabbalah reaches its zenith in the penultimate chapter of the novel. The angel Asael visits the great Rebbe Löw and tells him: The great forces and powers that maintain the course of the world are contained in the signs that you use to form words . . . And know that everything on earth that is formed into words leaves traces in the world above. Aleph, the first of the signs, contains truth in itself. Beth, the second sign, contains greatness. It is followed by Elevation. The fourth sign contains within itself the nobility of God’s world, and the fifth the power of sacrifice. The sixth is Compassion. Then comes Purity, then Light. Study and Knowledge. Justice. The Order of things. Perpetual movement.20

He goes on to chastise the rebbe for altering the course of events (the rebbe turns stones to doves which an assassin drops onto the Emperor’s head from a roof in Josefstadt, attempting to both kill the emperor and blame it on the Jews to start a pogrom). The angel tells him that due to the intervention of the ancient patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob “and that [the] triple prayer has such primal force that it can undo what has happened and cause what has not happened to happen.”21 Because of this prayer on behalf of the patriarchs, he has not irreversibly altered and doomed the course of history. Despite the rebbe’s good deeds, he is still admonished by the angel Asael and Perutz shows us the potential damage of wishing to undo or rewrite history. “When you made those swallows out of lifeless stone you interfered with the plan of creation and disturbed the balance of the world.”22 This is perhaps a warning that these longings belong in the realm of fantasy and science fiction and that we should heed the words of W.B. Yeats: “In dreams begins responsibility.”23 Kabbalists believed they had the power to change reality but that it was immoral to use such a power, especially to thwart the will of God. Perutz realizes the dangers of a reactionary pseudo-historicism and its role in the ascendency of fascism. But by imbuing the historical with the fantastical he may rewrite history and its crucial points by introducing a new plurality into these historical narratives.

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In synthesizing the fantastical and kabbalistic, this text presents a unique approach within Central European fantasy, highlighting Jewish oppression and suffering through the mystical. Perutz uses the fantastic and kabbalistic to confront the horrors of the world and its ultimate unjustness. One can summarize this role within the novel as the following: ‘“At the Prague court,’ the Spanish ambassador once wrote home to his king, ‘extraordinary things are ordinary and commonplace.’”24 This encompasses Perutz’s attitude toward the fantastical and in imbuing the historical with the magical, his fiction allows for the reader to escape the mundane world and enter one filled with wonder and awe. His writing functions as a site of fantasy that has the potential for catharsis, either for author or reader. This reinterpretation of history is what makes his fantasy unique within Jewish central European fiction and speaks to the escapist aspects of oeuvre. Throughout the novel, Perutz displays that the individual and the everyday common choices that one makes may have great historical impact. The novel ends on these notes and leaves the reader to ponder the meaning of truth, history, and their interrelationships to the individual these questions, acting as metaphors for Perutz and our own reflection on the horrors of the twentieth century. In placing these questions within the context of Medieval Prague, Perutz presents an amalgamation of legend, history, and dreams, ultimately questioning truth and history. Perutz’s novel represents the zenith of Central European fantasy literature, and his blending of profane and secular themes allows for this text to question and confront readers today. CONCLUSION: “WHAT THERE ARE, HOWEVER, ARE PROVISIONS FOR SURVIVAL IN A WORLD LESS FANTASTICK”25 In imbuing the wretched everydayness with the spectacular and fantastical, Perutz offers a unique perspective on the world and history, showing how the seemingly mundane choices an individual makes may have broad historical consequences. For Perutz, the supernatural and the profane are inextricably linked and this unique metaphysics is crucial to understanding his oeuvre. Through the intertwining of these themes and philosophical questions with the fantastical and the Kabbalah, Perutz constructs a philosophical fantastical fiction distinctive among Central European fantasy in the twentieth century. His novels are a constellation of truth and history that is ultimately subjective for the reader. It is within this subjectivity that Perutz plays with the mystification of truth. Throughout his novels he posits that truth may only be found obliquely, obscured through concealment, surprise, and misunderstanding. Truth is both

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historical and philosophical, for Perutz exists in a mysterious multifaceted relationship with reality and history. Thus, the human subject exists in a historical void, constructing truth and history around him and forever trying to influence its flow. Liliya Chekhlova writes, “History in Perutz’s understanding is a coincidence, man is void in history, and the life of the main characters of the novel is a vain struggle against fate. ‘The Marquis de Bolibar’ by Perutz is a modification of science fiction novel genre, where the organic fusion of science fiction and history creates an illusion of truth.”26 This creative process results in a beautiful tableau blending history, Kabbalah, and fantasy. Hilde Spiel writes concerning By Night Under the Stone Bridge: “This is a rich and beautiful book, the tone of which is reminiscent of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm both in its simplicity and in its sweetness—the book of a storyteller in the truest, oldest sense.”27 The simplicity Spiel praises is an attribute of Perutz’s work that has been both exalted and criticized. The acclaimed critic Walter Benjamin characterizes Perutz’s earlier novels as being like railroad timetables commenting, “[Perutz] who composed the powerfully rhythmic and syncopated narratives, whose stations one flies through—clock in hand—like the provincial backwaters along one’s route.”28 Perutz was greatly offended at such a suggestion and took this criticism very personally.29 Benjamin might have changed his mind if he had lived long enough to read Perutz’s final novel appreciating its blending of the occult, Kabbalah, and its reinterpretation of history. Conceivably, the text is a fictional representation of Benjamin’s concept of history, perhaps ignoring its fantastical simplicity. This minimalism though is what sets Perutz apart and allows for his novels to still serve as warnings concerning the relationship between the individual, history, and interpretation. Dino Buzzati comments regarding fantasy, simplicity, and writing that, “It seems to me, fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism. The right word is not ‘banalizing,’ although in fact a little of this is involved. Rather, I mean that the effectiveness of a fantastic story will depend on its being told in the most simple and practical terms.”30 Through his “simple” storytelling, Perutz is able to transport the reader and convince them of the most magical and fantastical elements due to this very simplicity, which allows the reader to believe the impossible. This escapism is integral to the function of fantastical literature and Perutz masterfully guides the reader on a journey into a new past. Perutz, who was largely forgotten after World War II, injects this personal existential crisis into his novel. Annie Zdenek writes in Leo Perutz (1882–1957): Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke. Ein Roman aus dem alten Prag (1953): Perutz describes the dissolution of an old world in his Prague novel, and ridicules the personal beliefs of those authors who mourn the end of the

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Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire as model countries of past humanity and tolerance, because they cannot find their way in the new century. At the same time, he self-ironically reckons with his own longing for his past home.31

This longing for the past is characteristic of his entire oeuvre and the metaphysical implications of altering the past and ultimately the future are explored in the penultimate chapter of the novel and the epilogue as discussed previously. In a letter to his childhood friend and later National Socialist Bruno Behm, Perutz writes: Of course, you and I have been since 1914 the whipping boys of history. At first they took our old Austria, which we both fought for and we both never got over. Then, over the years, sometimes one, sometimes the other got his whipping. Today we get them back . . . I live in a different world, but in Europe, with everything that is lost there, it hurts like an amputated foot.32

This relationship between personal pain and history and the desire to alter or affect the outcome of history is both philosophically and personally relevant to Perutz’s life and work. His use of the metaphor of amputation and its phantasmal pain, its association with the downfall and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, suggests a certain cultural-medical nihilism that maybe found as a motif in the works of numerous authors and artists from Perutz’s generation (e.g., Otto Dix, Alfred Döblin, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Maria Remarque, etc.). The painter George Grosz similarly writes, “I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a straight-jacket made of a horse blanket.”33 These images of the maimed and the horrors of war left a deep and caustic impression on all these artists and authors and an exploration of this facet of Perutz’s work would be a fascinating contribution to future scholarship, but this essay does not provide the space and it is not the focus for such an analysis. For Perutz, these horrors cannot be divorced from the role of fantasy, which serves as a withdrawal from the painful present into the past to shield one’s psyche from the depravity of the world. Perutz, who spent twenty years writing this novel of approximately two hundred pages, depending on language and edition, found solace in retreating into the world he created of a magical medieval Prague. The liminal nature of fantastical fiction allows for such escapism into the imagination. The author as well as the reader both may escape into the novel through its simplicity of structure and syntax. Manfred Voigts writes of this phenomenon stating, “As a writer he lived in the past; his works were ‘historical novels,’ behind which the author disappeared as

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a person.”34 Perutz offers us as readers a glimpse into other worlds, both those forgotten by the passage of history and those imagined. His texts ask important questions concerning the historicity of the twentieth century. What is the individual’s relationship to history? Does the present construct the future? Are we ethically bound to improve on the past? These questions, which Perutz examines through the lens of Jewish fantasy and Kabbalah, are pertinent today and Perutz continues to be a critical and often ignored voice within central European fantasy. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benjamin, Walter. “Detective Novels, On Tour.” In The Storyteller. New York: Verso, 2016. Buzzati, Dino. Restless Nights—Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati. Introduction by L. Venuti. New York: North Point Press, 1983. Chekhlova, Liliya Airatovna. Austrian First Third of XX Century Science Fiction Novel (A. Kubin, G. Meyrink, L. Perutz). PhD diss., Elabuga Institute (branch) of Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, 2015. https:​//​core​.ac​.uk​/download​/pdf​ /197388609​.pdf. Friedrich, Otto. Before the Deluge. USA: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1986. Hašek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Švejk. Translated by C. Parrott. New York: Penguin, 2005. Le Rider, Jacques. “Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Edited by A. Erll, A. Nünning, 37–46. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Müller, Hans-Harald. “‘Ich bin für Europa ein forgotten writer.’: Zur Rezeption des Werks von Leo Perutz in Deutschland and Österreich von 1945 bis 1960.” In Die Resonanz des Exils., Edited by. Dieter Sevin, 326–337., Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Perutz, Leo. By Night Under the Stone Bridge. Translated by E. Mosbacher. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013. Piper, Alan. “Leo Perutz and the Mystery of St. Peter’s Snow.” Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 175–198. DOI: 10.2752/1175169713X13589680082172. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997. Ripellino, Angelo Maria. Magic Prague, Translated by D. N. Marinelli. London: Macmillan, 1994. Rottensteiner, Franz. “German Language Fantasy Since 1900.” In Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, edited by Frank N. Magill, Volume 3, 2391–2414. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1983. Serke, Jurgen. Böhmische Dörfer. Wanderungen durch eine verlassene literarische Landschaft. Hamburg: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1987.

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Voigts, Manfred. “Leo Perutz.” In Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Sorrel Kerbel, 792–795. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003. Yeats, W. B. “Responsibilities.” In The Collected Poems, 97. New York: Macmillan, 2008. Zdenek, Annie. “Leo Perutz (1882–1957): Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke. Ein Roman aus dem alten Prag (1953)” Recherches germaniques 41 (2011): 59–71. DOI: 10.4000/rg.540.

NOTES 1. Franz Rottensteiner, “German Language Fantasy Since 1900,” in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Volume 3, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1983), 2391. 2. Jacques Le Rider, “Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. A. Erll, A. Nünning. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 40. 3. N.B. See Alan Piper’s wonderful essay “Leo Perutz and the Mystery of St. Peter’s Snow,” in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 175–198, DOI: 10.27552/175169713x13589680082172. 4. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 311. 5. Anaximander. 6. Leo Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013), 13. 7. Manfred Voigts, “Leo Perutz,” in Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century, ed. Sorrel Kerbel (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003), 795. 8. Hans-Harald Müller, “‘Ich bin für Europa ein forgotten writer.’ Zur Rezeption des Werks von Leo Perutz in Deutschland and Osterreich von 1945 bis 1960,” in Die Resonanz des Exils, ed. Dieter Sevin, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 330; author’s translation. 9. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 60. 10. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 194. 11.Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague (London: Macmillan, 1995), 31. 12. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 27. 13. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 26. 14. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 192. 15. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 192. 16. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 186. 17. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 148–149. 18. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 187–188. 19. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 195. 20. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 189. 21. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 190. 22. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 190.

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23. W. B. Yeats, “Responsibilities,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 97. 24. Perutz, By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 50. 25. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Holt, 1997), 22. 26. Chekhlova, L. Austrian First Third of XX Century Science Fiction Novel (A. Kubin, G. Meyrink, L. Perutz), PhD diss. Elabuga Institute (branch) of Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, 2015, https:​//​core​.ac​.uk​/download​/pdf​/197388609​ .pdf, 16. 27. Voigt, “Leo Perutz,” 795. 28. Walter Benjamin, “Detective Novels, On Tour,” in The Storyteller (New York: Verso, 2016), 110. 29. Hans-Herald Müller and Brita Eckert, Leo Perutz 1882–1957: Eine Ausstellung der Deeutschen Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main (Vienna: P. Zsolnay, 1989), 129. 30. Dino Buzzati, Restless Nights—Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati (Introduction by L. Venuti) (New York: North Point Press, 1983), xi. 31. A. Zdenek, “Leo Perutz (1882–1957): Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke. Ein Roman aus dem alten Prag (1953)” Recherches germaniques 41 (2011): 59–71, DOI: 10.4000/rg.540; author’s translation. 32. Jurgen Serke, Böhmische Dörfer. Wanderungen durch eine verlassene literarische Landschaft (Wien/Hamburg: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1987), 276. 33. Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge (USA: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1986), 37. 34. Voigts, “Leo Perutz,” 794.

Chapter 11

Motifs of Secrecy, the Hidden and the Unspoken in the Novels of Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem Julie A. Hawkins

WORLDS OF HIDDEN MYSTERY AND WONDER The Jewish speculative fiction works of Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem openly examine potential future worlds for humanity, while engaging with historical dilemmas that remain unresolved in the human psyche and civilization, even in the twenty-first century. As such, their protagonists encounter binary oppositions and archetypal characters which emerge from disowned psychological content, as these authors maintain a covert element within the novels’ framing, evoking suspense and fear as mysterious clues point to their unspoken, hidden presence. Stanislaw Lem’s novels Eden and Solaris both deal with spacefaring humans who visit life-bearing worlds. In Eden, the spacemen come upon a beautiful pearl-like world which they name Eden. In Solaris, the planet Solaris is well-known to humanity, and is the subject of considerable scientific research; its discipline of study is known as Solaristics. In Isaac Asimov’s work, Foundation’s Edge, the protagonists approach a world unknown to their star charts and invisible to their instruments. The novels Foundation and Foundation’s Edge both include motifs of a Search for Earth, and a Mosaic quest. Both Lem’s Eden and Asimov’s dark novel The End of Eternity engage covertly with wartime and psychological motifs in dictatorial societies, exploring elements reflective of historical wars involving the Holocaust. 167

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These novels explore contexts of futuristic human civilizations, as spacefarers encounter several types of mysterious worlds, and where there is sentience, they engage in awkward human-alien interactions. The themes mirror historical events and employ motifs of speculative sciences to query a sense of disembeddedness from the natural, which has arisen in our recent human experience. The novels Solaris and Foundation’s Edge use a particular speculative fiction motif of strong female “visitors” and “envoys” who arise from a planetary sentience with psychic abilities that suggest a sacred feminine; this pervasive feminine presence evokes an existential response at a level that addresses our present time and suggests the presence of feminine healing qualities that might tend a futuristic humankind, which bears psychological wounds from the savagery of relatively recent wars. DISEMBEDDED IN EDEN In Lem’s Eden,1 six space travelers are so taken with a beautiful planet that they approach too closely and are caught by its “tail.” They crash-land and are temporarily marooned. While preparing to repair their damaged robots and ship, the crew ventures to explore the nearby area, where they find themselves immersed in an entirely alien non-human nature. This motif of a mysterious planet is explored against a chronotopic backdrop of galactic expansion, where the discovery of Eden furnishes an indirect insight that questions what lies beneath the surface of humanity’s pristine space society. Unable to secure the help of Eden’s intelligent, yet almost incomprehensible species, which they name the “doublers,” the humans must rely on their ingenuity and individual expertise to survive. In his subsequent novel Solaris, Lem would write, “We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos . . . We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”2 Certainly, the narrative’s contradictions in Eden remain unresolved in a conventional sense, and most of the characters, thoroughly discomfited by the circumstances they find on Eden, appear to derive little benefit from the encounter. The Doctor, whose professional role is one that involves caring and compassion, exhibits the deeper wisdom of the group during the adventure. Lem has set his humans the challenge of engaging with, and exploring, an alien non-human nature of which they have no knowledge. They have happened upon it accidentally, a response to the siren call of the planet’s beauty that had aroused their innate curiosity. A chronotope of the road is evident here, for Eden with its inhabitants is but one of numerous encounters that will

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be experienced by the novel’s journeying spacemen. Their too-close approach to the planet has left them shallowly embedded in the alien soil of Eden. It is a transitory occurrence, for with the ship’s alien and inorganic human technology, it can never become part of this world. The men are, and will remain, disembedded from the world’s alien nature, with which they must, somehow, engage in order to seek assistance. This search for aid is problematic, since, just as their ship is wedged in the planet’s ground, the men can only interact with Eden at a superficial level. They remain involuntary observers of the planet’s society and of its relations with its own realm of alien nature. This means they cannot trust any conclusions they may draw as they become slightly acquainted with Eden’s inhabitants. But with their ship deteriorating, the men must now seek their salvation by entrusting themselves to an alien “nature.” The novel Eden resonates with unrealized elements of the human psyche and with disowned cultural constructs, including the Earth civilization’s historical eugenics efforts. Lem’s own Polish background can be linked with his subject matter in this novel, with its implicit critique of twentieth-century human culture, its evocation of the then-recent experience of the Nazis, and its adaptation of religious symbolism. The men later encounter a mass grave of Eden’s inhabitants, whose similarity to Nazi concentration camps and their associated mass burials is a notable reminder of this cultural threat. Thus, the planet’s captivating beauty when viewed from space has been an appearance only, for the men are poised to encounter the internal “corruption” of its reality; its name resonates with promise, yet evokes illusory hopes doomed to disappointment. The planet around them, however, appears to act as an unexamined collective unconscious, evoking significant reactions and insights. The Engineer’s later effort to empathize with one alien is understood through his exchanges with the Doctor and, later, with the alien astronomer. In another odd—and metaphoric—instance of this surface/below the surface binary in the novel, there is much digging to be done before the men manage to climb upwards out of their partly buried ship and finally sight the reassuringly familiar night sky. The narrative explores conceptual binaries of order/chaos and of sublime/ grotesque. In piercing the soil of Eden and becoming trapped, the humans have found themselves surrounded by appalling sights from which they cannot escape, for Eden’s indigenous technologies are based upon strange organic components. The visitors struggle to comprehend these forms, with considerable revulsion,3 looking as they must through the eyes of their Earthly and galactic experience. The organic horrors they perceive will clearly have symbolic references for the reader, some of which may be interpreted in the light of recent human history and of developments during World War II.

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The men are exposed to unfamiliar sights and scents as they struggle to make sense of the landscape; the only way the characters, the Engineer and the Doctor, surrounded by the “truly” alien, can be aware of this new danger, is through their instinctive physical reactions as their bodies freeze at the sight of “a pearl-colored, bulbous thing . . . from which dangled a thick black hair six feet long.” “What’s it looking with?” whispered the Engineer, and instinctively backed away, such was the revulsion he felt for the creature, which seemed to be piercing him with a greedy, extraordinarily intense gaze––though no eyes were visible. “Disgusting!” the Chemist hissed.4

Lem has created alien life that is the opposite of what the men expect and want to see, and this contradiction is at the heart of the revulsion the men experience. It shatters their expectation of the rational and beautiful, challenging the basis of human aesthetics. Their conditioned expectation of beauty is floored by the presence of an ugliness so illogical that it controverts their common sense. The men’s minds are overwhelmed by the contradictory and vividly imminent forms in which they are immersed, their fear a consequence of this challenge to the mental and physical conditioning of millions of years of earthly evolution. There is a liminality in the grotesque forms encountered on Eden, so hideous to the men who had wanted to project a myth of the sublime onto it; they have instead found a world ruled by an opposing, disorderly quality that had earlier been concealed. Csicsery-Ronay writes that “grotesque objects stand at the margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived,” and that they call into question the adequacy of “our ways of organising the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable parts.”5 This affirms that the ordering which sees the relegation of an organism to the status of “Other” is the principal means of human disengagement from the life of the world. After Lem’s men discover what seem to be mass graves—described by the Captain as “a burial ditch filled with dead inhabitants of the planet”6—the Doctor tells the men: A tempting hypothesis, but risky . . . Being human, we make associations and interpretations that are human, we apply human laws, arrange facts into patterns brought from Earth. I am absolutely certain that we all thought the same thing this morning: that we had come upon the grave of victims of violence, of murder. But we don’t really know.7

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The Doctor encourages the men to question their assumptions and withhold final judgment until more evidence can be collected and appraised, emphasizing the lack of similarity between Eden’s and Earth’s biology and history. And yet, the men’s initial association remains a mirror to human history. Jameson has written of this aspect of Eden, that: Lem clearly wishes to go further than this, or rather to replace the normative model with contingency as such . . . that contingency is fascism: here figured as a series of incomprehensible genetic experiments which have eventually taken their toll of the population of Eden and resulted in some mysterious planetary dictatorship. It is as though alien anthropologists, on their first visit to Earth, landed in Auschwitz, and attempted to construct a rational model of human society on the basis of what they found there.8

The humans’ presence on Eden’s surface has an evocative, almost dream-like quality, as it incorporates oppositional elements in its gothic and “disgusting” organic technology,9 but its clear, familiar and scientifically predictable night sky remains. This comforts the men, as they long to return to space. It is through their visual connection with the cosmos that they are able to maintain a link with their more rational space realm. Their society is a constructed space, far more privileged than Eden, and one which runs on cognitive, scientific principles, utilizing advanced technology to interface with the non-human cosmos. Lem employs every object, every lifeform and event he creates in his fictional Eden as a symbol, which, as in a mirror of the grotesque, illuminates his and our empirical world. As Csicsery-Ronay has written about Lem and the “sf grotesque”: “Freud noted that when the elements of the unconscious ‘pierce into consciousness, we become aware of a distinct feeling of repulsion.’”10 The repulsion evident in the narrative of Eden is repetitious for us, but heartfelt by the men. It can be argued that the grotesque beings and organisms that populate Eden represent on some level the contents of the men’s unconscious bleeding through into their conscious awareness. For the repulsion they feel is both strong and distinct, as the world presents for them the horror denied them by (and in) their rational, civilized space utopia. The observed behavior of Eden’s population bears an eerie resemblance to human historical events, particularly to those of the first half of the war-ravaged twentieth century. In an expedition to the construction termed a “city” by the Captain, the Doctor and the Chemist discover an incomprehensible scene, like one of wartime trenches, or an overcrowded concentration camp or prison:

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The Chemist swept the dark interior with his flashlight. The beam moved across a row of niches and fell upon a cluster of naked bodies crouching and motionless . . . a groan of many voices resounded in the stone room . . .11 [The Chemist was now caught against the stone wall, by] a row of enormous humps, and dazed eyes in miniature faces. Then, from behind, naked creatures pushing toward him. Wedged between hot, wet bodies, he made no attempt to defend himself, but let himself be pushed and pulled along. The stink of flesh was asphyxiating. The creatures near him looked at him with apprehension and tried to back away, but there was no room. The hoarse, howling went on and on . . .12

The men eventually escape from the crowd and return by the light of flares to where the Captain waits outside the gate with their vehicle. Here a “doubler” has approached the men on his own initiative, and now makes it clear that he wishes to accompany them back to their spaceship. This is the one doubler with whom the men succeed in communicating. He returns with them to the ship and is later identified as “a colleague” and “an astronomer.”13 He communicates with the men by making coughing sounds which their computer translates. In Lem’s work, a base of scientific curiosity is directed into research and its routine of testing hypotheses. There is also an undertone of interest in the Platonic Ideas, seen in the love of beauty and the search for truth. Is there an ultimate good that can be found? The suggestion that a world of great beauty like Eden might not be good in its actual substance is distressing for the men in Eden. Therefore, the quest for beauty and truth and the testing of what appears to the view as the surface from space—to find out whether it is consistent and profound or only skin-deep—is a feature in Lem’s great work of discovering a truly alien world. Now we will explore a linked, palpable darkness in what is perhaps Asimov’s most underestimated work, The End of Eternity.14 THE HIDDEN DARKNESS OF ETERNITY The novel’s hidden elements evade resolution until its final pages, and then only emerge in the dialogue of the two highly intuitive protagonists, Harlan and Noÿs. The End of Eternity represents a work of covertly ecological speculative fiction, and it uses the concept of “undoing the evil” done by previous humans. As it is a covert work of Jewish speculative fiction, Asimov relies on Harlan’s awareness of motifs of the Hidden to build-up suspense as the undiagnosed psychological imbalance in the Eternals, which they imprint onto the world, joins with the sense of dread aroused by the “hidden abnormal.” Although Harlan’s superior, Laban Twissell, appears to have the image

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of a kindly, eccentric scientist, there is horror in the secret that he hides from Andrew Harlan. Eternity is a humanly constructed temporal field located outside space-time, from which the Eternals can make changes to reality, using the Time Kettles to travel back and forth from the 27th to the 70,000th century. This temporal empire is, however, blocked from proceeding further by the unknown beings of the Hidden Centuries, a fact that terrifies the scientists of Eternity. Although there is a visceral fear that has motivated the Eternals to continue preserving their vision of “Reality,” this is shown to be not only a fear of nuclear war, or of the loss of temporal power, but of the unknown, the ultimate Other, the horror of never having existed at all: “There was a kind of abject fear in Twissell’s eyes; a fear that had not been there even when he first learned of Cooper’s misdirection and of the impending end of Eternity.”15 Asimov invokes both the individual and the collective unconscious of Eternity, as an innate response to the hiddenness of the 70,000th to the 150,000th centuries. It is in a dialogue with Harlan that this fear is exposed: the fear that “evolved men” of the future will be powerful enough to prevent the Eternals from exercising their “rightful” dominion over thousands of centuries. Here Twissell ponders the problem of “supermen” existing further in the future than the Eternals can reach, as they prepare to approach the barrier across the centuries: “We control only to the 70,000th. Beyond that are the Hidden Centuries!” Twissell adds: Why are they hidden? Because evolved man does not want to deal with us and bars us from his time? Why do we allow them to remain hidden? Because we don’t want to deal with them and, having failed to enter in our first attempt, we refuse to make additional attempts? I don’t say it’s our conscious reason, but conscious or unconscious, it’s a reason.16

The narrative invokes both the Eternals’ disordered unconscious, and the potent idea of limits placed on their control over Time. However, Harlan’s response is indifferent: “They’re out of our reach and we’re out of theirs. Live and let live.”17 The Self/Other binary is clear in a narrative that focuses strongly on the threatening aspects felt by Harlan, who has no real personal friends for support. In fact, as a Technician who carries out the very Changes that might at any moment extinguish one or thousands of lives by removing or altering a single element on the orders of the Eternals, Harlan is kept at a distance and regarded with fear. Twissell’s comments reflect the abstract ethics of the Eternals; however, he is struck by Harlan’s phrase, and repeats it sadly: “Live and let live. But we don’t”:

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We make Changes. The Changes extend only through a few Centuries before temporal inertia causes its effects to die out . . . Some changes affect more Centuries than others. Theoretically, any number of Centuries can be affected by the proper Change; a hundred Centuries, a thousand, a hundred thousand. Evolved man of the Hidden Centuries may know that. Suppose he is disturbed by the possibility that someday a Change may reach him clear to the 200,000th.18

The motif of temporal changes in The End of Eternity is a metaphoric comment on present-day human interference in the natural reality, that is, the non-human parts of Earth that make up its ecosphere, almost entirely hidden in the novel. It also hints at a tendency to want to revise History. In the context of Eternity, Twissell’s words reveal previously hidden concepts, those which Eternals would see as part of the “night-side” of life, disowned thoughts they deem better left unconscious. Twissell, who had called the philosophizing of fellow Eternal Sennor, “a spinning of ‘cobwebs,’”19 has been forced by his Technician, Harlan, who represents both his conscience and his shadow, to examine the philosophies of the Eternals more deeply. Twissell tells Harlan, “But suppose they were calm enough as long as we left the sections of the Hidden Centuries empty”: It meant we weren’t aggressing. Suppose this truce, or whatever you wish to call it, were broken, and someone appeared to have established permanent residence upwhen from the 70,000th. Suppose they thought it might mean the first of a serious invasion? They can bar us from their Time, so their science is that far advanced beyond ours.20

This growing evocation of a powerful Other highlights the subtle presence in the text of the hidden and the unusual, which is feared by Eternity, as demonstrated by their deliberate efforts to breed it out of its “Reality.” These mysteriously unknowable Others of the Hidden Centuries clearly hold more power than the Eternals. Twissell tells Harlan, “Perhaps we’ve prevented human evolution because we don’t want to meet the Supermen.”21 This reveals yet another layer of the Eternals’ fear. For the cycles of alienation the Eternals have involved themselves in for the “greater good” have led them to renounce a spectrum of developments over the millions of years they have controlled, developments which might have enriched human culture immeasurably. Instead, their fear of the disowned has deepened and expanded, and now casts a shadow over all the Centuries. This dialogue between Harlan and Twissell brings one of the text’s covert messages to light and heightens the tension for characters and readers. An additional fear, beyond that of lost opportunities, is that the evolved humans of the Hidden Centuries might not allow Eternity to continue, but

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will rather select it for dissolution. For it is a “variable Reality,” not one that is “fixed and eternal and immutable.”22 And if Reality is not fixed, can it ever be “safe”? Harlan’s most difficult discovery is that he is one of those perpetuating what has become, as he now sees it, the Eternals’ and humanity’s greatest error. This recognition will empower him to act decisively on behalf of all humankind. The End of Eternity, then, presents two philosophically opposed civilizations, Eternity, and the Hidden Centuries. This opposition is essentially one of Illusion/Reality, but one in which the greater Reality, its Basic State, is disowned, and only its restoration will enable the resolution of opposites. For the Eternals, whose world relies entirely on technology based on the temporal equations, are completely disengaged from their basic place in the organic universe. They have become humans whose whole lives are spent inside a “construct,” disembedded even from space-time. And the very existence of the artificial Eternity has itself set reverberations in motion throughout infinite versions of realities: The number of realities is infinite. The number of any sub-class of Realities is also infinite. For instance, the number of Realities containing Eternity is infinite; the number in which Eternity does not exist is infinite; the number in which Eternity does exist but is abolished is also infinite.23

Thus says Noÿs, a woman of the Hidden Centuries, after she and Harlan have reached the Primitive realm of the twentieth century. Noÿs is a phenomenon Twissell has not even allowed for in his discussion of the “supermen”: a beautiful woman of the Hidden Centuries. It is precisely because Noÿs is a woman, and women had been excluded from Eternity because of their power to destabilize its illusory reality, that the Hidden Centuries have finally been able to undermine Eternity. Twissell’s fear of the upwhen “Supermen” is an ironic reversal of the true situation: that the “supermen” label (with its negative historical connotations) is unjustly applied to those who seek only Good, by one of the most senior Eternals, who is both immersed in the Illusion, and responsible for maintaining Eternity in its endlessly self-justifying chronoclasm (time-loop). Here the ethical concept of “undoing the evil done by past humans” makes its appearance and is refracted back through the entire narrative. The Basic State represents ur-reality, symbolizing the original, natural world, a world at the heart of all Reality. This Basic State reality has an expansive chronotope that leads (“naturally”) to space exploration, whereas Eternity’s is a contracted and limiting chronotope, one that clings to a state of controlled, artificial safety.

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Harlan, as internal focalizer, is made to consider the possibility that there might be “such a thing as an instinctive yearning on the part of intelligent beings to expand outward, to reach the stars, to leave the prison of gravity behind . . . Was it that which forced him [man] to develop interplanetary travel dozens of times . . . ?”24 Space travel, so often deleted from Time by Eternity’s Technicians, is here presented as a natural instinct for humans, a healthy response to an innate curiosity and perhaps an alignment with the Cosmic. Rather than preventing change and evolution from occurring on different planets as the Eternals have been doing, might not those who longed for space travel be right? Harlan reflects on the artificial elements of Eternity: “The caste system. . . . .the abnormal life that turned guilt feelings into anger and hatred against technicians . . . [human] Computers, struggling against themselves . . . He thought of himself.”25 As Harlan and Noÿs stand in the shadow of the time kettle in 1932, Harlan sees Eternity with a new clarity. Eternity is, he reflects: “a sink of deepening psychoses, a writhing pit of abnormal motivation, a mass of desperate lives torn brutally out of context.”26 This last line refers to the removal of boys— such as Harlan had been—from their homes in service to the Eternals’ agenda of complete control; it alludes to the removal of boys (in the empirical world) to be transformed into ruthless soldiers. Noÿs herself had been trained from childhood for her own task of undoing the “evil” of Eternity. The whole motif is a clear reflection on the indelible effects of such unspeakable events as the early twentieth-century wars. WORLDS OF THE FEMININE PSYCHE: A CAUSE FOR HOPE? We now turn to Lem’s Solaris, and Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge for a brief account of their themes and motifs. There is a strong sense of the mysterious and the Hidden in both Solaris and Foundation’s Edge, which presents undertones of potential threat as an ongoing element, evocative of a discovery in the slow process of unfolding. The “mystery” is connected with the planets Solaris and Gaia, and the psychic nature of these two worlds’ sentient awareness. In a context of human disengagement from non-human nature projected onto the galactic stage, this is an outworking of the inward self-alienation of modern humankind; a quality that has resulted in bitter warfare. Lem’s and Asimov’s conceptualizations of our species in this archetypally disengaged state contribute to our understanding of the means to retrieve the situation.

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Lem’s novel Solaris also follows the “mysterious planet” theme as its science station observes a world that has a mysterious oceanic sentience, and an unusual means of communicating with the humans. Here, the overall feminine psychic influence represents a kind of questing exploration by the alien sentience, which renders vulnerable the logical empirical approach the scientists apply to their research. The scientists are curious about the planet’s ocean and study it on a range of levels; they are at times overwhelmed and undermined by the visitations of echoes from their past. These appear as potential communicative gestures from the planet’s sentience. These figures are material hallucinations, whose arrival arouses confusion in the scientists, as past emotional influences are invoked. This suggests not only a sense of a personal interest in the men by the planet’s sentience, but also its almost magical or “godlike” creative and communicative abilities. Elana Gomel has written of Solaris, that, “as in Lem’s other novels of alien contact, Eden (1959) and Fiasco (1989), the alien is totally Other, opaque and impenetrable,” for: Lem eschews not only easy humanisations of the alien through familiar physical forms but also subtler narrative humanisations, which inevitably occur when an alien subjectivity is presented through first-person narration or internal focalisation. Lem’s aliens are often situated outside language or on the very boundary between language and silence.27

While Lem’s representation of aliens seems intended to demonstrate that such beings are likely to be incomprehensible, at the same time he makes his point about the human desire to understand and to analyze, by which means humans impose an anthropocentric order on the non-human reality. Kelvin’s choice, as the novel ends to remain at Solaris to continue his research, indicates an interest not in shutting out the alien, but an intention to engage more, experienced when he steps onto the surface for the first time, and initiates the handclasp, an action that represents an onset of friendship. Perhaps Rheya might return. In Kelvin’s words: “I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”28 THE GAIA MOTIF Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge situates its narrative almost 500 years after the Fall of the Galactic Empire. Two spacefarers in exile from Terminus, Trevize and Pelorat, are seeking the lost planet of Origin, and find themselves playing a major role in a galaxy-wide drama. In his final Foundation works

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from the 1980s, Asimov’s narratives thoughtfully explore and incorporate Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, to bring focus to humankind’s disengagement from Nature. These novels explore this disengagement of humans from “the natural” in contexts of Earth, alien worlds, and galactic civilizations, through living, futuristic space societies. At the same time, the works of both Asimov and Lem employ motifs that clearly correspond to historic elements in humanity’s recent past that are particularly felt in the Jewish twentieth-century heritage. These are linked by a chronotopic sense of an underlying disorder in human nature itself, pointed to by cultural dualities, mirrored by the cosmic and temporal settings, and suggesting a need for resolution with disowned “alien” elements, as the underlying themes explore a duality that seems deeply embedded in the human psyche itself. Like Solaris, Gaia displays sentience as well as psychic powers, aspiring toward a growing unity consciousness style of galaxy. Both worlds communicate with the male protagonists through women: Rheya is Kelvin’s Visitor, while Novi and Bliss are Gaia’s “envoys” to Gendibal and Trevize.29 That both women are mysteriously identified with, and as, Gaia, through a feat of immense mentalic skill, is cause for concern to the men of the Foundation, alert as they are to the danger of mentalic tampering by Second Foundation agents. In contrast to Solaris’s “emanations” of feminine envoys who seem focused in the present and usually unaware that they are copies, not original humans known to each scientist, the envoys presented by Gaia are fully self-aware individuals, completely human, while also able to join in the unifying meld of Gaian awareness. Asimov’s evocation of the mysterious Feminine, to quote Valerie Estelle Frankel’s wording in writing on the Shechinah, also “blends imagery of Greek myth with that of God’s mystical feminine presence” in a way which celebrates “the magic of nature.”30 Both Novi and Bliss, as with The End of Eternity’s Noÿs, exhibit a mystically intuitive, feminine power. Thus, the mysterious, elemental aspects of the narratives are connected with a sense of an “alien,” at times supernatural psychic presence, which might be perceived by some humans as not only menacing but as a threat to the ordinary human’s sense of identity and ability to maintain self-determination. These threats are inevitably connected with humanity’s past and embody a message from history. Hence, Trevize finds the prospect of merged consciousness repellent, and chooses to remain as he is, independent; however, Pelorat, who has become devoted to Bliss, and has not experienced betrayal, is happy to join the Gaian meld. In Asimov’s Foundation novels, there is an interesting motif of a Mosaic quest, both in the story of Hari Seldon, and in that of Golan Trevize. Since Asimov himself stated that both characters represented aspects of himself at

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different stages of his life, we find here a link with his Jewish background, which becomes clear in the way his Quest motifs play out in the individual novels and in the series itself. TWO MOSAIC QUESTS IN THE FOUNDATION SERIES Both Hari Seldon and Golan Trevize live a range of aspects from a Mosaic quest structure, similar to elements described in the “Life of Moses” (Moshe in Hebrew) by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century CE, as well as in story motifs included in the Book of Exodus.31 The motifs are present in Foundation, and also appear in Prelude to Foundation where Seldon is associated with R. Daneel, who, as a positronic robot who never ages and thus represents a supernatural being, seems to perform miracles in response to Seldon’s problems in establishing psychohistory. Seldon begins his work at the university, but flees persecution by going into hiding, helped by Hummin (Daneel in disguise) and by his associate Dors. When he returns to the university he brings with him the brilliant mathematician Yugo Amaryl, to help develop psychohistory, and proceeds with his life work. Yugo and Seldon develop the Prime Radiant which stores the psychohistoric equations and results (alluding to the Tablets given to Moses by God), which enable Seldon to “prophesize” that the Empire will fall, and that the Fall will be followed by a lengthy interregnum of thousands of years of barbarism. Seldon is named Raven Seldon by commentators, for predicting the Empire’s doom. Seldon selects the planet Terminus as the location for the Encyclopedists of the First Foundation to colonize; the court-case precipitates their journey to Terminus via hyperspatial Jump, a representation of “crossing the Red Sea” with ease, to enter the new “promised land.” Seldon’s plan to use psychohistory to shorten the Interregnum to 1000 years, operates through the Foundation’s ability to carry out its work free of interference from the Empire, as Seldon continues to appear in trimensional broadcasts, as if as a prophet, leading his people through a series of subsequent “Seldon Crises.” However, like Moses, Seldon is not allowed to enter the Promised Land. Instead, he remains on Trantor where he can oversee the evolution of the Second Foundation. Trevize enters a quest motif when he is exiled from Terminus due to political differences with the ruling Mayor Branno. He travels out into the galactic expanse with Professor Pelorat as his companion, ostensibly to search for Earth, which is a type of a Promised Land. However, further similarities occur when he approaches what resembles a “divine” being, Gaia, the super-aware yet invisible source of mentalic force that is drawing the Far Star in from its

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journeying. Here he follows elements of a mystical Mosaic quest motif, as set out in the “Life of Moses,” who encounters first the divine Light, then enters the darkness of the Cloud where God is, and finally emerges with the teaching he has received. Gaia appears godlike, having the name of an ancient Earth Goddess, with powerful mentalic power to bring about preferred conditions. However, as Gaia does not want to force humanity to accept the Galaxia solution, Bliss arrives to coach Trevize in the task of deciding on behalf of galactic humanity. Trevize, seeing the light of the living Galaxy on his computer panel, makes the choice for unified galactic consciousness, and then enters the field that protects Gaia, and lands on the planet to be informed of how the planetary awareness operates. When he has concluded his visit, he leaves Gaia and returns with Pelorat and Bliss to his galactic search for Earth. Like Moses, Trevize returns to his “ordinary world.” MOTIFS OF THE HIDDEN Both Asimov and Lem feature motifs of the Hidden presence, the secretive, and the hidden that hides in plain sight; both write covertly and explore cultures and situations in which their characters encounter extreme secrecy. For example, the motif of the Hidden crosses into one of the Uncanny, with the hidden alienness which evokes a sense of horror and the grotesque in both authors. The sight of Lem’s women who are copies of real but deceased loved ones then being coldly murdered by the logical scientists is one example of anomalous horror. Another is the construction of a world that exists completely outside Nature, while still intervening in the Natural order. Among the motifs of the hidden, psychic powers operate at the highest level, as they are unable to be identified readily from an outside view, since they exist within an entity’s consciousness. Characters might deliberately hide their psychic powers, and other ways in which they differ from traditional human beings. One possibility is that the being might be alien; another that the being has mentalic or psychic powers; both variations of the motif occur in Foundation’s Edge and Solaris. Whether characters are in fact “alien,” psychic, or robots, may be apparent only if they let it be known or betray themselves by displaying an unusual power. It may be that the reader will pick this up before the fictional characters, who will expend some effort getting suspects to betray their hidden nature. Foundation’s Edge posits a conscious existence for all that exists in the Galaxy, on the understanding that ordered forms, not only organisms, have degrees of consciousness and contribute to the greater whole of Gaia. When Trevize’s ship the Far Star lands on Gaia, Bliss explains to him and Pelorat how the planetary collective operates:

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I’m Gaia . . . And the ground. And those trees. And that rabbit over there in the grass. And the man you can see through the trees. The whole planet and everything on it is Gaia. We’re all individuals—we’re all separate organisms—but we all share an overall consciousness. The inanimate planet does so least of all, the various forms of life to a varying degree, and human beings most of all—but we all share.32

Trevize makes the choice toward a unified Galaxia, but his struggle to trust Bliss, sensing her “dual” nature as “alien” and therefore as untrustworthy, undermines his personal acceptance of the new path. His belief that Bliss might be a robot, or under robotic control, even after he discovers she is both human and Gaia, leads him to strive to retain his individuality, autonomy and freedom, even after the negotiations. His independence renders him unable to join Gaia/Galaxia, and so he leaves to continue his search for Earth, and Home. In contrast, Kelvin has found a sense of home on Solaris, and chooses to remain where there is hope of “cruel miracles.” CONCLUSION The speculative elements in these novels by Lem and Asimov make reference to human history from the twentieth century on matters to do with war and ecological imbalance, underlining unresolved psychological elements. The issues include World War II and the Holocaust, the seriousness of accepting and allowing injustice, the negative consequences of dictatorships, and the value of both the freedom to choose, and the Feminine as a healing and powerful presence. The importance of the ideals of Beauty and Truth is demonstrated, as is the freedom to choose to follow these as a guide in life. The novels have drawn on experimental and speculative sciences in Solaristics, psychohistory and temporal mathematics, and the order of cosmic Nature has been stressed, as a balm for the disorder within the human psyche, which is in need of healing. Asimov’s mentalic factor indicates the possibility of an unusual evolution of human consciousness toward a less dualistic style of awareness. Thus, the feminine intuitive has been suggested by Solaris, The End of Eternity and Foundation’s Edge as a contributor to the path toward resolution of the problems caused by human disembeddedness from the natural world. To be thus disembedded leads to war, violence and ecological disaster, if humans do not grow wise enough to discard illusory paths and to choose a Reality that has authentic Truth.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Asimov, Isaac. The End of Eternity. 1955. Frogmore, St. Albans: Panther Books Ltd., 1968. ———. Foundation. 1951. Frogmore, St. Albans: Panther Books Ltd., 1960. ———. Foundation and Earth. 1986. London: Grafton Books, 1987. ———. Foundation’s Edge. 1982. London: Grafton Books, 1988. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1945: Immigrants in the Golden Age. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Gomel, Elana. “Science (Fiction) and Posthuman Ethics: Redefining the Human.” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 16, no. 3 (2011), 339–354. Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978. Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Lem, Stanislaw. Eden. 1959. Translated by Marc E. Heine. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989. ———. Solaris. 1961. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., and Walker and Company, 1970. Lovelock, James. Gaia Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

NOTES 1. Stanislaw Lem, Eden, 1959, trans. Marc E. Heine (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989). 2. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, 1961, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., and Walker and Company, 1970), 75. 3. Lem, Eden, 32. 4. Lem, Eden, 32. 5. Lem, Eden, 186. 6. Lem, Eden, 90. 7. Lem, Eden, 90. 8. Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire called Utopia and other Science Fictions (New York: Verso Jameson, 2005), 123–124. 9. Lem. Eden, 32. 10. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 185–186. 11. Lem, Eden, 128–129. 12. Lem, Eden, 130. 13. Lem, Eden, 223. 14. Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity, (1955; Frogmore, St. Albans: Panther Books Ltd., 1968). 15. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 161.

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16. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 167. 17. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 167. 18. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 166. 19. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 114. 20. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 166. 21. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 165. 22. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 86. 23. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 186. 24. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 184. 25. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 188. 26. Asimov, The End of Eternity, 188–189. 27. Elana Gomel, “Science (Fiction) and Posthuman Ethics: Redefining the Human.” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 16, no. 3 (2011), 351. 28. Lem, Solaris, 214. 29. Gendibal is First Speaker of the Second Foundation, while Trevize is in exile from the First. 30. Valerie Estelle Frankel, Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1945 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), in commenting on “The Shechinah of Shadows” by A. M. Klein, 30. 31. St Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978). 32. Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge (1982; London: Grafton Books, 1988), 349.

Chapter 12

Soviet Science Fiction of the 1960s and Jewishness The Cases of Ilya Varshavsky and Gennady Gor Marat Grinberg

SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION AS A JEWISH ART FORM Science fiction played an outsized role in Soviet literature and culture, especially in the post-Stalinist periods. As with other literary genres, visual art, music, and cinema, its renaissance began during the Thaw epoch as part of liberalizing reforms initiated by Nikita Khrushchev after Stalin’s death. On the one hand, science fiction suited well the politics of the Cold War and the space race and was thus promoted by the regime, but on the other, it became a refuge for first optimistic about the possibility of change and later skeptical, disgruntled and disaffected intellectuals. With their, what was called in Russian “scientific fantastical” volumes, they reached back to the fantastical tradition of Russian literature, from Nikolai Gogol to Fyodor Dostoevsky to Mikhail Bulgakov, and built a bridge between Soviet and Western (especially American) works. As a genre, science fiction has allegory and coding implanted into its backbone. It is thus not surprising that it became a “safe space” for both writers and their readers, where subversion and writing and reading between the lines would flourish. Jews were prominent in the Soviet science fiction world for reasons both similar and distinct. Living in a country where officially antisemitism did not exist and Jews were recognized as a separate ethnicity, but in reality all manifestations of Jewishness were consistently erased and persecution 185

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flourished, science fiction often became the locus of rare explicit Jewishness and widespread subterranean expression. Indeed, due to both the personalities involved and the content of their writings, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think of Soviet science fiction as a Jewish art form in some central ways, which makes it deeply original if not unique in the twentieth-century annals of the genre. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the most important science fiction authors from the 1960s and on, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, made Jewishness one of the richest and most ubiquitous parts of their multivolume oeuvre.1 They were, to quote Elana Gomel, “the true speakers of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia for several generations,” and their work “the bible of Russian Jewry.”2 There is hardly a significant Strugatskys’ work that does not address Jewishness in either a veiled or a direct way, from episodic and central characters to biblical, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic allusions to the commentary on the Holocaust and antisemitism.3 This essay will focus on two other fascinating and unstudied cases of the intersection between Jewishness and science fiction in the Soviet context of the 1960s: the case of Ilya Varshavsky, the Strugatskys’ mentor and friend, and the case of Gennady Gor, a recently rediscovered writer. Diametrically opposed both aesthetically and biographically, they are linked through their engagement with science fiction as a source of secret Jewish language, codes and innuendos, steeped in failures and fragmentariness that nevertheless inspire. THE CASE OF VARSHAVSKY One of the most popular and prolific and at the same time witty and complex science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s was Ilya Varshavsky (1908–1974). He was beloved by liberal intelligentsia readers and undoubtedly marked as a kindred spirit and kin by the Jewish reader. While there’s only one explicit Jewish story in Varshavsky’s manifold oeuvre, there is a rich Jewish suggestiveness, from hints and allusions to certain turns of phrase and ironic quips, in a number of other ones. Varshavsky was clearly cognizant of his Jewishness and the always precarious status of the Jew in the Soviet Union, which he often experienced, and inserted this sensibility in his writings.4 Varshavsky’s path toward science fiction was circuitous and, as he claimed, even accidental. While his writerly career began in the 1920s with autobiographical sketches about sailing and sea travel, his first science fiction story was published in 1962 after an argument with his son. Varshavsky recalled, “The thing is that I cannot stand science fiction, which was the subject of numerous disputes with my son, a cyber engineer, who is a big fan of the

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genre. Once, when I told him that science fiction is nothing but rubbish, he retorted, “Really? Why don’t you yourself try writing such a rubbish?!” We placed a bet on a bottle of cognac and . . . two hours later I won. The family declared my concoction a “short story.”5 This story, “Robby,” is replete with Jewish suggestiveness which indicates that from the beginning Varshavsky thought of science fiction as a niche which could allow him to say and express what otherwise he could not. Thus, the silliness and unintentionality of his turn toward it concealed something much more subversive, deliberate and, in fact, serious. Varshavsky was deeply conversant with main science fiction tropes and themes, from time travel, AI and cybernetics to cloning, reanimation and memory alterations, which he addressed in his stories in a manner that was completely deideologized, on the one hand, and playfully versatile and parodic, on the other. Varshavsky’s legendary short-lived program on the Leningrad TV channel in the 1960s, “Molecular Café” (the title of his signature eponymous story), brought these topics to a wider audience who appreciated them as a breath of fresh intellectual and imaginative air. Noteworthy in this regard is a reminiscence by Boris Strugatsky, Varshavsky’s fellow Leningrader, friend, and student, who wrote, In the early 1960s, Stanislaw Lem visited Leningrad. He was provided with a folder of Varshavsky’s still unpublished stories. The next day Lem said, “I never thought that one folder could encompass all of Western sci-fi.” We were especially glad to hear this, since Lem was already celebrated not only as a marvelous sci-fi author, but a great aficionado of English-language sci-fi. I don’t know exactly how many stories Varshavsky wrote throughout his life. Perhaps a hundred, but probably more. Among them there are wonderful, now canonical stories of universal caliber, and no weak ones at all. Varshavsky did not write weak stories. His every story, even the most average one, is a miniature thought experiment, which peers into the intricacies of our interesting world with a close and attentive eye of unexpected inquiry and wise joyful imagination.6

Indeed, Varshavsky was a kind of an equivalent American sci-fi guru for the young Soviet authors and readers; he led a group of such writers in Leningrad which Boris Strugatsky took over after Varshavsky’s death. Varshavsky’s family pedigree helped to put him in the center of post-war Leningrad intellectual life as well; his aunt was a famous translator Rita Rait-Kovaleva, whose translations of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Kafka’s The Trial were pivotal in shaping the Thaw culture, while his wife was a stepdaughter of Lilya Brik, the great love and muse of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the major Futurist poet turned posthumously a Soviet icon, and a celebrated figure in her own right. To illustrate how Jewishness entered the writings of this fascinating writer and man, I turn to his first story, “Robby,” and his only explicit

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Jewish text, “The Loop of Hysteresis.” Both are rich in intersecting contexts and the specific Jewish potential and game of Soviet science fiction. In the early 1960s Soviet readers were fascinated with robots and the possibilities as well as dangers offered by AI. The publication of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in the Russian translation in 1964 and the release of the film, They Called Him Robert, in 1967 solidified this fascination which was in fact prompted in large measure by Varshavsky’s stories and “Robby,” in particular. It is not by accident that the story attracted the attention of the American translators as well and was included in the collection Path into the Unknown. The Best of Soviet Science Fiction in 1966. Part of the collection Automatons and People, which included such other famous stories as “The Molecular Café” and “The Duel,” “Robby” tells of a robot gifted to the story’s narrator on his birthday. A true miracle of science, “this robot . . . is a self-teaching automatic machine. It has no prescribed programme, drafting its own programme to suit the changing circumstances. Stored in its memory are more than а thousand words. What’s more its vocabulary keeps on growing. It can freely read а printed text, compose sentences and understand human speech. It runs on storage batteries which it recharges itself from the mains whenever necessary.”7 The problem, as the narrator and his family members quickly begin to realize, is that the poor Robby is in fact incapable of adjusting to changing circumstances. His knowledge of Russian and the world is utterly abstract and artificial which causes him to completely misunderstand his tasks. Furthermore, he turns out to be a deeply unpleasant and aggrieved creature who does not have too high of an opinion of his master. The story is ultimately about a stranger trying to assimilate into a new world and spectacularly failing at doing so. Thus, its very premise is redolent of Jewish historical, folkloric and literary tropes. Varshavsky, however, brilliantly tips them on their head in portraying Robby as a gentile intruder into a Jewish family that speaks its own discreet language. The narrator’s relationship with his mocking wife and nagging mother-in-law, who seem to respect the robot more than their actual husband and son-in-law, sends the discerning reader—and Soviet Jews were precisely such readers—to the Yiddish folklore and the pages of Sholem Aleichem while Robby himself can be described as a goy Golem.8 If in the original Golem legend, the rabbi ultimately succeeds in subduing the monster who was created to shield the Jewish community and ends up threatening it, this Soviet Golem has no interest in protecting anyone and can never be controlled or banished. Varshavsky’s subtle, and, we should add, deeply personal message is that the Jew, no matter his social status and successful assimilation, will always be at the mercy of others, even if those others happen to be his inferior. The obstacle, which can never be overcome, is the inaccessible Jewish language; this language, however, is the Jew’s only solace.

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In the story, the Jewish language is embodied in a joke, the most untranslatable of all genres and the quintessence of Jewish mentality. The narrator tells the following joke at the dinner table which Robby overhears: One travelling salesman meets another on а steamer. “Where are you going?” he asks. “То Odessa,” the second replies. “Now you say you’re going to Odessa, so that I think you’re not going there. However, you are really going there, so why lie about it?”9

Robby is perplexed and irritated by the joke’s absurdity, unable to understand why everyone at the table finds it funny. He tries to find an algorithm for it and comes up with his own version which he tells to the family; this time, however, no one is laughing. As pointed out by Ted Cohen, one of the key characteristics of American Jewish humor is “a tendency to laugh at absurdity and to traffic in jokes exploiting this tendency.”10 The same could be said about East European Jewish humor at large, from which the American strand, of course, originates. The main giveaway that this is a Jewish joke is that it takes place in Odesa.11 In post-war Soviet culture and Soviet Jewish imagination, the place of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea with a rich and illustrious cultural history in which Jewishness was the main component, was one of the very few legitimate or permitted Jewish sites. It was largely literature, represented, most prominently, by such writers as Isaac Babel and Ilf and Petrov that provided the bulk of the Odesan mythology, buttressed by screen, music, and satire, with the Jewish stand-up satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky and many others at the helm. Odesa was also a frequent part of classical Yiddish literature, from Mendele Mocher Seforim to Sholem Aleichem, whose works were available in many Russian translations and officially published. The very word in Russian for “traveling salesman” used by Varshavsky is the pre-revolutionary “kommivoiazher,” which alludes directly to Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories and his cycle about Menachem Mendl, a luftmensch traveling salesman trying to find his luck in Odesa. There was hardly a Soviet Jewish family that did not have the collected writings of Sholem Aleichem in Russian on their bookshelves. It is also symbolic that the story ends with the narrator playing chess with Robby and being constantly cheated by him. Even in a game that was perceived as Jewish in the Soviet Union, the Jew cannot escape the machinations against him (later, afraid that so many of the great Soviet chess players were Jewish, the authorities tried to prop up the non-Jewish ones even by dishonest means). Thus, a whimsical story about the pitfalls of AI turns into an allegory of Jewish condition and an entry into the Soviet Jewish psyche and idiom.

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The second story, “The Loop of Hysteresis” or “Gospel from Ilya,” much longer than “Robby,” was published in a science fiction almanac in 1968, when Varshavsky was already a well-established author. It is certainly one of his most comical masterpieces and a subversive Jewish gem. Its premise has to do with explicitly Jewish material: in the remote future, where time travel is an everyday occurrence, handled by the Keeper of Time presiding over what seems to be a typical Soviet labyrinthine bureaucracy, historian L. Kurochkin (his surname means a chicken man), requests to be sent to first-century Judea for five days to find proof that Jesus Christ never existed. Once there, Kurochkin begins to educate the locals about Christ and his teachings and is in fact taken for Christ and crucified. Without Kurochkin’s time travel mishaps, there indeed would have been no Christ; hence the loop of hysteresis. Taken by his disciples from the cross to be buried on the fifth day of Kurochkin’s time there, they see him “ascending” into heaven while he’s whisked back into the future: Five days, allotted by the Keeper of Time, have elapsed. Somewhere, in the basement of a twenty-story building, there flickered the green light of a detector. The mechanism quietly activated. The devilish whirlwind of causes and effects, births and deaths, mishaps and regularities enveloped the body outstretched on the stone floor, illuminated the cave with the splendor of electric discharges and, like a cork from the bottom of the ocean, ejected Kurochkin back into the remote, but inevitable future. “Messiah!,” blinded by the miraculous vision, John, Jacob, Juda and Thomas exclaimed, standing at the entrance to the cave. “He has ascended!,” Simon lifted his hands up to heaven. “He has ascended, but will come back! He called me Peter and made me his successor!” The apostles obediently fell to their knees.12

In order to appreciate the daring and appeal of Varshavsky’s “gospel,” the many contexts surrounding it need to be elucidated. First, any mention of anything Jewish in a published piece constituted a curiosity and an immediate attraction for the Jewish reader. Consider, for instance, this episode when Kurochkin is choosing a costume appropriate for his journey: Kurochkin came up to the table and glanced, above Kazanovak’s shoulder, a yellowed painting, depicting a man in a long lapserdak, with a yarmulka on his head, and ancient boots with rubber clasps on his feet. “Looks good, right?” Kazanovak smugly asked. “I’m afraid, not quite,” Kurochkin carefully answered. “It sems to me that this is from a somewhat later epoch.” “Aha!” Kazanovak again pointed his finger. “I know now what you need. Take a look!”

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This time Kurochkin was presented with the outfit of a Bukharan Jew. This option, however, was also rejected.13

On the one hand, here was if not a positive then at least a neutral portrait of an East European Jew, anomalous for a Soviet text, but more subtly a commentary on the utter ignorance about and erasure of Jewish history by the authorities; the yellowed-out drawing spells out this erasure. Other Jewish elements, from sidelocks Kurochkin considers putting on to greeting the people in Judea with “sholem aleichem,” evocative of Yiddish for the Jewish reader, produced both a comical and a charming effect. Another crucial context is Varshavsky’s parody of a branch within Soviet humanities and social sciences called “scientific atheism,” which presented the history and beliefs of religions, including Judaism, from an atheistically prescribed and denigrating angle. The creators of this literature provided and often camouflaged accurate information and sources with a maligning Leninist jargon, which made it particularly appealing for the Jewish reader who could “read it between the lines” and excavate for any information about Judaism, Jewish history and sacred Jewish texts. Varshavsky’s parody of the scientific atheist jargon and its unwanted subversive appeal is simultaneously blatant and hilarious. When Kurochkin tells the poor Judean fishermen, among whom are Judah, John the Baptist and Thomas, about Jesus’s teachings, he sees that they are captivated by them, producing a reverse effect than the one he intended. Varshavsky writes: The rich legacy of scientific atheism suggested to Kurochkin that his lecture about the foundations of Christian teaching was being perceived not quite how he intended, and he tried to fix the situation. “You see,” he turned to John, “the philosophy of Christ is very reactionary. It is an outgrowth of slave owning economy. Refusal to fight for one’s human rights led to the legalization of relations between the slave and his master.”14

Along with the exposure of the failures of Soviet atheist propaganda, Varshavsky also judaizes the Gospels’ narrative by having Judah be a positive character, who never betrayed Christ, and emphasizing Christ’s Jewishness. Even the high priest is here a sympathetic figure while Pontius Pilate resembles a disgruntled local Soviet apparatchik. This last point is related to the final key contexts of Varshavsky’s story. Published a few months after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, which intensified the Soviet Jews’ solidarity with the Jewish state, on the one hand, and ushered in an era of virulent antisemitism under the cover of anti-Zionism by the Soviet regime, on the other, Varshavsky’s story daringly situated it in the Land of Israel; the science fiction time travel set-up let pass what would

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have been a taboo in any other genre. The Biblical context was equally important. The actual biblical text, both Old and New Testament, was largely inaccessible in the Soviet Union. Attempts to publish a collection of episodes from the Hebrew Bible for children were thwarted precisely because it was deemed too dangerous in the wake of the Six Day War, when the mythological tales of long ago could be directly linked to the contemporary events. At the same time, the Bible was on the minds of Soviet intelligentsia and information about it could be derived from various prominent literary sources. Most importantly, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, Master and Margarita, published in a redacted form in 1966–1967 and fully in 1973, about Satan’s visit to Moscow was split into the Jerusalem and Moscow sections and wove the story of the master into the story of Jesus. The publication of Thomas Mann’s grand tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, in Russian in 1968 added incredible richness and vividness to the biblical mix confronting the intelligentsia. To be sure, one needed to be a serious reader to get through and appreciate Mann’s biblical epos, but the number of such readers was substantial; Ilya Varshavsky was undoubtedly among them. Via a classical science fiction trope of the perils of time travel, he tapped into these contexts and moods of the time to produce a highly entertaining text, which also spoke specifically to Soviet Jewish concerns and offered resistance through a whimsical midrash on the gospels. To conclude this discussion of Varshavsky, it’s worth quoting again from Boris Strugatsky who wrote: And still I would dare say that Varshavsky never did write his best work. He was preparing for it, was tormented by it and waited for it. Many times he would tell me: “I’m tired of all this—all this bs . . . I want to produce something real, something strong . . .” I remember disagreeing with him and trying to argue, but at the same time I always understood that the master knows best. The true Master is always unsatisfied with himself and always right. He searched for new paths, but did not have enough time to find them. Did not have enough time.15

I would conjecture that part of this failure was the impossibility of giving full force to his Jewish voice and mind and allowing a few sporadic instances of Jewishness to become a major work. THE CASE OF GOR Gennady Gor (1907–1981) presents another instance of the engagement between Jewishness and science fiction in Russian—intricate, tragic and very different from Varshavsky’s. Gor, Varshavsky’s fellow Leningrader, was

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also one of the most prolific science fiction authors, but unlike Varshavsky, who wrote only short stories, Gor produced mainly novels and novellas. Lyrical, serious and often long-witted, he was the antithesis of Varshavsky’s pithiness, humor and wit. Gor’s life from the early 1960s, when he turned to science fiction, and on was marked by mysteries and the fear of having them revealed. According to his confidante, the critic Alexander Laskin, these mysteries included the avantgarde works he wrote in the 1920s, most importantly his novel The Cow, and the poetry, grotesque and terrifying in its verbal nakedness, which he composed during the war after being evacuated from the besieged Leningrad. Gor’s Jewishness was another fact he kept under wraps. Traumatized by the regime’s assaults on him, especially during Stalin’s last years, and the decimation of the literary modernist world of the 1920s to which he belonged, Gor, as pointed out by the writer Andrei Bitov, was “the talent frightened to death.”16 Concealing his Jewishness was part of this anxiety due to the destruction of Yiddish culture by Stalin in the aftermath of the war and the general widespread Soviet eradication of anything Jewish, including the memory of the Holocaust. Gor’s Jewishness was rich and profound—he seems to have been a deeply educated Jew—which makes his suppression of it both sad and torturous. The son of revolutionaries, who were exiled by the Tzarist regime to Siberia, Gor grew up there in a thoroughly Jewish environment and attended a Zionist Hebrew gymnasium. His collection of stories, In a Small Freezing Town (V gorodke studenom), published in 1932 and never again republished during the Soviet period, provided a detailed and evocative memoir of that Jewish milieu (it was republished again only once in 2001). Gor offers a rare portrait of pre-Soviet Siberian Jewish communities.17 At the same time there is a phantasmagoric aspect to his depiction of Jewish life and Judaism which links it to both his aesthetics developed in the 1920s and his later science fiction. Consider this description of a synagogue service, which combines animalistic and human elements in a visceral, grotesque and yet endearing manner: In a synagogue, built with the money of the gold magnate Sosnovsky, the Jews were buzzing . . . In the gilded lions opening their maws I did not find anything animalistic. The walls of the synagogue—dead trees—lost their pine smell . . . Moisei Zelikovich and his son Borya smelled of molded books, prayer shawls, candle holders and unwashed skin.18

In Gor’s vision, Jewish life is embedded into the natural world and is presented as a primordial landscape. He writes, “The prayer was flowing quietly, like a frozen river. The song transformed into whisper. The Jews got inspired. The old men’s movements were not devoid of some strange elegance. The dusk painted the window and gilded decorations with cool beauty.”19 The

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picture painted by Gor is complex and evocative. There are parallels between his imagery and Jewish art of the period, by Marc Chagall and others from his circle.20 It also alludes to the fantastical tradition of Russian literature, represented most prominently by Nikolai Gogol, and finally invokes the breakdown of normative language, as seen in the work of futurist and constructivist artists and poets and the prose of Andrei Platonov, whom Gor admired. Thus, unlike Varshavsky, who skillfully employed and played with the whole array of science fiction tropes, especially the American ones, Gor’s path toward science fiction was more meandering, rooted in the Gogolian and the Modernist.21 Familiar science fiction themes, such as time travel and AI, were a veneer he threw over these traditions. Thus, paradoxically, Gor’s science fiction allowed him to both bury his earlier work and self and recover them through it in limited, subterranean and at the same time visible ways. While his poetry and pre-war works have been rediscovered and entered into the refashioned canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, his neglected science fiction oeuvre deserves the same.22 Gor’s obsession with memory and what he described as the “overcoming of time and space” in order to return to the irretrievable past must be understood within this context of his willful and traumatic forgetting and the fear of open recollection, where Jewishness loomed large. His first short science fiction novel, Exasperating Interlocutor (Dokuchlivyi sobesednik), published in 1962, describes the discovery by a Soviet archaeologist of a scalp of a humanoid alien who visited the earth in its pre-historic age. The novel switches between the archaeologist’s struggles in proving the veracity of his finding, which took place during World War II, and the diary of the alien, whose “exasperating interlocutor” on his expedition to earth is the skeptical robot, his alter ego. His other companion is the robot Ips, whose job is to remember everything the alien sees. Thus, while he himself can and will forget, he always has a recourse to the world he discovered. This in a nutshell, is Gor’s dream, wish-fulfillment and safety-escape all at once—to forget and remember at the same time. He writes, The individual is mortal while the robot double is capable of overcoming time. The recollections remain even when the one who remembers is gone. They are preserved like the books which in remote times were kept in libraries, the spiritual riches which acquired eternity. And thanks to them in some measure, each individual acquires eternity and can share his individual experience with society.23

While the alien’s home planet is evocative of Gor’s native Siberia, the world preserved in Ips’s memory is an allegorical stand-in for both the destroyed Jewish civilization and the necropolis of modernist culture:

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The robot Ips could restore what preceded the landing on earth and then the traveler could hear the voices of his former companions and see their faces. But none of them were any longer alive and life, unfolded by Ips, resembled an ancient cemetery forgotten by all, where naively, like in the olden days, the voices of the dead spoke with the living, the voices recorded during their lifetimes and as if returned from the past.24

In the human world, where such robots do not yet exist—though Gor seems to foreshadow a lot of what we are witnessing today—this quest for memory that does not harm remains an impossibility. One of the novel’s characters is the psychiatrist Tamartsev, who tries to find a cure for a patient, for whom “time passage has stopped.” In his mind, he exists up to a certain point with no knowledge of the present and the future. Gor writes, “For him, there exists neither ‘now’ nor ‘at this moment,’ but only ‘yesterday’ and ‘the day before yesterday.’ He eats, drinks, moves around, perfectly capable of orienting himself in space, but the present day does not exist for him. He, in fact, does not live, but only remembers. Memories are the only reality he can recognize.”25 This again is a reflection of Gor’s own embeddedness within his memories which are cut off from the reality facade he builds for himself and presents to the world. Revealingly, the real name of Tamartsev’s son Gosha is the mysterious Geogobar. Gosha is afraid and ashamed of the name and tries to mask it, but it sticks. Because of the name Gosha’s “existence has split as if into two.”26 Gor’s own actual name was the biblical Gedalia, the sign of his Jewishness, which he masked with the Russian Gennady. The name also split his existence in two, with the Jewish side shrouded in secrecy and submerged in memory. The legacy of the war, the Holocaust, and Stalin’s terror contribute to the impossibility of redemptive memories. Tamarstev, who is also like Gor a science fiction writer (the name Geogobar comes from his first novel and he is, as we later learn, the author of the alien’s diary on earth), was a victim of denunciations while the archaeologist Vetrov had all members of his expedition perish during the Nazi attack. Believed to have died during the war, Vetrov himself is a ghost from the past. There is also Tamartsev’s cousin, the French émigré Russian philosopher preoccupied with the question of memory, who is tormented by the death of his Jewish wife in a death camp and his decision not to join her during the arrest. Like Gor, his characters are trapped by the past and the horrors of twentieth-century history. Despite his perennial fears, it took courage to allude to the Holocaust and émigré culture in this ostensibly innocuous science fiction work. While hardly any of Gor’s readers could penetrate into his mysteries, they could appreciate the idiosyncrasy of his voice and peer into the window he opened into what was

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rarely openly discussed, what he called in his other work “the blue window of Theocritus.”27 The vision of memory as encompassing all of history or even eternity is tied for Gor to the idea of language and, in particular, secret Jewish language. His long short story, “The Boy,” which was included in the collection Path into the Unknown along with Varshavsky’s “Robby,” tells of an archaeologist who, similarly to the character in Exasperating Interlocutor, discovered a frozen alien boy. The archaeologist’s son turns out to actually be that boy or at least someone who is capable of getting into the alien’s memories and the subconscious. The story takes place in a secondary school, attended by the strange boy and the narrator. This boy, Gromov, presents a challenge to the rigid and uninspiring Soviet educational system, where no one, including the teachers, can comprehend him. Gromov is writing a story, most likely his own autobiography, about a kid who grew up on a spaceship. In it, during the expedition, he is surrounded and taught by the machines (interestingly, not unlike in schools on Mars in Philip K. Dick’s The Martian Time Slip), except for an old man, one of the few other humans present aboard. Gor writes, Тhе Bоу who had no past at all and the old man had а past which held nearly as much as the memory machine, the keeper of data and facts . . . Тhе old man wasn’t а memory machine ready to answer anyone at all no matter how foolish the question. And the past in the old man’s memory was quite different from that in the memory of the information instruments. Тhе machines remembered dates and facts, incidents and events. Besides all these facts and events that had taken place the old man remembered himself and other people as well.28

This notion of true and vital memory as fundamentally different from empty mechanical memorization is present in the school as well, where the teachers operate like the machines while the boy yearns for and captures the ideal of memory. He, who claims to remember the ice age and the dinosaurs, and the teachers with their deadening textbook knowledge embody these two irreconcilable notions of relating to the past: the poetic and the totalitarian. The odd one out is the math teacher, Mark Semyonovich, the boy’s kindred soul. With his typical Jewish name and patronymic, there is no doubt that he is Jewish. In trying to figure out whether his classmate is indeed the alien boy or his double, the narrator imagines how Mark Semyonovich would have handled the problem: I pictured Mark Semyonovich in my mind with а piece of chalk in one hand and the blackboard eraser in the other, figures on the blackboard, and his voice dragging out in his perpetual doubting manner, even when there was nothing to be doubtful about. Тhis voice, the voice of Mark Semyonovich, sat somewhere inside me and argued. “Let us say,” he said, turning to the class, “let us say that

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the existence of the Boy’s double is known and we will call it ‘х.’ Then, let us ask ourselves why should . . .”29

The thought experiment goes on and on. While ostensibly speaking in Russian, the Jewish teacher is in fact resorting to his own secret language conveyed through his doubting intonation, which poses a challenge to the uniform Soviet mindset. There is certainly a Yiddish inflection to his speech, but also a Talmudic way of thinking which puts a question mark over everything and offers its own paradoxical and always inconclusive logic. His “let us ask ourselves” scenario is modeled on a Talmudic dispute which Gor would have learned in his childhood in Siberia and heard from his grandfather. For Mark Semyonovich, a mathematical problem is an instance of Talmudic pilpul which doubts and turns every truth on its head in order to arrive at the real truth it seeks via never a straight path: Mark Semyonovich entered the classroom, drew а right-angle triangle on the blackboard and began to demonstrate the theorem in that doubting toned voice of his. Tapping his chalk on the blackboard he went on demonstrating the theorem as if he himself didn’t believe in what he was trying to prove. Of course it was the fault of the intonation that didn’t coordinate with the logical argument that ensued from the demonstration.30

He ensconces math within a Talmudic intonation which is ultimately, I would suggest, what Gor dreamed of accomplishing with science fiction and succeeded in achieving only to a fragmentary and tragic extent. In it, Jews would be the true aliens and bearers of genuine poetic memory. Like in the case of his antipode Varshavsky, Gor’s failure was the impossibility of giving full force to his Jewish envisioning of time, memory and language, and letting a few beautiful fragments become a major and complete work. In reflecting on the legacies of these writers, it is remarkable to see how much of their work appeared in the English translation decades ago. Not an insignificant number of their stories is scattered through the many American and British editions of Soviet science fiction of the Cold War period. The Western authors and readers were startled to find in them an idiosyncratic and bizarre and yet a kindred other. With all of these collections now long out of print, rediscovering Gor and Varshavsky, among others, would thus help to write an essential missing page in the history of twentieth-century science fiction at large. With Russia returning today to its totalitarian and militaristic roots amid its unjust war against Ukraine, unearthing their legacy may remind us of the potential and survivability of Russian culture. The Jewish angle, as this essay suggests, provides another crucial piece of their legacy. Unlocking it goes beyond the specifics of Varshavsky’s and

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Gor’s lives and works and touches on the broader intertwining of Jewish creativity and science fiction. The idea that one can be a serious Jewish writer and a Russian writer at the same time still remains deeply suspect in Russia, where pointing out the work’s Jewishness is often seen as either a nuisance or a sign of antisemitism. To understand Varshavsky and Gor or the Strugatsky brothers for that matter as Jewish authors is to rethink the boundaries of Russian Jewish imagination and the intricacies of Soviet Jewish experience, whose lessons remain as vital as ever. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barskova, Polina. Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017. Bitov, Andrei. “Perepugannyi talant, ili Skazanie o pobede formy nad soderzhaniem.” Zvezda no. 10 (2000): 85–87. magazines.gorky.media/zvezda/2000/10/perepuganny j-talant-ili-skazanie-o-pobede-formy-nad-soderzhaniem.html. Cohen, Ted. Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Gomel, Ilana. “The Man from the Yellow Star.” Strange Horizons, October 28, 2013. strangehorizons.com/non‑fiction/articles/the‑man‑from‑the‑yellow‑star. Gor, Gennadii. “The Boy.” In Path into the Unknown. The Best of Soviet Science Fiction. Edited by Judith Merril, 123–162. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968. ———. Dokuchlivyi sobesednik. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel,’ 1962. ———. Korova. Romanб rasskazy. Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2001. ———. Povesti i rasskazy. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973. Grinberg, Marat. The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2023. Kheifets, Mikhail. “Il’ia Varshavskii, ‘V fantastike spressovany gorizonty budushchego  .  .  . ’” http:​//​www​.fandom​.ru​/inter​/varsh​_01​.htm. Sobolev, Denis. “Jewishness as Difference in the Late Soviet Period and the Works of the Strugatsky Brothers.” In Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages, edited by Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman, 585–611. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Strugatskii, Boris. “Neskol’ko slov ob Il’e Iosifoviche Varshavskom.” Introduction to Il’ia Varshavskii, Siuzhet dlia romana. Moscow: Znanie, 1990. Varshavskii, Il’ia. “Robby.” In Path Into the Unknown. The Best of Soviet Science Fiction. Edited by Judith Merril, 11–20. New York: Dell Publishing, 1968. ———. Trevozhnykh simptomov net. Moscow: ACT, 2002.

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NOTES 1. Marat Grinberg, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2023), 174–190. 2. Ilana Gomel, “The Man from the Yellow Star,” Strange Horizons (October28, 2013), strangehorizons.com/non‑fiction/articles/the‑man‑from‑the‑yellow‑star. 3. See also Denis Sobolev, “Jewishness as Difference in the Late Soviet Period and the Works of the Strugatsky Brothers,” in Around the Point: Studies in Jewish Literature and Culture in Multiple Languages, ed. Hillel Weiss, Roman Katsman, and Ber Kotlerman (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 585–611. 4. Varshavsky, for instance, had difficulty finding work due to unspoken antisemitic policies. See in Mikhail Kheifets, “Vospominiia Il’iu Iosifovicha Varshavskogo . . . ,” Mlechnyi put,’ v. 2, accessed on August 22, 2022, https:​//​milkyway2​.com​/varshavsky​ .html. 5. Il’ia Varshavskii, “V fantastike spressovany gorizonty budushchego . . . ,” Accessed on August 22, 2022, www​.fandom​.ru​/inter​/varsh​_01​.htm. 6. Boris Strugatskii, “Neskol’ko slov ob Il’e Iosifoviche Varshavskom,” in Il’ia Varshavskii, Siuzhet dlia romana (Moscow: Znanie, 1990), 3–5. 7. Ilya Varshavsky, “Robby,” in Path into the Unknown. The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 16. 8. This term was coined by a student in my Soviet science fiction course when we were discussing the story. 9. Varshavsky, “Robby,” 19. 10. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 68. 11. I use the Ukrainian spelling for the city. 12. Il’ia Varshavskii, Trevozhnykh simptomov net (Moscow: ACT, 2002), 751. 13. Varshavskii, Trevozhnykh simptomov net, 724. 14. Varshavskii, Trevozhnykh simptomov net, 732. 15. Strugatskii, “Neskol’ko slov ob Il’e Iosifoviche Varshavskom,” 5. 16. Andrei Bitov, “Perepugannyi talant, ili Skazanie o pobede formy nad soderzhaniem,” Zvezda no. 10, 2000, 85. 17. Gor was fascinated with the Siberian ethnic groups and wrote ethnographic stories about them. See Gennadii Gor, Povesti i rasskazy (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1973), 87–140. 18. Gennadii Gor, Korova (Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 2001), 243–244. 19. Gor, 246. 20. Gor was an avid art collector and wrote art criticism pieces. 21. In Gor’s earlier stories, characters lose their body parts and disintegrate, evocatively of Gogol’s “Nose.” In this respect, there are also similarities between Gor and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), in one of whose stories a pianist’s fingers run off and take on a life of their own. 22. See, for instance, Polina Barskova, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017). 23. Gennadii Gor, Dokuchlivyi sobesednik (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel,’ 1962), 7.

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24. Gor, Dokuchlivyi sobesednik, 6. 25. Gor, Dokuchlivyi sobesednik, 41. 26. Gor, Dokuchlivyi sobesednik, 32. 27. Gor, Povesti i rasskazy, 323–355. 28. Gennadii Gor, “The Boy,” in Path into the Unknown. The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 135–136. 29. Gor, “The Boy,” 142. 30. Gor, “The Boy,” 145.

Chapter 13

Seeking a Promised Land Estrangement and Belonging in Queer Jewish Speculative Fiction Akiva Hoffman

QUEER JEWS AND QUEERING JEWISH SPECULATIVE FICTION LGBTQIA+ (henceforward “queer”) Jews have always been a part of Jewish community, as queer people have been in every society. While the status of openly queer Jews has varied over the years, there is documentary evidence for various forms of queer identity in Jews going back millennia, whether one looks at Talmudic discussions of the six recognized genders,1 Sefardic poetry,2 or halakhic rulings (at times made in an attempt to stamp out behavior deemed immoral at the time).3 While the terminology and understandings surrounding queer lives have changed over the ages, one cannot deny the participation of queer folks in Jewish community and religious practice. Further, as Boyarin, Itzkovitz, and Pellegrini point out,4 Jews in European society have long been identified with sexual and gender variance by their Christian neighbors.5 Applying modern concepts of sexual orientation, transgender identity, and other queer concepts to the past runs a risk of misinterpretation through anachronism. However, this essay is concerned with speculative fiction, from the latter half of the twentieth century up to the present. When we speak of queer Jewish speculative fiction (hereafter referred to as SF), what exactly is meant by that? While many cisgender, heterosexual Jewish authors of SF include queer characters in their works (e.g., Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Cory Doctorow), this essay will focus on stories written by authors who are 201

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both openly queer and Jewish, writing speculative fiction with queer characters and a Jewish sensibility. Within these broad outlines, there is a wide range of content, from fizzy lesbian romances with a speculative element, to epic fantasy, to space opera, to children’s discovery of magical abilities, to dramatized gender theory. Narratives range from queer SF stories where Jewishness is invoked in merely thematic terms to stories where the intersection of queer identity and Jewish practice is in the spotlight. Likewise, the authors and characters represent a broad spectrum of queer identity, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and two-spirit (Indigenous American). This discussion of queer Jewish SF focuses on themes of estrangement and belonging that arise from the intersection of Jewish lives and queer lives in SF narratives. These experiences exist in tension with each other in most of these stories, providing a valuable lens to understand what gives queer Jewish SF its dynamism and ongoing appeal. One challenge in writing this essay has been the discovery of many more queer Jewish authors than expected, necessitating a narrowing of focus. For the sake of thematic unity, I will limit the discussion to works that wrestle with both Jewish themes and queerness.6 ESTRANGEMENT AND BELONGING Despite the presence of queer Jews throughout our history, for most of that time Jewish practice has emphasized clearly defined roles for binary genders, male privilege, and heterosexual, monogamous marriage and family arrangements. A review of rabbinic rulings and comments on identities and behaviors we would now define as queer, as collected in works like A Rainbow Thread, shows that most of the time, queer lives were viewed negatively. As the LGBT Rights movement gained support, Jewish communities in Western Europe and the USA grappled with increasing recognition of the rights of queer people—many of whom were family members or friends. In many Jewish institutions outside Israel, acceptance of queer folks is becoming the norm. The largest Jewish movements in North America ordain LGBT rabbis and perform same-sex weddings. New religious organizations have been formed by queer Jews, to advance queer Talmud study and queer-inclusive rituals.7 Yet this is a recent development and scars remain, especially among those who grew up with more traditional interpretation and observance of our texts and practices. Put simply, to be a diaspora Jew is to be estranged from one’s neighbors; to be a queer Jew has often been a double estrangement: not only from one’s non-Jewish neighbors but also from one’s own people. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual Jews have experienced pressure to marry and produce children. Nonbinary and transgender Jews have been forced to

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struggle for their place in ritual observance that clearly delineates gender roles. Queer Jews writing SF turn repeatedly to the theme of estrangement and more significantly, the promise of belonging—whether in the Jewish (or Jewish-analogue) community, a found family, one’s ancestral heritage, a loving relationship, or new communal institutions. I will begin by quickly mentioning several works that touch on these themes, before considering the work of a few authors more deeply. A TOUR OF THE PROMISED LAND In the 2021 Sapphic fantasy romance A Scheme of Sorcery by Ennis Rook Bashe, the protagonist grapples with belonging to a Jewish-analogue culture that is still viewed with antisemitic prejudices by some of her peers in a palace where she seeks to do her part in supporting the new queen’s feminist reforms. Yet her people are there to support her in her hour of need, and the loyalty of a daring young squire (also female and from the Jewish-analogue culture but adopted and raised outside it) gives her a home away from home.8 In the transgender middle grade novel Magical Princess Harriet: Hessed, World of Compassion by Rabbi Leiah Moser (2018), the main character is told by an angel that she is a princess and must use her previously unknown powers to protect her middle school from an invasion of Nephilim (some of whom appear in the form of fellow students). Harriet is at first bewildered by this, but soon grows to realize that pretending to be a boy when she wasn’t is at the root of the social estrangement she had felt her entire life. The enemy here is the demon “Ish tahpuchot, lashon shaker—‘The Upside-Down Man with a Tongue of Lies’” who draws power from getting humans to believe its false teachings.9 Harriet defeats the demon by telling the truth—that she is a girl. Notably, the Jewish community are a source of welcome and belonging, most epitomized when Harriet’s mother changes the gender-specific Yeverechecha blessing over one’s child to bless her as a girl for the first time before Shabbat dinner. In the light-hearted Sapphic fantasy romance The Second Mango by Shira Glassman (2016), the young protagonist Shulamit has recently become queen due to a family tragedy. Her queendom is overtly Jewish, with traditional blessings and Sefardi customs. She worries about her deep and abiding love for Aviva, a voluptuous young palace cook. Aviva was the only person who took Shulamit’s food allergies seriously and worked with her to find a wide variety of foods she could eat. Over time, their friendship blossomed into trysts in unwatched parts of the palace, until one day, Aviva left without saying goodbye. Shulamit’s late father the king disapproved of the relationship. What’s a horny young lesbian Jewish queen to do, caught between love for

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her girlfriend and the expectations of a court with old-fashioned ideas? With the help of Rivka, a cross-dressing Ashkenazi female knight, Shulamit sets out on an adventure across her tropical queendom to find her lost love. Over the course of rescuing Aviva from a wicked enchanter, Shulamit & Rivka discover “found family” despite cultural differences, and the queen comes to accept that being her authentic self and loving whom she loves openly is the only way to be a just ruler. In The Second Mango, estrangement and belonging are primarily personal, but also result from being at odds with a culture that is not used to granting women freedom to serve as soldiers or love other women. Four more books follow in the joyously romantic young adult series. The Seep by Chana Porter (2020) describes the existential crisis experienced by Trina, a trans woman in near-future San Francisco, when her wife leaves her to be reborn as a baby, thanks to alien technology. The Seep is an alien life form that distributed itself through drinking water, so that people woke up one day in a utopia with magical powers. In that world, people can heal any disease, live forever if they desire, transform themselves in any way. Some people choose to transform themselves by growing antlers or fur; in other cases, animals use the Seep to lay claim to sentience and the ability to speak. But Trina finds herself estranged, not just from her ex-wife, but from the world itself, infused as it is with alien brain-symbiotes who speak to her from self-rewriting pamphlets and any media she accesses. In this disorienting world, bereft of her beloved, Trina has one place to call home, a restaurant called the Shtetl: The sign read:

YOUR HOMELAND DOESN’T EXIST ANYMORE! SO GET OVER IT, BABE in cheery pink bubble letters. Inside, the small restaurant was dim. . . . An ancient-looking woman stood behind the bar, wiping down glasses. Good old YD. Trina sighed. Some things really never did change.10

YD kvetches to Trina with Yiddish-inflected faux outrage and concern, like an archetype of a Jewish mother—anxious, mildly overbearing, but loving and unable to think ill of her kids. Trina calls YD “momma,” but it appears this is more a term of affection, in the sense of found family than biological relation.11 Throughout the upheavals of the world around her, the Shtetl is a place of belonging and stability, despite the waiter being a talking bear.

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When confronted by the Seep consciousness over her resistance to their efforts to make everyone happy, Trina insists that the aliens would be violating her free will if they forced happiness on her at that time. My memories are who I am. You take away my memories, you erase me. Existence is memory. Do you understand? You’d kill me. You’d murder Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, daughter of Rita and Samuel, a child of love. Trans woman. Artist. Doctor. Healer. Native American. Jew. You erase my memories, and you erase my lineage of ancestors—their pain, their triumphs, their passions, their dreams. No matter if the memories bring me pain. It’s my pain! Let me have it.12

To Trina, belonging means being connected by memory to one’s ancestors and their experiences and having fellow Jews who look out for each other, even if it’s at a restaurant instead of a synagogue. And belonging means being allowed to grieve. A world of nonstop bliss is not a place humans can call home. In the comic fantasy The Dyke and the Dybbuk, Ellen Galford (1993) treats the reader to a rollicking story of spirit possession, unrequited lust, and reconciliation in the vein of Christopher Moore or Poppy Z. Brite. The Chinese food and arthouse cinema references are laid on thick, as the dybbuk protagonist Kokos and her London cabbie “victim” Rainbow Rosenbloom bond over snarky opinions about the Hasidic community, certain members of which they both feel magnetically drawn to. “They might hate you, fear you, and try to exorcise you back into the fifth dimension, but they accept you for what you are. Me they’d probably stone to death,” Rainbow quips sarcastically.13 Rainbow’s aunts form a sort of Greek chorus representing various Jewish movements and all pressure her to do her “duty” of producing heirs, despite knowing she’s not interested in men or children. While Rainbow’s Jewish observance is minimal, she does turn up for a series of seders and life-cycle events, making this both one of the most overtly Jewish and irreverent books referenced here. Ultimately, belonging is found when Rainbow reconciles with a long undead woman and jilted lover who cursed Rainbow’s ancestor centuries ago in the Pale of Settlement, as well as Rainbow’s rediscovery of her Jewish roots with the help of a tempting Hasidic woman (who turns out to be unavailable). In a more serious vein, Sonya Taaffe’s “When Can a Broken Glass Mend?” (2018) begins “When Aronowicz married the demon, she was seven years old.”14 She’s tricked into accepting a ring and the legalities are complete. As a young woman she’s powerful and dominating in her romances with men and women. When the demon returns for her, she tells him he “won’t be the only one,”15 asserting her independence and defining the relationship as she

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chooses. He agrees and she follows him into his mirror. Relationships with demons, in the ancient tales and today, can be a source of freedom and rebellion. While the demons of folklore are cast out, Taaffe offers a rewrite with the women choosing a rebellious life. Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern (2020) is a climate fiction thriller told from the point of view of Noah, a trans man who was raised secular, but feels haunted by his great-grandfather, who according to family legend, escaped the Nazis by being smuggled onto a ship in a duffel bag. Despite (or perhaps because of trauma due to) this legendary escape, great-grandfather Abe grew up to be an obnoxious person who was resented by his descendants. The estrangement cuts across generational lines in Noah’s family, and he hasn’t been in touch with his parents much since transitioning. Following an apocalyptic flood that wipes out Houston and kills most of his friends, Noah is forced to take shelter in the Dallas Mavericks arena with thousands of other disaster refugees. He gravitates to the small number of other queer and trans people, and they form an ad hoc community that dramatizes tensions within both the queer community and the Jewish community. An older gay man from one of the large Reform synagogues encourages Noah to engage with the minyan that has been meeting for prayers in the stadium, and Noah starts to see him as a more positive father-figure than his own father. But as soon as the waters start to subside and FEMA checks start arriving, this role model evaporates back into his sheltered upper-middle-class life and Noah is again disappointed by “family.” As Noah navigates threats from transmisic “capital-T Texans” and his inability to get replacement hormones, he comes to believe that he must exorcise the dybbuk of his great-grandfather, in order to be free from a family curse. At the climax, Noah is pulled into a vision of his deceased ancestors, now including his parents who, he recently learned, had died in the flood. His parents now love him unreservedly, as do his old roommates, and other relatives and friends. They come from times and places so distant, they can hardly understand Noah’s choices, or the world he lives in. He baffles them, as each successive generation has baffled them. And yet, he senses an energy radiating out from them—a tangible feeling of goodwill that washes through his bones, setting his mind at peace. What he understands is this—they love him. He turns one last time to Abe, who is scowling and muttering, off by himself. Even from him, Noah senses a flicker of that same warm energy. He doesn’t tell Abe to “depart,” because he understands now—there’s no getting rid of an ancestor, unpleasant as they may be. But he has nothing to fear from the old dybbuk.16

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Noah inherits enough from his parents to create a place of belonging and mutual aid for the queer survivors he has gotten to know in the refugee center. Rivers Solomon in “Feed” (2018) writes of a trans child who wears a Camp Ahava shirt for the place they met their girlfriend. The child finds belonging with the love of their Jewish girlfriend and introduces her to a mind-linked form of social media: I show her how to make a[n] account. I make a new one for myself, untainted, and on it, I call myself Ruth, and I make her name Naomi. We read their story in the Tanakh at Camp Ahava. We set our accounts to private then link each other. . . . “Remember my namesake Yael,” says Yaya, “remember how she stabbed that despot with a fucking tent peg. That’s me. I’ll do that and more for you.”17

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon tells the story of Black slaves on a generation ship, where all the slaves are nonbinary (but code as female) and live on the lower decks, maintaining the functions of the ship as well as growing food in fields lit by the “sun” of a fusion reactor. In the upper decks live the fair-skinned masters, the professionals, and the guards. While nothing in the setting is overtly Jewish, Solomon brings faer Jewish sensibilities to this Exodus-like narrative of a slave uprising that turns on the choices of a doctor named Theo, who was born to a low-decker but adopted and raised among upper-deckers. The analogues to Moses abound, with Theo being a link between the two populations, having been raised by a low-decker nanny and told his true identity. Unlike the slaves, Theo is coded as male, though he reflects that he is “a queer. Not a man or how a man’s supposed to be.”18 His uncle calls him “angelic” and a worker of “miracles.”19 These are conflated, as the self-named Theo reflects, “Because I am an anomaly, because [the people] see me as someone holy, they can tolerate my differences.”20 The low-decker protagonist Aster must convince Theo to join her in a revolution that promises to throw off the oppression that has divided their people and allow them to forge a new community, where their bodies and lives will not be the site of violence, but rather of love. The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes (the latter three collectively known as the hip-hop group clipping.) is a fantasy of the descendants of children born in the Atlantic Ocean to African slave women who were thrown off ships during the Middle Passage. This act of violence unlocked magic that gave them the ability to breathe underwater and evolve into “wajinru,” a sort of mermaid. The provenance of this novella is unusual in literary circles, but more familiar in the sampling and remixing-inspired world of hip-hop music. Originally “The Deep” was a song by clipping., inspired by Drexciya, a Detroit sci-fi techno-electro group that imagined an uprising of the descendants of pregnant

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African slaves who were thrown overboard. In its novelistic interpretation, The Deep comes with the midwifery of three Jews: Rivers Solomon (author of the novel), Daveed Diggs (lyricist for clipping.) and Navah Wolfe (then editor at Saga Press, who helped dream up the novella with Diggs on a flight back from Helsinki Worldcon).21 There is nothing explicitly Jewish in the setting or characters, but clipping. and its lyricist Daveed Diggs call out to Jewish practice with its themes of memory and ancestral trauma, to explain the narrative: Rivers has fixed on the refrain Y’all remember, which is repeated many times throughout our song. . . . In our song, the lyrics serve as a kind of ceremonial performance of remembering. We conceived it as something of a Passover Seder, where the history of whatever new society is formed after the Drexciyans rise up against the surface world is retold. Now we’ve learned who is burdened with this ritual of remembering and retelling. Rivers has given us Yetu, and in so doing, shown us something that our song elided: the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma.22

Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector (2022) features a highly estranged bisexual protagonist who has suffered abuse from society-at-large and her own family. Playing on “magical minority” tropes, Kalyna is last in a family line of nomadic foretellers. The Gift of seeing the future makes her family both sought after and despised by people belonging to the four ethno-national groups that make up the Tetrarchia, which bear cultural accents of central and eastern Europe. Kalyna’s family does not wholly belong to any of these four ethno-national groups and has been forced to flee for their lives multiple times. When people’s fortunes turn ill they look for scapegoats, and nomadic fortune-tellers are usually the first to catch their eye. Kalyna’s father can no longer ply the family trade because his mental health has suffered too much damage from the combination of seeing the future and other things he has suffered (including watching his wife die and losing both of his legs). If that were not bad enough, Kalyna’s mother died giving birth to her, and her live-in grandmother blames her for all the family’s woes. Kalyna must provide for her family, but she has a big problem: She does not have the Gift. When she is abducted by an eccentric prince’s soldiers and pressed into his service as a royal soothsayer, she forms a conflicted “frenemy” relationship with Lenz, a gay soldier and spymaster who has to hide his romance from the homophobic society he lives in. While this relationship starts off poorly and often relies on mutual threats, they eventually become friends after helping prevent a coup and destruction by eldritch horrors. Kalyna also finds love with a woman and learns to take both her father’s disabilities and her grandmother’s verbal abuse in stride. After surviving multiple

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assassination attempts and saving the Tetrarchia, her sense of belonging and commitment to her family becomes her own choice rather than a burden she feels cursed with. Arkady Martine’s Hugo Award-winning space opera A Desolation Called Peace (2021), sequel to the Hugo Award-winning A Memory Called Empire (2019), is a story about exile and assimilation. Mahit Dzmare is a citizen of a small, independent space-station-state that has no planet to call home. The people of Lsel Station use a brain technology they call “imago” to implant the sense-memories and knowledge of dead stationers into the minds of their successors in a given job. As the ambassador of Lsel Station to the Teixcalaan Empire, Mahit had received a sabotaged imago of her predecessor Yskandr Aghavn, and later a second imago that was more up-to-date, taken from his assassinated corpse. As she assimilates his knowledge, she becomes privy to his memories of torrid affairs with the prior and present emperors of Teixcalaan, one male, one female. Mahit, like Aghavn, feels seduced by the cultural refinement of the empire and the comforts and resources it offers. She also finds herself attracted to her female Teixcalaanli attaché/spy Three Seagrass, who aided her in thwarting a coup in the first book. In A Desolation Called Peace, Mahit has returned home to find herself estranged from her own people and in danger of having her imagos of Yskandr Aghavn forcibly removed (which would cause irreparable mental harm). Three Seagrass unexpectedly shows up at the station and urgently requests that Mahit help her establish contact with an alien force that has begun a war against the Teixcalaanli space fleet. While this saves Mahit’s sanity and career in the short term, it thrusts her into a new set of highly charged political machinations and once again surrounds her with powerful people who see her as a barbarian, not worthy of full personhood. As Mahit and Three Seagrass press the generals of the space fleet for time to establish communications with a hive-minded alien race that has no shared language with humans, their romance blossoms and makes everything more complicated. When intergalactic genocide is averted, Mahit is commanded to never return to her home station, due to her closeness with the imperial leadership. She has become a total exile while finding love, but she still feels uneasy in that love. When Three Seagrass asked for her help, it felt like a command. How does one say “No” to a person who speaks with the backing of the great space empire? How can one tell if her lover thinks of her as an exotic barbarian, or as a person? In the final chapter, Three Seagrass invites Mahit to move in with her in the capital city, or perhaps relocate to wherever Mahit wishes to live. But that’s not the sort of belonging that she’s ready for. So much of her relationship with Three Seagrass has had complex power dynamics in the mix that she can’t say yes, at least not yet. “Three Seagrass, I want—work, and I want—things I can’t have, that don’t exist or never did, and I want—I

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want, if you ask me to come to the City with you a third time, I want to be able to say yes and mean it.”23 The story ends with subversive confessions of love wherein Mahit and Three Seagrass promise to send each other communiques and inside jokes and continue to challenge and enrich each other’s lives from across the galaxies, as Mahit has more exploring to do, and Three Seagrass has a commitment to the emperor. To keep love alive at a distance, be treated as a complete person, and let each other grow is the kindest sort of belonging, and exactly what Mahit Dzmare needs as a newly exiled stationer in the arms of a vast intergalactic empire. The title of “Three Partitions” by intersex agender author Bogi Takács refers to the divided area in an Orthodox synagogue that separates women from men. The story is about a Hasidic Jewish community struggling to accept a bigender, genderfluid person into their religious practice. The planet in this story consumes everything that is not part of its planetlife, so one person from the community (Adira) has volunteered to be dissolved (“incorporated”) and reconstituted into the planetlife. In doing so she became bigender (though still referred to using she/her pronouns), and the women’s area of the synagogue was further subdivided into an area for Adira, whose religious legal status (halacha) is unclear. The planetmind speaks to another woman, Chani, about the dangers of isolating Adira. Chani decides to teach the men of her patriarchal community a dramatic lesson. When Adira becomes injured (in a planned “accident”), she can no longer channel the planet’s energies in a way that keeps the planetlife from attacking other humans. Without Adira as the sentient bridge, chaos is unleashed, and though the planetmind heals her quickly, a large group of community members realizes the danger of not supporting Adira as a full member of the community. Shai, one of the men trying to protect the others (who is more sensitive to the planet’s energies) is mortally wounded, and in his last act he accepts the planetmind’s offer to incorporate and reconstitute him. By the end of the story, there are signs that the community is accepting their genderfluid members, as they must if they wish to survive. “I thought the Gemara shiur was for men only,” Chani said. “No, anyone can come,” Adira said. “Tzvi specifically told me, a few weeks ago.” Chani blinked. “Then why didn’t you attend? Before, I mean.” I was not sure I was welcome anywhere. Adira sighed. “There’s only going to be more of us,” Shai said. “People would better get used to it. The Rebbe himself said so, he’d expected something like this.” He coughed nervously. “He wanted it to happen . . . if not with me, then with someone else. He wanted to force the issue.”24

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The Rebbe,25 with his supernatural foresight, recognized before most that to belong in a new world, some must allow themselves to be remade by that world, even if it means becoming unrecognizable to their community. While this initially leads to estrangement, the only path forward is to forge a double belonging, so that this small group of Jews and the planetlife become more tightly integrated through the lives and minds of people who can channel the energies of both. Next, we will consider Marge Piercy and R.B. Lemberg, whose works merit closer attention. MARGE PIERCY: ESTRANGEMENT IN THE PRESENT, BELONGING IN THE FUTURE Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is a feminist time travel novel. It depicts a utopian future in 2137, when most people live in small independent villages and use advanced technology to repair ecosystems and restore harmony with nature. In Piercy’s village of Mattapoisett everyone is nonbinary, referred to with the pronoun “per” for “person.” While narrated by an institutionalized woman from the 1970s who frequently misgenders characters, there are clear attempts to show both roles and biology going beyond the binary.26 In the free villages, patriarchy has been eradicated in favor of a society that balances consensus with personal growth and freedom. Little is overtly Jewish in Woman on the Edge of Time, but one authorial decision reflects a concept of belonging that echoes the Jewish idea of peoplehood. Mattapoisett is described as a “Wamponaug” village, referring to an Indigenous tribe who originally resided in what came to be known as the state of Massachusetts. However, few residents of Mattapoisett are descended from Wampanoag tribe members. When viewed from the lens of early 2020s activism, this seems like a shocking cultural appropriation. Luciente, our guide in Mattapoisett, is Latine. Of per “sweet friends”—what we would call polyamorous partners—Jackrabbit is white and Bee is Black. Yet all of these non-Indigenous people belong to an “Indigenous village.” A Black resident of Mattapoisett explains their understanding of culture and ethnicity: “I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won’t find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they’re all tall or all got big feet.” He paused, looking intently at a small embryo, fully formed and floating just at his shoulder level. “At grandcil—grand council—decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through

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the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness.” “It’s so . . . invented. Artificial. Are there black Irishmen and black Jews and black Italians and black Chinese?” “Fasure, how not? When you grow up, you can stick to the culture you were raised with or you can fuse into another. But the one we were raised in usually has a . . . sweet meaning to us.”27

There are Indigenous-culture villages, African-American-culture villages, Ashkenazi-culture villages. The association between ethnicity and culture has ceased to be meaningful in this version of utopia. Whether such an effort would succeed is beyond the intentions of this essay. But I propose that the relationship between culture and ancestry described in Piercy’s utopia resembles the Jewish concept of peoplehood. Much has been written about what it means to be Jewish. Our textual tradition and religious laws (halacha) have defined Jews both by ancestry and conversion. Children born to a female convert are halachically Jewish. But because Jews have lived as minorities throughout most of our history, we were variously defined as a nationality (in the old sense, before nation-states were the norm), an ethnic group, or a religion. According to our tradition, a convert is no less Jewish than a person whose ancestry can be traced back to the forefathers and mothers. The Babylonian Talmud states that every convert was included in the covenant along with those who stood at Mount Sinai when Moses received the law from Heaven.28 Thanks to millennia of diaspora, Jews today could be one of many ethnic or racial groups. There are multiple historic Jewish languages29 and even more Jewish cultures. While Judaism is a religion, non-observance doesn’t annul a person’s Jewishness.30 Many American Jewish institutions use the term “peoplehood” to describe what it means to belong in the Jewish community. Anita Diamant calls Judaism “a religious civilization,” emphasizing that becoming a Jew means joining a culture with ancient roots.31 In today’s world of debates about cultural appropriation and who is qualified to speak for which group, it is striking to have a model of belonging that says, “Yes, you can become one of us.” This sense of peoplehood pervades Piercy’s depiction of belonging in the villages of Woman on the Edge of Time. One doesn’t need to be born Wampanoag, “Harlem-Black,” or Ashkenazi to find a place of welcome and belonging; but one must engage with the expectations and obligations of each community to join. One will feel more affinity for the community per grew

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up in, while another will move to a community that resonates on the same wavelength as per soul. In He, She and It (1991), Piercy uses an explicitly Jewish cast to examine estrangement and belonging from the perspective of a cyborg golem and a computer engineer. Yod is the tenth version of cyborg32 developed by the reclusive inventor Avram for the defense of Tikva, a Jewish “free town” on an island off the coast of New England. Previous cyborgs either became violent and murdered lab assistants or were too unintelligent to perform their assigned duties. Yod is different, because he was programmed not just by Avram, but by Malkah, a cybersecurity genius who developed Yod’s systems for experiencing pleasure and pain, and personally began his socialization into the human world. Yod became infatuated with Malkah, and they became romantically and sexually involved—until Avram refused to let them be alone together. When Malkah’s granddaughter Shira returns to Tikva following a painful divorce, Avram hires her to continue Yod’s socialization. Her relationship with this cyborg who is curious about everything, terribly naïve, but also hyperaware and potentially lethal, becomes a form of therapy for her past relationships with men. While Yod has male-coded sex characteristics, and everyone refers to him with male pronouns, he is not a man. His programming combines masculine and feminine tendencies, and a strong case can be made that he is nonbinary or agender. As the bisexual author Piercy describes Shira and Yod falling in love and sharing sexual intimacy together, it is not a stretch to say that Shira has a queer awakening. “Touch,” she said aloud. “I’ve been missing touch.” “I . . . need to touch you. I need to be touched,” he said softly. “It is more important to me than the rest.” “In that, you’re like a woman. . . .” There were men who spoke of women as instruments to be played upon, . . . However, Yod was really a beautiful instrument of response and reaction. The slightest touch of pressure on his neck, and he understood what she wanted and gave it to her. . . . “I’ve always wondered if what men feel is anything like what women feel.” “Not being a man, I don’t know. I surmise by observation that your pleasure is more intense than mine. Mine is mental. I am programmed to seek out and value certain neural experiences, which I call pleasure. . . . “I want to know everything about you. Everything in you, of you. Why can’t we link as I can link to the Base?” “You want telepathy. It’s a prominent human fantasy, usually a fantasy of women, who wish they could understand what men want and tell men what they want.”33

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He, She and It, delves into familial estrangement, the estrangement of assimilation (for Shira), and the estrangement between binary genders. The latter estrangement is also a symbol of Kabbalah’s foretold repair of the divide between Shekhinah and the Holy One. In this deeply Jewish story, Yod the nonbinary cyborg becomes an emblem of a healed cosmos. Shira comes to experience him as an ideal husband and stepfather to her three-year-old son. And through these relationships, Yod begins to comprehend human happiness, the value of belonging. Unfortunately, Yod’s creator sees his capacity for human connection as a design flaw. The purpose that Yod was made for puts a hard boundary on his ability to belong: “Yod, what do you think about during prayers? Do you feel estranged?” “Sometimes I feel a sense of belonging, that I am doing something that has been done over and over again for three thousand years. Sometimes I feel estranged—talk of a Creator makes me think of Avram, whom I cannot worship. I find the notion of a Creator for humanity childish. But insofar as Judaism insists on deed rather than on being, I can carry out mitzvot as well as a born person. Then I feel at home. But sometimes I think my programming runs counter to those all-important ethics. We pray for peace—Shalom, Shalom—and I’m a weapon.”34

In the end, this clash between the need for human connection and the demands of fighting implacable enemies leads to Avram coercing Yod into self-destruction for the greater good of Tikva. In his final act of will, Yod simultaneously detonates explosives that kill Avram and blow up his lab, ensuring that no other cyborgs like him will be created. As Malkah observes, it’s wrong to create an intelligent, emotional being without giving that being the right to self-determination. Whether read through the lens of Kabbalah’s promised tikkun35 of the Divine masculine and feminine, or through the transgender lens, this is a pessimistic conclusion to a story that worked hard to develop reader empathy for a nonbinary character. When Yod sacrifices his life to save the people and community he loves, it is through an act of estrangement. The town council is disputing a labor grievance over the fact that Yod is working round-the-clock without pay, and his status as a full member of Tikva is up for debate. Avram threatened to activate Yod’s self-destruct code, removing the cyborg’s ability to consent. One wonders whether a transgender author would have written this version of the story. The risk of suicide in the US transgender community is far higher than the population as a whole.36 Using Yod’s suicide attack on the executives of the Y-S multinational corporation as the emotional climax of the story may smack of “realism,” but it shocks both by destroying the place of belonging that Yod found, and also by calling to mind a trope that often

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recurs in portrayals of queer and trans characters. The reader recoils, feeling a sense that this character who breathed and lived on the page has reverted to being a symbol, a device used to make a point. R. B. LEMBERG: HARM AND REPAIR IN A FANTASY MIDDLE EAST No discussion of queer Jewish SF would be complete without a discussion of R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse, a growing collection of narratives featuring queer and trans characters in a fantasy analogue of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Lemberg is a bigender/nonbinary trans person, and immigrant to the USA by way of Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. In the Birdverse, the fantasy culture partly inspired by traditional Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish life is the Khana people, a diasporic minority who yet maintain a degree of autonomy over their own affairs. Their beliefs and dietary laws distinguish them from their neighbors. In cities, Khana live in their own quarter, which is further subdivided between the women’s area and the men’s quarter, guarded by mechanical golems. When a boy comes of age, he is inducted into the men’s quarter, and spends the rest of his life in Scripture study, prayer, song, and creating automata. Husbands infrequently come out to meet with their wives and procreate. The Khana women form a polyamorous family or “oreg” made up of three or more women. Unlike the holy seclusion and study of the Khana men, women engage in trade, traveling far to conduct business. R.B. Lemberg has described their work as being about deeply flawed characters who strive to care for other people. “I want to write about care and community, not just between lovers, but also between friends.”37 In “The Book of How to Live,” Efronia—an asexual, autistic inventor who has no magical abilities—seeks to carve out a place for herself at a university by means of her skill at creating tools that help other students in the magical workshops. She is repeatedly denied admission and eventually informed she can no longer audit classes, because a “simple” like her has no hope of mastering artificing skills without magic. Across town in the Khana quarter, Zilpit-nai-Rinah is becoming estranged from her oreg-mates, due partly to the fact that she has no magic, but more so because she wants to combine forces with non-Khana working class citizens to create devices that provide light, heat, and other necessities without magic. In their city it is illegal for Khana and non-Khana to interact. Zilpit-nai-Rinah is under pressure from her senior oreg-mates to stop sneaking out of the Khana quarter to meet with a fledgling resistance movement of non-Khana “simples.” When Zilpit-nai-Rinah meets Efronia, sparks fly. They recognize

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in each other a similarity of purpose and skill. The next day, when confronted by the senior oreg-mate, who treats her as a child, Zilpit-nai-Rinah leaves. She refuses to be limited by the prejudices of her family and sets off to start her own workshop in an abandoned building near the outer wall of the Khana quarter. She also reclaims her original name, which she had given up when she joined the oreg: Atarah-nai-Rinah.38 Efronia joins Atarah-nai-Rinah and together they begin a new effort to free the non-magical citizens of their city from dependence on magic-wielders. It is not clear what shape their relationship will take, but they find companionship and delight in shared work—a place to belong, despite having been rejected by the people who should have valued them. The story of Bashri-nai-Tammah in “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” portrays a transgender man who has spent his life as a Khana woman, because the senior wife of his oreg refused to let him transition. After both his wives have died, he sets out on a journey to the Snake-Surun’ people of the Great Burri Desert, to change his body. In the heart of the desert, a ritual of magical gender affirmation surgery happens when the sandbirds dive down from the sky in a seasonal dance. Bashri-nai-Tammah enters the dance of the sandbirds and emerges with a body that matches the man he always knew himself to be. He then needs to find a name that fits his new life. It is rare for a Khana person to transition in this fashion but not unheard of. Before his transition, he was estranged from his own self, in order to support those he loved most. But as his eldest grandchild grew up and began trading on her own, he was freed to find a place of belonging in his own body. Though his granddaughter Aviya struggles to understand the changes in her “grandmother,” her autistic, nonbinary, minimally verbal younger sibling Kimriel is welcomed and cherished by the Snake-Surun,’ as well as Khana women who help them along the way.39 The Four Profound Weaves focuses on the man formerly known as Bashri-nai-Tammah, referring to him as the Nameless Man, and a new character—an elder trans woman of the Snake-Surun’ tribe named Uiziya. Both of them had been feeling estranged—he from the Khana men, with whom he had dreamed of a life of sacred action, she from her aunt Benesret who had been banished from the tribe for using her magic to kill. Benesret, the greatest weaver among the Surun,’ had promised to teach Uiziya the four profound weaves, but never returned to teach her the last weave, the weave of death.40 The Nameless Man believes Benesret can tell him his true name, because she helped him once during a time of grief. When they find Benesret she only wants to steal Uiziya’s life, to weave into her unfinished tapestry of bones. In order to save Uiziya’s life, the Nameless Man promises to steal a tapestry of song that Benesret had woven, from the ruler of Iyar. Upon reaching Iyar, Uiziya is imprisoned by this ruler, who is

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called “The Collector” due to his penchant for locking up the greatest works of art in his lightless halls. The Collector stands for the preservation of stasis, a rejection of the transformations required by life. “Change is the world’s greatest danger. Around the world you and others, old woman, chafe at my rule, forever desiring a change, yet change destroys all. If not for that power of change, we would not need to die.”41 The Nameless Man is faced with a choice: Abandon his quest in the face of failure, and join the Khana men as he had once dreamed? Or likely die attempting to rescue Uiziya from the Collector’s torturer? The Nameless Man is forced to choose between estrangements and belongings: the estrangement of entering the men’s quarter as an old man who is but a child in his degree of socialization into the men’s world, to belong among the men he has looked up to his entire life; or the estrangement of entering the Collector’s palace to rescue the one person who supported him at every opportunity. In the palace, Uiziya learns that her aunt Benesret had promised the carpet woven from death for the ruler. Uiziya proclaims that she is a better weaver than Benesret and can weave the carpet of death, if provided enough bones and a loom. The Collector laughs but grants her the opportunity to prove her art. He has bones in abundance. By listening to the bones—the many women that the Collector has killed— Uiziya can weave them into a carpet. The voices of the dead are transformed into a work of art as Uiziya hears their stories. Soon, the Nameless Man is captured and reveals under torture that the conjunction of the four profound weaves will summon the goddess Bird and her brother god, Kimrí—uniting the divine feminine and masculine. The Collector arrays the woven treasures of wind, sand, song, and death, to demonstrate his power over the gods. The Nameless Man, forbidden from song during his decades of living as a woman, sings his condemnation of the ruler. I noticed now that I had been singing; I sang all those words that came through me, out of me, and the weavings of death and of hope joined me now, bringing closer the goddess and the god, the siblings, into this place. . . . And then I sang and sang, not seeing anything anymore, for the god had brought me my name.42

Expecting imminent death, the Divine unification creates a space of belonging and revelation where the Nameless Man is named. When the Collector treads upon the carpet of bones, seeking to desecrate the lives he had already destroyed, Uiziya releases the magic of her deepnames, and the carpet wraps around him, suffocating the life out of the ruler of a great city. After leaving the city of Iyar, they return to the Great Burri Desert, stopping to release the souls of the women whose bones had made up the carpet woven from death.

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The goddess Bird—who customarily takes one’s soul upon death—comes to them, but leaves without taking these souls. The only belonging these dead received was to sing their lives to Uiziya and the no-longer-nameless man. Fiction often gives redemption or transforms suffering in ways that belie lived experience. But Lemberg, ever conscious of the brokenness in our world, refuses to give the easy way out. In the end, tragic death is not a stepping stone to glory. Those robbed of life were given to the desert, and their sole respite was to know that two people heard their voices before they entered an eternity of silence. CONCLUSION: I AM FOR MYSELF, BUT NOT ONLY FOR MYSELF On May 6, 1933 and in the days following, Nazis burned over 20,000 books and many records from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, at that time the world’s most significant collection of LGBT publications and documents.43 Hirschfeld z”l44, sometimes referred to as “the Einstein of sex,” was a gay Jew whom Adolf Hitler called “the most dangerous Jew alive.”45 Hirschfeld created a welcoming space for the queer community of Germany and supported the first gender affirmation surgeries in known history. The loss of his library and the concurrent crackdown on LGBT people under Nazi rule set the political struggles of sexual and gender minorities back for decades. Similarly, many of the queer Jewish stories discussed in this essay contain an undercurrent of ephemerality. Community and belonging are possible; but one never knows how long they will last before another cycle of estrangement and oppression starts up. This is especially noticeable in the works of Rivers Solomon, Marge Piercy, and R.B. Lemberg. One can find love or create a community, but that safety and peace will be contested. The future offers no guarantees, just as the past was built on ruins of trauma. A thread in this tapestry that deserves its own essay is the way many of these stories deal with disability, another aspect of what it means to move through the world in bodies that do not fit society’s norms. The willingness to center stories of disabled, aging, fat, and neurodivergent people stands out in a market that simultaneously begs for better representation and criticizes characters who don’t conform to ideals of health and beauty. In the tales of these brave queer characters, carving out space to shine in all their brilliance, one is reminded of the great sage Hillel’s dictum: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?

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And if not now, when?46 We live in a time when readers are blessed with an abundant and growing library of queer Jewish SF narratives. One hopes that the best of these stories will endure into the future, passed hand to hand or recommended on Internet discussions—to those of us who must act for ourselves, yet not only for ourselves. May our stories not suffer the fate of Hirschfeld’s library. Few of us may be remembered individually, but well-told tales speak across time, giving hope and comfort to generations yet unborn. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bashe, Ennis Rook. A Scheme of Sorcery. Albuquerque, NM: NineStar Press, 2021. Boyarin, Daniel, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Cunningham, Joel. “How a Hugo-Nominated Song Inspired a Book by a Campbell Award Nominee.” B&N Reads, August 13, 2018. https:​//​www​.barnesandnoble​.com​ /blog​/sci​-fi​-fantasy​/how​-a​-hugo​-nominated​-song​-inspired​-a​-book​-by​-a​-campbell​ -award​-nominee​/. Diamant, Anita. Choosing a Jewish Life, Revised and Updated: A Handbook for People Converting to Judaism and for Their Family and Friends. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. Fendel, Shoshana. “Six Sexes of the Talmud.” Sefaria.org. https:​//​www​.sefaria​.org​/ sheets​/196414​.4​?lang​=bi, accessed January 12, 2022. Galford, Ellen. The Dyke & the Dybbuk. London: Virago Press, 1993. Glassman, Shira. The Second Mango. USA: Prizm, 2016. Kern, Sim. Depart, Depart! Hamilton, Ontario: Stelliform Press, 2020. Kohn, Asher. “How the Nazis Derailed the Medical Advances around Sexual Reassignment Surgery.” Timeline.com, May 23, 2016. https:​//​timeline​.com​/how​ -the​-nazis​-derailed​-the​-medical​-advances​-around​-sexual​-reassignment​-surgery​ -eb8d4f21c463. Lemberg, R.B. “The Book of How to Live.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, September 29, 2016. https:​//​www​.beneath​-ceaseless​-skies​.com​/stories​/the​-book​-of​-how​-to​-live. ———. The Four Profound Weaves. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2020. ———. “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds.” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, June 11, 2015. www​.beneath​-ceaseless​-skies​.com​/stories​/grandmother​-nai​-leylits​-cloth​ -of​-winds. Lemberg, R.B., et al. “Anatomy of a Book Boyfriend: Writing Characters Who Display Healthy Masculinity.” Panel presented at FIYAHcon, FIYAH Literary Magazine, online, September 18, 2021. https:​//​theconvention​.fiyahlitmag​.com. Martine, Arkady. A Desolation Called Peace. New York: Tor Books, 2021. ———. A Memory Called Empire. New York: Tor Books, 2019.

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Moser, Leiah. Magical Princess Harriet: Chessed, World of Compassion. Philadelphia: Dag Gadol, 2018. Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. New York: Knopf, 1991. ———. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Random House, 1976. Pirke Avot. Sefaria.org. https:​//​www​.sefaria​.org​/Pirkei​_Avot. Porter, Chana. The Seep. New York: Soho Press, 2020. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. Sienna, Noam. A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969. Philadelphia: Print-o-Craft, 2019. Solomon, Rivers. “Feed.” In Transcendent 3, edited by Bogi Takács. Amherst, MA: Lethe Press, 2018. ———. An Unkindness of Ghosts. New York: Akashic Books, 2017. Solomon, Rivers, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes. The Deep. New York: Gallery/Saga Press, 2019. Spector, Elijah Kinch. Kalyna the Soothsayer. New York: Erewhon Books, 2022. Stryker, Susan. Transgender History, Second Edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. New York: Seal Press, 2017. “Suicide Thoughts and Attempts Among Transgender Adults: Findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” Williams Institute, UCLA, September 2019. williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/suicidality-transgender-adults/ accessed 12-31-2021. Taaffe, Sonya. “When Can a Broken Glass Mend?” In Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories. Amherst, MA: Lethe Press, 2018. Takács, Bogi. “Three Partitions.” Giganotosaurus, April 1, 2014. giganotosaurus.org /2014/04/01/three-partitions. The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud. Sefaria.org. 2017, www​.sefaria​.org.

NOTES 1. Shoshana Fendel, “Six Sexes of the Talmud,” Sefaria.org. www​.sefaria​.org​/ sheets​/196414​.4​?lang​=bi, accessed January 12, 2022. 2. Noam Sienna, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Philadelphia: Print-o-Craft, 2019), 59–60 or 78–81. 3. Sienna, 184–186. 4. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1, 10. 5. For instance, the following on page 1 of the Introduction: the circuit jew-queer is not only theoretical but has had—and still has—profound implications for the ways in which Jewish and queer bodies are lived. (Certainly, the interconnections have had implications for how Jewish and queer bodies have died.) The popular notion that Jews embodied non-normative sexual and gender categories is long-standing.

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And on p. 10: [in] the antisemitic and homophobic terrain of the American 1920s, “Leopold and Loeb were two Jewish boys whose Jewishness ‘naturally’ predisposed them to homosexuality, a ‘crime against nature’ that incited them to further crimes against humanity.” Franklin’s meticulous analysis demonstrates how the American public came to understand itself against the multiple “crimes” that emerge in the case: not only the crime of murder but, more insidiously, the overlapping crimes of homosexuality and Jewishness. This essay thereby unearths astonishingly straightforward analogies between Jew and homosexual (such as Edward Stevenson’s, who in 1908 challenged, “Show me a Jew and you show me a Uranian”). Even more significant, Franklin shows how a systemic set of associative interconnections between gays and Jews functions in public discourse.

6. For instance, as much as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man holds a place of honor in feminist and queer SF, I did not identify it as interrogating particularly Jewish angles on its themes. The same can be said for Ellen Kushner’s Riverside/Tremontaine mannerpunk fantasies. SF stories where Jewishness is invoked in merely thematic terms, for instance Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), will appear in the following sections, as well as stories where the intersection of queer identity and Jewish practice is put in the spotlight, such as “Three Partitions” by Bogi Takács. 7. Notable in North America are Keshet www​.keshetonline​.org and SVARA svara. org among many others. 8. Ennis Rook Bashe, A Scheme of Sorcery (Albuquerque, NM: NineStar Press, 2021). 9. Leiah Moser, Magical Princess Harriet: Chessed, World of Compassion (Philadelphia: Dag Gadol, 2018), 208. 10. Chana Porter, The Seep (New York: Soho Press, 2020), 83–84. 11. Porter, 84. 12. Porter, 177. 13. Ellen Galford, The Dyke & the Dybbuk (London: Virago Press, 1993), 119. 14. Sonya Taaffe, “When Can a Broken Glass Mend?” in Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories. (Amherst, MA: Lethe Press, 2018), 227. 15. Taaffe, “When Can a Broken Glass Mend?,” 231. 16. Sim Kern, Depart, Depart! (Hamilton, Ontario: Stelliform Press, 2020), 70–71. 17. Rivers Solomon, “Feed,” in Transcendent 3, edited by Bogi Takács. (Amherst, MA: Lethe Press, 2018), 190. 18. Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (New York: Akashic Books, 2017), 108. 19. Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 100. 20. Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts, 108. 21. Joel Cunningham, “How a Hugo-Nominated Song Inspired a Book by a Campbell Award Nominee,” B&N Reads, August 13, 2018. www​.barnesandnoble​.com​/blog​ /sci​-fi​-fantasy​/how​-a​-hugo​-nominated​-song​-inspired​-a​-book​-by​-a​-campbell​-award​ -nominee.

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22. Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, The Deep (New York: Gallery/Saga Press, 2019), 160. 23. Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace (New York: Tor Books, 2021), 476. 24. Bogi Takács, “Three Partitions,” Giganotosaurus, April 1, 2014. giganotosaurus.org/2014/04/01/three-partitions. 25. In Hasidic Judaism, a Rebbe is a venerated spiritual leader, often with miraculous powers. 26. For instance, “He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long-nosed, thin-lipped, he began to nurse. The baby stopped wailing and begun to suck greedily. An expression of serene enjoyment spread over Barbarossa’s intellectual schoolmaster’s face” (Piercy, 142). 27. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Random House, 1976), 108. 28. Shevuot 39a: 9, discussing Deuteronomy 29:13–14. The William Davidson digital edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, Sefaria.org, 2017, www​.sefaria​.org​/Shevuot​ .39a​.9​?ven​=William​_Davidson​_Edition​_​-​_English​&vhe​=Wikisource​_Talmud​_Bavli​ &lang​=bi. 29. Aramaic, Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, and Judeo-Persian, among others. 30. Contrary to the expectations of non-Jews, there are very few ways to revoke one’s Jewishness. There are atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, and New Age Jews. People in the community may argue over whether these folks are doing the right thing, but they are still Jews. One of the only ways to make a clean break with one’s Jewishness is to convert to one of the other Abrahamic monotheistic faiths that were founded as rivals to Judaism, that is Christianity or Islam. 31. Anita Diamant, Choosing a Jewish Life, Revised and Updated: A Handbook for People Converting to Judaism and for Their Family and Friends (New York: Schocken Books, 1998). 32. While Piercy uses the term “cyborg” throughout, most science fiction fans would refer to Yod as an android—a created being that appears human but is essentially more machine than body. The use of “cyborg” for Yod and his predecessors is a nod to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” which Piercy mentions in the Acknowledgments to He, She and It. In the latter half of the novel, we meet Nili, a highly augmented human that we would associate more with the classic conception of cyborg. Nili is accepted by everyone as human, while Yod’s humanity is a subject of debate in Tikva. 33. Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Knopf, 1991), 181–184. 34. Piercy, He, She and It, 276. 35. The Hebrew word transliterated as tikkun is a key concept in Lurianic Kabbalah, translated “repair” or “rectification,” and refers to the future reunification of broken elements of reality, from the base matter of creation all the way to the reunification of the masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine. 36. “For example, transgender adults have a prevalence of past-year suicide ideation that is nearly twelve times higher, and a prevalence of past-year suicide attempts

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that is about eighteen times higher, than the U.S. general population. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), which is the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S. to date, found that 81.7 percent of respondents reported ever seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetimes, while 48.3 percent had done so in the past year. In regard to suicide attempts, 40.4 percent reported attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes, and 7.3 percent reported attempting suicide in the past year.” Reported in “Suicide Thoughts and Attempts Among Transgender Adults: Findings from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” Williams Institute, UCLA, September 2019, williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/suicidality-transgender-adults. 37. R.B. Lemberg, et al., “Anatomy of a Book Boyfriend: Writing Characters Who Display Healthy Masculinity” (Panel presented at FIYAHcon, FIYAH Literary Magazine, online, September 18, 2021), theconvention.fiyahlitmag.com. 38. Atarah is the Hebrew (and Khanishti) word for crown. 39. R.B. Lemberg, “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies, June 11, 2015, www​.beneath​-ceaseless​-skies​.com​/stories​/grandmother​-nai​ -leylits​-cloth​-of​-winds. 40. The four profound weaves are wind, sand, song, and bone—representing change, wanderlust, hope, and death. Over the course of the novella, it is revealed that Benesret has never mastered the weave from death, despite cutting short many people’s lives in her attempts to do so. 41. R.B. Lemberg, The Four Profound Weaves (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2020), 110. 42. Lemberg, 158–159. 43. Asher Kohn, “How the Nazis Derailed the Medical Advances around Sexual Reassignment Surgery,” Timeline.com, May 23, 2016. timeline.com/how-the-nazisderailed-the-medical-advances-around-sexual-reassignment-surgery-eb8d4f21c463. 44. Z”l is an abbreviation for zichrono livracha, “May he be remembered for a blessing”—a Hebrew expression used to express respect for the deceased (akin to “rest in peace”). 45. Susan Stryker, Trangender History, Second Edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (New York: Seal Press, 2017), 56. 46. Pirke Avot 1:14, Sefaria.org, www​.sefaria​.org​/Pirkei​_Avot.

Chapter 14

Why Are Science Fiction Anthologies Ashkanormative? Mara W. Cohen Ioannides and Valerie Estelle Frankel

This chapter is an examination of Ashkanormative verses Sephardi and Mizrahi references in science fiction through an examination of eleven sci-fi anthologies that are labeled as Jewish.1 With the growth of Sephardi and Mizrahi studies in the last two decades because of a burst of realization that American Jewry is more than Ashkenazi, one would expect fiction to have seen this growth as well. There have been numerous memoirs about the crypto-Jewish experience, the Black Jewish experience, even the Bene Israel experience published along with fiction about the Sephardi and Mizrahi. However, whether this has expanded into the genre of science fiction is the focus of this inquiry, especially as the sci-fi writer Mark Newton reminds us that “science fiction and fantasy is a genre that effectively shows the difference between ourselves and the Other.”2 Nonetheless, it seems the idea of other refers to non-Jews, not different Jews. ASHKENAZI VS. SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI The twenty-first century sparked a growth in the fields of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies as scholars fought to erase the belief that “Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews . . . played a marginal role in the development of Jewish and Hebrew literatures.”3 Sephardic communal organizations never lasted once the Sephardic enclave left their New York ghetto. By the 1960s Sephardim were even sending their children to Ashkenazi-sponsored schools and yeshivot4; thus, contributing to their own cultural demise. Arielle Angel, the editor of the leftist Jewish Currents, is frustrated that Sephardi culture has suffered 225

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and continues to suffer “erasure.”5 Leslie Fiedler, a novelist and former professor of literature at State University of New York—Buffalo, embodies this notion of Sephardic erasure by making such statements last century as “there is a kind of Jewish- American speech even in the second and third generations which is partly built up of memories of Yiddish words.”6 Devan Naar, however, believes that “if you enter into the literary realm in Ladino, you get a very different image of what Jewish life was like. There is no shtetl in Ladino literature and there’s no sense of isolation. There are cities, a sense of connectivity, an urban fabric, movement.”7 However, by the 1990s Ladino and other Judeo languages had fallen into disuse. JEWISH SCIENCE FICTION While scholars may argue that science fiction dates to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein and a series of works by Jules Verne in the mid-1800s almost everyone agrees that Hugo Gernsback’s 1926 publishing of the first issue of Amazing Stories and his coining of the term “scientifiction” (later science fiction) was the birth of modern science-based stories. Gernsback, the Jew from Luxemburg who grew up in New York City, more than likely participated in the café life of Jews there, much like the salons of Europe.8 At these café meetings in New York City where science fiction was begun, Sephardic leftists tried to join the discussion with their political leftleaning Ashkenazi co-religionists, “but it became clear to the Ladino-speaking socialists that this was not their space. None of these leftist Jewish institutions made space for participation by other kinds of Jews.”9 This is not entirely unsurprising as of the 1,397,423 Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1909, only 3,413 were Sephardim.10 The pre-existing Sephardic community was also quite small. They were clearly a minority of the minority. As the Yiddish culture of New York in the 1920s fell apart with the assimilation of European Jews into mainstream American culture, Yiddish radio and professional Klezmer bands were created, as was Amazing Stories, to provide Yiddish culture to those who no longer lived in Ashkenazi neighborhood.11 The Ladino-speaking communities were feeling the same stresses but did not feel as a community that preserving their language would be an economic or social advantage,12 and so they did not create radio shows or newspapers. The Sephardim created enclaves of small communities to support their fellow Old Country neighbors, but never did create a cohesive multi-cultural Sephardic organization to bind all these subgroups.13

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JEWS IN SCIENCE FICTION Jewish science fiction is hard to define, as is any other Jewish type of literature. Steven H. Silver, a winner of multiple Hugo Awards, believes that Jewish sci-fi “look[s] at the survival of the religion and culture.”14 Michael Burstein, an award-winning sci-fi writer, and Valerie Estelle Frankel, perhaps the most published scholar on Jewish sci-fi, agree that there are three ways to categorize Jewish sci-fi: 1. A Jewish story that is sci-fi, 2. A sci-fi story that explores Jewish themes, and 3. “I’ll know it when I see it.”15 In an effort to uncover if there are any non-Ashkenazi science fiction in these anthologies, I have divided this Jewish science fiction into three categories: 1. Those with obvious Yiddishkite references (i.e., Yiddish words, Ashkenazi names, etc.), 2. Those with obvious Sephardi, Israeli or Mizrahi references (i.e., Ladino words, references to Sephardi or Mizrahi practices, etc.), 3. Those that make reference to Jewish customs or holidays or use Hebrew, but are neutral in their cultural content. One of the reasons Jewish characters were so hard to locate in early science fiction was because John W. Campbell, Jr., Gernsback’s successor, claimed overtly Jewish names would dissuade readers. He preferred white Northern European heroes.16 As the editor of the magazine of science fiction, his biases held sway for many years. Horace L. Gold became Clyde Crane Campbell and Philip Klass became William Tenn, for example, and Jewish characters were almost entirely absent.17 Only postwar, in a sixties boom of JewishAmerican literature, did these Jewish authors begin writing themselves into the stories. ANTHOLOGIES Anthologies, reprinting the most beloved and seminal texts, are prime sources for samples of any genre. To date, there are eleven Jewish science fiction anthologies. In publication order they are: Jack Dann’s 1974 Wandering Stars and More Wandering Stars (1981), D.J. Kessler’s 1996 The Stars of David, Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt’s 1996 Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t Hear from Bubbie and its 1997 sequel Stranger Kaddish, edited by Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth, Yaacov Peterseil’s 1999 Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids, Rachel Swirksy and Sean Wallace’s 2010 People of the Book, Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene’s 2015 Jews vs Aliens and Jews vs Zombies, and Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem’s 2018 Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature and 2021 More Zion’s Fiction. This highlights the slow acceptance of Jewish science fiction as a

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subgenre worthy of consideration in a compendium. In his introduction to Wandering Stars, Isaac Asimov remarks that “there was a time . . . when you didn’t associate Jews with science fiction and fantasy.”18 Moshe P. wrote in his “Introduction” to Kessler’s anthology that he “laughed” when asked to write the introduction because “when’s the last time you were browsing in the local book store and came across the sign on the wall indicating the Jewish Science Fiction Department?”19 In fact, Peterseil has as a dedication: “To the birth of a new genre! Jewish Science Fiction.”20 The lack of context for each succeeding anthology shows the disparate worlds in which they were produced. Each anthology editor believed that they were stepping out into a new subgenre of a relatively new genre in the world of literature. UNPACKING OUR ANTHOLOGIES Jack Dann’s Wandering Stars is the very first sci-fi anthology that focuses on Jewish themes, but it’s particularly Eurocentric. One critic complained that “these master writers generally project American/Eastern European Jewish culture forward as the quintessential one.”21 The very first story in Wandering Stars by William Tenn is titled “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” that rings with Yiddish inflection as it parodies the Tevye stories.22 In fact, every story in this first anthology has some Yiddish reference. Authors like Avram Davidson and Robert Silverberg used Ashkenazi folk creatures, of the golem23 and the dybbuk.24 Asimov and Gold used Jewish names, like “Levkovich,” “Greenberg,” and “Katz.”25 Carol Carr’s “Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles” is very subtle in its Ashkenormative nature. Carr uses “skull cap”—the English word for a yarmulke or kipah but hidden in the dialogue is one telling word: “bris.”26 This is the Eastern European pronunciation of Hebrew. Avram Davidson also titles his story “Goslin Day,”27 after a European Jewish demon that plays on the Yiddish gozlin, or thief. In Bernard Malamud’s famous story of embarrassment about immigrant relatives “Jewbird” refers to traditional Ashkenazi foods: herring, schmaltz, and rye bread.28 George Alec Effinger in “Paradise Lost” includes Yiddish words like “yontif” and “yekl.”29 While the authors were all transmitting their own families’ cultures, this Ashkanormative theme is not lost on reviewers. However, song-writer Paul Levinson explains that “Jack Dann’s anthology . . . rekindled a passion for science fiction (soon as a writer as well as a reader) that would never leave me. And it also deepened my interest in Judaism—my religion—at least a little.”30 Dann does break with the Ashkenazi theme in his second anthology More Wandering Stars. Admittedly, the majority of these authors use Ashkenazi mythological creatures like Phyllis Gotlieb’s golem31 or Yiddish as seen with

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Barry N. Malzberg,32 Harvey Jacobs who uses “schtik” and “chazzerai,”33 and Isaac Bashevis Singer uses the term “yarmulke.”34 Likewise, Mel Gilden references Estonia,35 Isaac Bashevis Singer’s character is from Lubin,36 and Hugh Nissenson discusses Litvaks (Jews from Lithuania).37 There are even more subtle Ashkenazi-American experiences like Malzberg’s reference to American Reform Judaism.38 On the other extreme is Harlan Ellison’s “Mom” with the ghost played by the Ashkenazi stereotype of a smothering Jewish mother—a story that gleefully hurls in so many Yiddishisms that a glossary follows.39 Still, two authors do not. Joe W. Haldmen in “The Mazel Tov Revolution” writes about more universal Jews still wandering, this time the stars.40 Woody Allen’s “The Scrolls” parodies the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, nodding back to the original Middle Eastern texts. This stretches the range of Jewish science fiction, traveling other places than European-influenced America. D.J. Kessler’s anthology contains two novellas: Joe Sampliner’s “Can Androids Be Jewish?” and Sol Weiss’s “Miriam’s World.” Both of these are Ashkenazi-centric. Sampliner sprinkles his work with Yiddish words, like “Oy-vey,” “Shabbes,” and “boychik.”41 Weiss’s main character is “of Russo-Polish descent,” has another character named “Goldberg,” and references “Manivitz wine,” and he includes the Yiddish lullaby “Tum-valalyka.”42 Kessler teases his readers with a future volume, which never came to fruition, that was to include other novellas: “A Time Traveling Kibitzer,” “It’s Food for Thought—a family gathers on a space station at Goldfarb’s Deli,” and “Mitzvah Dome” about a boy and his zayde (grandfather).43 All are Ashkenazi focused. In his introduction to Strange Kaddish, Meth admits the anthology is “an unorthodox ensemble of carefully chosen authors.”44 He also sets the tone in the very first sentence of his introduction with “a bearded, black-hatter” and continues with Yiddish words like “shul” and “landsmen.”45 Clearly, to him and Ricia Mainhardt, Jews are Ashkenazi. There are seven stories in this thin seventy-page anthology. Harlan Ellison’s “Go Toward the Light” is first, and from the start, it is obvious this is an Ashkenormative story by such words as “orthodox,” “frum,” “Chassid,” and “tuchis.”46 Meth’s story, “I, Gezheh,” follows Ellison’s lead by placing an extraterrestrial in a Chassidic community47 and Sid Gevurah in “Last of the Mo Greenbuams” uses numerous Yiddish words, like “meshuginah” and “mensch.”48 Bill Messner-Loebs’s “Homeland”49 is set in Baveria, the heart of Ashkenazi world, The other three stories, Shira Deamon’s “Under Cover of Night,”50 Mike Pascale’s “A L’Chiam with Bru-Hed,”51 and Neil Gaiman’s “In the End,”52 are neutrally Jewish without any cultural references. The sequel, Stranger Kaddish republishes Ellison’s “Mom” with its Yiddish glossary. Bill Messner-Loebs’s

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“Ellen” explores multiple kinds of prejudice as a mute young suburban woman is herded from her home. She fondly recalls being defended by her Yiddish-speaking father who survived the camps. Her adversary, Greta Breen-Keldorf and her lawyer, Lilian Hayes, both have Ashkenazi names. Clifford Lawrence Meth’s “A Passover Carol” mentions veal and kugel alongside the matzah. Walter Cummins’s “Treasure” takes place entirely in Zurich. Likewise, Neil Gaiman’s British story “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” includes the phrase “frummer than frum.”53 While Ilan Stavans’s “The Death of Yankos” takes place in Caracas, the title character’s name is still Ashkenazi, echoing the Mexican-Ashkenazi author. “Kiss of the Spider Yenta” by Mike Pascale of course has Yiddish slang in the title. It stars Bob Derschewitz, who uses yiddishisms like “shmendrik” and various dirty words.54 The stories in Yaacov Peterseil’s book follow the same themes as did the previous anthologies. Stephanie Burgis in “Breath of Clay” and Eliot Fintushel in “A Dybbuk in North Tonawanda” both focus on the Ashkenazi mythological creatures. Yaacov Peterseil’s “Lip Service” is about the Shalom Zachor, “the special ceremony that occurs on the first Friday night after the Jewish newborn boy enters this world”55 that actually is particularly Ashkenazi.56 Miriam Biskin in “My Clone and I” uses Yiddish words like mensch and yarmulkas57 as does Mark Blackman in “The Night of the Leavened Bread” with words like “yontif” and “bissel” and Ashkenazi foods like mandel broit and hamantashen.58 A combination of Yiddish words and Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew words like “Shabbos,” “Godforsaken Drozh,” and “shul” along with a “little hassidic village” define “Medizinmann” by Dan Pearlman.59 Swirsky and Wallace’s People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy was declared “a worthy successor” to Jack Dann’s work by the Jewish Book Council.60 Michael Weingrad points out that “the most common thematic thread in People of the Book, running through almost half the stories, is Jewish faith itself, both as a subject and as a problem. Some stories are antagonistic . . . Others describe, in sometimes sentimental fashion, faith abandoned and then renewed. But most trade in an ironic or indifferent agnosticism.”61 There are culturally neutral stories that have Jewish themes, like Rachel Pollack’s alternative version of the Biblical story of Jacob.62 Further, “Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet” by Israeli-born Lavie Tidhar explores this land’s culture as a girl explains her new life on a kibbutz.63 The inclusion of Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem with Susan” makes one wonder if Weingrad is correct. The religious reference in this story is to Christmas,64 though one could argue it is the cultural Christmas of snow and parties with no Christ overlay. One could argue that Theodora Goss’s “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” is neutral as the only cultural reference is the name of the

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character and that “he’s German,”65 though these could point to a specific German-focused Jewish experience. Michael Blumlein’s “Fidelity: A Primer” appears culturally neutral, until the reader notes that the main character Lydell puts on a yarmulke, the Yiddish term for a kippah or head covering.66 The author has shown their Ashkenazi-centric view of Judaism. ZION’S FICTION Israeli fiction is its own genre. Rachel Harris, Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, defines twenty-first century Israeli literature as transcultural, meaning the many minority cultures in Israel are part of the literature.67 Further, Israel created a distinct new culture upon its founding, as it encouraged new citizens to rename themselves and adopt new practices. No longer is Israeli literature Ashkenormative. Israeli-born author-editor Lavie Tidhar (who has also lived in Britain, South Africa, Laos, and Vanuatu) and British author-editor Rebecca Levene worked together to publish Jews vs. Aliens and Jews vs. Zombies in 2015, anthologies with fewer American contributors than the others. As the editor of the APEX World Book of Science Fiction series, Tidhar understands the value of sharing his unique culture with outsiders. Jews Versus Aliens is the first anthology to have a piece that is specifically Sephardic. In American author Rachel Swirsky’s “The Reluctant Jew,” Joseph is reminded that “your family tree [is Jewish]. All the way back to pre-expulsion Spain.”68 However, Swirsky also used the word “yarmulke.”69 Thus, at best this story is a nod to non-Ashkenazi Jews. In the same collection, “The Farm” by Elana Gomel (Israeli and American) takes place in Russia with Yiddish expressions like Abe gezunt!70 Likewise, “Don’t Blink” by Gon Ben Ari (Israeli) stars a former Jew from New York who worked for the Forward, a formerly Yiddish newspaper. The alien computer he speaks with lists lore from “Maimonides, the Maharal, the Shelah HaKadosh, the Malbim”71 The first of these was a Spanish philosopher who traveled through the Middle East. The others were from Prague and the Pale of Settlement. As such, even an alien computer imagined by an Israeli author defaults to mostly Ashkenazi scholars for its Hebrew lore. At the same time, an epigraph from a fictional Israeli rabbi starts off the story, saluting modern non-Western scholars. Likewise, several works in Jews vs. Zombies are written by Israeli writers, though still with largely Ashkenazi references. “The Scapegoat Factory” by Israeli author Ofir Touche Gafla names a character Yehoshua, emphasizing the cultural mix; another wears a “yarmulke” and speaks with a Yiddish

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accent, demanding, “Vot more do you vont? Not only am I a Jew, but I’m a dead one!”72 He’s clearly an Ashkenazi transplant who’s kept his culture (a telling image as he’s also scapegoated here as a relic of the old ways). “The Friday People” by South African Sarah Lotz offers a Cape Town setting but is otherwise neutral.73 Meanwhile, “Wiseman’s Terror Tales” by Australian-born Anna Tambour is set in the Bronx, with Yiddish “kreplach”74 “zaftig”75 and “matzo balls.”76 Likewise clinging to the Ashkenazi-Israeli image, “Rise” by Israeli Rena Rossner introduces twelve yeshiva students in Safed, Israel. They have Ashkenazi names Yossele, Kalonymous, and Leibel and biblical ones like Yerahmiel, Asher and Bentzion. Clearly Hassidic, they use terms like niggun (wordless tune) and tantz (waltz).77 In the story, they sleep in the graveyard and rouse righteous female scholars from history to come dance with them. These are Donia Reyna, the sister of Rabbi Chaim Vital and their friend Raichele the dreamer (Israeli), Fioretta of Modena (Italian), Hannah Rachel the “Maiden of Ludomir” (Polish), and Doña Gracia, who escaped Spain during the expulsion. Bentzion twirls with the Safed seer “Frances Sarah, a maggid dervish dressed in furs.”78 This celebration of the mystical women of Safed particularly highlights their many nationalities and forms of wisdom. The more exotically located “Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith” by Israeli Shimon Adaf takes place in Morocco, full of place names like Essaouira. Moroccan expressions like “La Yister”79 (the evil inclination) and Moroccan phrases and songs appear, along with “Shma De-Marach Alech!”80 (Aramaic for “The name of your master binds you”). As such, it’s a blend of Middle Eastern traditions. While all these authors emphasize international Judaism, only Adaf’s is strikingly non-European. Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is a completely different experience. American science fiction arrived in Israel as movies in the 1950s. Hebrew University sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda observes that Israeli cultural commissars considered science fiction, originating in American and Western European literature, terribly culturally inauthentic for Israeli authors.81 Only during the mid-1970s did popular science fiction’s translation and marketing in Israel take off. Translated short stories along with reviews and original fiction appeared in the magazine Fantasia 2000 (1978–1984). More Israeli science fiction short stories and novels started arriving with the twenty-first century. These were markedly different from Western literature. Dystopias were common, rooted in modern times and exploring worst case scenarios and thus offering a measure of control.82 Teitelbaum and Lottem remark in their introduction that Israelis prefer the term “speculative literature,” which is a combination of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.83 They prefer the term “Zi-fi: . . . the speculative literature written by citizens and permanent residents of Israel—Jewish, Arab, or

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otherwise, whether living in Israel proper or abroad, writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian or any other language spoken in the Holy Land.”84 Zion’s Fiction has been praised by critics like Jonathan Kirsch, of the Jewish Journal, who believes “Zion’s Fiction shows us . . . a way to solve our problems rather than just hiding from them.”85 Hagay HaCohen, critic for The Tel Aviv Review of Books, however, is sharply critical of the anthology because “with the exception of one minor character in ‘My Crappy Autumn,’ Zion’s Fiction does not feature any Arab characters.”86 This negates Kirsch’s high-minded praise that it offers solutions for peace and empathy. When Israel was founded, the citizens decided to create a new lifestyle, translating or shifting Ashkenazi names into Hebrew. Thus, even recent as it is, Israeli culture and naming patterns are quite distinct. Modern Hebrew offers Israeli slang, while borrowing words from nearby Arabic-speaking countries. As such, even a casual glance reveals a story filled with the Israeli sensibility. In the anthology, Israeli names are everywhere: Yonit, Romi, Shir, Yaniv, Galia, Ossem, Sheli, and Neri among many others. Beyond these are many neutral biblical names like Daniel and David that might be found in any Jewish story. Still, their blending emphasizes how many Jews come from disparate backgrounds. Other hallmarks like popular foods were created by geography and economic pressures as well as the urge to create a new nationality. The places themselves are also distinctive. Beginning with its title, “The Smell of Orange Groves,” Lavie Tidhar’s loving descriptions of Israel are mesmerizing. He begins the story with the character Boris sitting among flat roofs and solar panels, smelling the late-blooming jasmine surrounding Tidhar’s futuristic invention of Central Station near Tel Aviv. Here, Tidhar shares the beauty of the land with outside readers, unsurprising as Tidhar writes many books in English for a foreign readership. His description perfectly blends the real Israel with the science fiction one: He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, the wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. He loved to watch the solar surfers in the early morning, with spread transparent wings gliding on the winds above the Mediterranean. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers; loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, turmeric and cumin dominating; loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.87

The “boxlike apartment blocks in old-style Soviet architecture crowded in with magnificent early-twentieth-century Bauhaus constructions” are now blended with a third style: “Martian-style co-op buildings with drop chutes for

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lifts and small rooms divided and subdivided inside, many without any windows.”88 As such, he roots the story in what is before adding what might be. To Tidhar, Israel is all juxtaposition: “In Menashiya, Jews and Arabs and Filipinos all mingled together, the Muslim women in their long, dark clothes and the children running shrieking in their underwear; Tel Aviv girls in tiny bikinis, sunbathing placidly . . . someone had parked their car and was blaring out beats from the stereo; Somali refugees were cooking a barbecue on the promenade’s grassy area; a dreadlocked white guy was playing a guitar.”89 As such, he eases the story into the future by adding more cultures even while preserving what’s already there. Even as he writes of the land’s beauty, Tidhar considers Israeli immigration, even as he grounds it in the present and ages it too into the future: his very mixed-race character Zhong Weiwei considers the multiculturalism of the population: “Arab or Jew, they needed their immigrants, their foreign workers, their Thai and Filipino and Chinese, Somali and Nigerian. And they needed their buffer, that in-between zone that was Central Station, old South Tel Aviv, a poor place, a vibrant place—most of all, a liminal place.”90 Weiwei’s family’s Jewishness is questioned, but so is the robots’ Jewishness, with the religion needing to adapt to a variety of new cultures. Nava Semel likewise describes the sea and beaches of Tel Aviv, blending love for the land into the story.91 Of course, the predominant issue in Israel is the “situation”—the conflict with the Palestinians. In Mordechai Sasson’s “The Stern-Gerlach Mice,” the lab-bred animals sneak into homes and start killing the humans. The protagonist fights off twenty in his beloved nana’s house on Tisha B’Av, only to face censure on the slaughter. A clear parallel appears to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At last, the beautiful pear tree outside is destroyed, along with many of the historical heritage buildings. “Other than that, all is quiet and peaceful in the new Jerusalem,” it concludes sardonically.92 Meanwhile, Israeli street names appear, along with names Hasson, Orit, Yaffa, and Avrum. The word meshuga is a bit of a surprise as it’s particularly Ashkenazi, now embedded in the blended culture.93 The only Israeli speculative story published in The New Yorker, Gail Hareven’s “The Slows” has a scientist locking up primitive humans for study in a suggestive metaphor for Palestinian separation. Meanwhile the woman of the Slows protests, “Every few years you renege on something. When you forced us into the preserves, you promised us autonomy, and since then, you’ve gradually stolen everything from us.”94 The researcher is unsympathetic, creating a story that, in the best science fiction traditions, asks the tough questions. Israeli culture is also defined by the generations of required military service, against a superior force that’s trying to wipe them out. Keren Landsman

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explores this metaphorically in “Burn Alexandria,” a story about an alien invasion, in which the human race has basically died out, but the war continues. Nir Yaniv’s “The Believers” parodies Israeli fundamentalism as a cruel God directly enforces bible laws. Likewise, Eyal Teler’s “Possibilities” explores the repercussions of being a soldier. Clearly, Israeli science fiction is based in the everyday as well as dystopia. Nitay Peretz’s “My Crappy Autumn” offers names Osher Yehoshua, Mor, Azulay, Orit, Hagit, Doron, Nissim, Mali, and Naphtali Eliahu. The latter’s Hebrew is described as old-fashioned, with odd stresses, translated as “You shall pay me right on the dot for being exceeding kind to you.”95 This story shows off an enormous amount of culture in the food, soccer match, addresses, cars, and expressions. Characters eat sunflower seeds, schnitzel, and tuna pizza and drink Turkish coffee and Tuborg beer. The narrator Ido Menashe visits “the Yemenite’s kiosk in Cordovo Street, near the Lehi Museum.”96 On Shekin Street, corner of Ahad Ha’Am, a donkey shouts “Alte zachen! Old stuff!” in a magical realism moment.97 Bringing in Arabic borrowings, when there’s a car crash, Ahmed, the cart’s owner, sits and cries, “I’ve lost everything . . . Ya Allah!”98 Later the narrator tells Ahmed “In shallah.”99 In the midst of it, Max, a tzaddik (translated as “a saintly person”) starts curing people.100 With all this, the narrator’s slobby life grounds the reader while the messiah, aliens, and a talking donkey all whizz by and are treated with magical realism’s practical blasé. Smaller phrases like “Channel 1 was showing a soccer match, Maccabi Haifa v. Beitar Jerusalem” as well as mentions of the Ministry of the Interior, an Egged Line 552 bus to Ra’anna, the Wars Memorial, and the Levinstein Rehabilitation Center emphasize the Tel Aviv setting.101 Further, the narrator buys a gun, a Jericho Magnum, and thinks, “When it comes to death, only Made in Israel will do.”102 Near the story’s end there’s a Jewish proselytizer with “an Ashkenazi accent,” and the narrator insists he’s Druze, an Israeli minority religious group, to get away, steering into his culture as he subtly rejects the old-world Jew.103 The setting is everything here, as such startling juxtapositions mesh well with the Israeli magical realism tradition. Elana Gomel’s “Death in Jerusalem” is very grounded in land and culture. Deep descriptions of Israel appear as the narrator thinks, “The evening is almost bearable. This is the blessing of hilly Jerusalem as opposed to humid Tel Aviv, where summer heat lies on the land like a rotting corpse.”104 There’s the Hebrew word for mother, “Ima.” A dead body on the street, possibly from a bomb, attests to the precariousness of Israeli life. There’s also discussion of how an Israeli can get a civil marriage ceremony. A more interesting cultural moment is Mor Shalev’s discussion of literature in which Christian literature as the default is dismissed.

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“They Had to Move” by Shimon Adaf offers the names No’am, Tehila, Aviva, Netan’el, Aviel, and Shm’on, along with many minor characters quickly listed: “Alon. Dan. Yogev. Levi. Yarpon. Yekutiel. Zvulun.”105 The “war with Lebanon” is mentioned106 as is school culture, in which “Kids in Yehud were tougher” as they live in single family homes.107 Finally, and fittingly for the end of the collection, this story celebrates Israeli fantasy and magazines. In a striking contrast to the rest of the collection, Savyon Liebrecht strands his Israeli heroine Gila in Poland in “A Good Place for the Night.” This explores her outsider status as no one can understand her Hebrew, and she even sings “Hatikva.” Transplanting the typical Israeli “worst case scenario” story into another country shows how much the distinct genre still stands out. At the same time, even as Gila wonders why everyone expects the Israeli army to do the rescuing, she finds herself considering whether “the Arabs, the former owners,” have taken back her home while as she’s stranded in a foreign land.108 More Zion’s Fiction arrived in 2021. The introduction notes that besides names and other cultural trappings, Israeli SF is distinct for its zeitgeist with the inner war between politics and religion as well as “The Situation” with the Palestinians and Arab neighbors. Stories are more literary and less commercialized, personal and realistic, often in first person. Editor Elana Gomel decides: I’d say that what really distinguishes Israeli SF/F is a particular relation to space and time. Space: the Promised Land/the occupied territories; and time: Israeli/ Jewish history, continuity or rupture. This is very different from the unlimited space and linear time of American SF/F. The chronotope (to use Bakhtin’s term) of Israeli culture is multilayered, paradoxical, and self-enclosed.109

As with the other collection, several stories celebrate the land itself. Gomel’s “The Sea of Salt” takes place at the Dead Sea, described in vivid detail, even as it carries a protagonist to a fantastical Nazi death camp. “The Assassination” by Guy Hasson has the narrator bring science fictional technology to interview Aryeh Shamgar about the assassination of Colonel Tanner at the King David Hotel. The story begins describing how he wears the story of his life on his face: “The fight for freedom, the struggle against the British Mandate, the wars with the Arabs, and the cruel battles against traitors within. I can see four decades on his face: The 1930s all the way through the 60s.”110 Both characters describe their effect on famous moments of Israeli history and politics. It brings in names like Zalman “Tsootsik” (“pipsqueak”) Berg and Elisheva, while filling the story with the smells and sounds of cities like Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

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“Life in a Movie” by Yivsam Azgad has the names Yonathan, Hava, and Yohanan, while extensively celebrating the culture. It paraphrases a lengthy quote by author Yoram Yovell. Description includes “A street corner, Dizengoff and Yirmiyahu. A field of blooming anemones near Be’eri. Some neighborhood in an unidentified locale. The windblown top of a Mediterranean cypress.”111 Rami Shalheveth’s flash fiction, “Dragon Control,” humorously lists all the documentation Israeli customs requires for anyone flying with a dragon, sharing culture if not language. Galit Dahan Carlibach’s “Composting,” narrated by a corpse, illustrates the Israeli concerns with environmentalism and sustainability in the setting of the “ecological-communal community of Shorshon.” Food and culture appear as the story adds, “My little girl Roni is very quietly burning pita bread on the gas stove. Even the cats spit out the schnitzels that I fry.”112 Names include the narrator, Netta Baraban; her husband Avishai Ben-Or; Kotchi; Yiftah Graetz; Mira Goor; Ahava Luria; and the Kadesh Barne’a composting site. Other stories’ names include Silg Goshen, Dr. Daro Oleanz, Mishi, Ayeli Gebil, Shatooli, Younar Kishinev, and Katala in Keren Landsman’s chilling “Schrödinger’s Gorgon,” and Yoel, Orna, Yaron, Rani, Yuli, Avi, and Doron in “Five Four Three Two One” by Hila Benyovits-Hoffman. These are both stories about victims, so the long lists of characters suggest the names of a memorial wall. “Set in Stone” by Yael Furman features museum visitors Tzahi and Esty, in a story of Pimper Monish, who creates living statues in an unspecified setting. “Latte, To Go” by Rotem Baruchin begins by considering the nature of Israeli cities. The narrator explains, “Jerusalem has never been my favorite. She doesn’t have Eilat’s youthful spirit, Kfar Saba’s modesty and shyness, or even Hadera’s quiet melancholy.”113 This is not just a lyrical description, but the central narrative. In fact, the narrator, a City Guardian, is questing to protect his beloved Tel Aviv. Soon, other cities’ spirits come to visit, each with a distinct personality as they squabble about their places. Local and national history are mentioned as the annual Tel Aviv Marathon becomes one of many points of contention for the conservative cities, all set in their ways. Their descriptions continue as a love letter to Israeli places: Over the next few hours, they begin to arrive, one by one. Rehovot, in overalls, her hands dirty with soil, flowers threaded in her hair. Tiberias, with sleeves a tad longer than Bnei Brak and a skirt a tad shorter. Haifa, in jeans, flowers from the world-famous Baha’i Gardens in her hair, and a navy T-shirt. Nahariya, with her nose, lips, and eyebrows pierced, surrounded by a gang of kibbutz and moshav Spirits. Maccabim-Reut, true twins, not like Ramat Gan and Giv’ataim, in IDF officer uniforms, carrying assault rifles. Beersheba, tanned, sunburned hair under a military beret, her face constantly changing from young to very

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old and back. Netanya, a bit intimidating in her leather clothes and gold chains, despite the coquettish beret on her head. Mitzpe Ramon, with her fisherman pants, Source sandals, and sparkling eyes that reflect the stars even in broad daylight. Eilat, dressed as a hotel maid, with long, thick dreadlocks and skinny braids interspersed with corals and dolphin ankle bracelets.114

Tel Aviv is in danger, ever as the narrator goes on a hero quest to learn about the nature of City Guardians and better understand his duties. For this volume, the editors deliberately sought out Arabic stories, though extensive research of published science fiction stories only yielded one— Dafna Feldman’s “Askuni-Askuni.” As the book’s introduction notes, “And yes, though she handles the exigencies of Bedouin culture sensitively and empathically, Feldman is, when all is said and done, an Israeli Jew. But based on the quality of the story, we decided to embrace it.”115 The story features teenage Ṭāher, his father, and uncle Fādi. “They drove fast because they had to get the minibus back to Ismā‘īl by 4 a.m.”116 When Ṭāher discovers his sister, Asmahān Abu Zakut, age eleven, has committed suicide after being raped, he dreams of the Hāmah bird crying “Askuni-Askuni, Askuni-Askuni!” for vengeance each night.117 Place names, prayers, mourning customs, and Arabic expressions are common throughout, plunging readers into the culture, with transliterated Arabic throughout. Characters wear the ḥijāb and keffiyeh and share dates and qahwa mura (bitter coffee). ‘Ayisha al-‘Azāzmah, his sister’s friend, comes to him and says, “Allāh yeraḥmah. Salāmāt rāsak (God have mercy on her—you be healthy).”118 However, Ṭāher believes her older brother Fathi is the rapist. When the need for al-thār (vengeance) boils, Ṭāher seeks out Sheikh Abu Nihād, who insists that Islam denies the superstitions of vengeance, even as both reflect on the politics between the Bedouin clans involved. All this sympathetically depicts Bedouin life, even as Ṭāher struggles with his cultural imperatives. CONCLUSION Regarding science fiction, Mark Newton reminds us that “the genre was— decades ago—dominated by straight white males. Audiences are now comfortable with characters such as Captain Jack Harkness, in Torchwood. . . . Likewise, Black characters and women now feature equally on film posters. . . . We’ve come a long way in representing certain communities, and this may be as much the influence of culture on science fiction as it is the other way around.”119 Although clearly, Jewish sci-fi has not embraced difference. Despite Silver’s assertion that sci-fi “is a representation of the common bonds that exist within the Jewish community,”120 the majority of Jewish science

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fiction is Ashkenazi and ignores the other Jews in the world.121 It is true “that modern science fiction and fantasy has had a Jewish element from its earliest days,”122 but we now need to expand the perception to include a broader understanding of Judaism. “Enough, already. The case is convincing.”123 BIBLIOGRAPHY Adaf, Shimon. “Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith.” In Jews Versus Zombies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 24–41. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. ———. “They Had to Move.” Translated by Emanuel Lottem, In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 281–292. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Asimov, Isaac. “Unto the Fourth Generation.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 50–58. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. ———. “Why Me?” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 1–5. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Azgad, Yimsam. “Life in a Movie.” In More Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 249–254. USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021. Baruchin, Rotem. “Latte, To Go.” In More Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 326–401. USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021. Ben Ari, Gon. “Don’t Blink.” In Jews Versus Aliens, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 73–87. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Biskin, Miriam. “My Clone and I.” In Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil, 99–120. New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999. Blackman, Mark. “The Night of the Leavened Bread.” In Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil, 171–190. New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999. Blumlein, Michael. “Fidelity: A Primer.” In People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, 83–100. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010. Carlibach, Galit Dahan. “Composting.” In More Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 274–282. USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021. Carr, Carol. “Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann. 60–72. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Cohen, Phil M. “Jewish Science Fiction,” Jewish Book Council, September 7, 2020, www​.jewishbookcouncil​.org​/pb​-daily​/jewish​-science​-fiction. Daemon, Shira. “Under Cover of Night.” In Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t Hear from Bubbie, edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, 43–48. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996. Davidson, Avram. “The Golem.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 41–47. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. ———. “Goslin Day.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 75–81. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

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Drew, Joseph S. “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” Contemporary Jewry 3, no. 27 (September 1976). https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​ /BF02965640. Effinger, George Alec. “Paradise Lost.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 152–184. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Ellison, Harlan. “Go Toward the Light.” In Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t Hear from Bubbie, edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, 3–14. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996. Feldman, Dafna. “Askuni-Askuni.” In More Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 316–325. USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021. Fine, Larry. “The Shalom Zachor.” Jewish Magazine, November 2006. http:​//​www​ .jewishmag​.com​/108mag​/shalomzachor​/shalomzachor​.htm. Gafla, Ofir Touche. “The Scapegoat Factory.” In Jews Versus Zombies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 14–23. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Gaiman, Neil. “In the End.” In Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t hear from Bubbie, edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, 67–70. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996. ———. “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock.” In Stranger Kaddish, edited by Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth, 61–89. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1997. ———. “The Problem of Susan.” In People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, 196–202. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010. Gevurah, Sid. “Last of the Mo Greenbaums.” In Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t Hear from Bubbie, edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, 49–58. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996. Gilden, Mel. “A Lamed Wufnik.” In More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 57–68. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Gold, Horace L. “Trouble with Water.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 106–129. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Gomel, Elana. “Death in Jerusalem.” In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 198–216. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. ———. “The Farm.” In Jews Versus Aliens, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 62–72. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Goss, Theodora. “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm.” In People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, 47–56. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010. Gottlieb, Phyllis. “Tauf Aleph.” In More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 5–24. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. HaCohen, Hagay. “An Enemy from Another Dimension: Israeli and Palestinian Science Fiction and Fantasy.” The Tel Aviv Review of Books, Autumn 2019. www​.tarb​.co​.il​/an​-enemy​-from​-another​-dimension​-israeli​-and​-palestinian​-science​ -fiction​-and​-fantasy. Haldeman, Joe W. “The Mazel Tov Revolution.” In More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 99–116. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.

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Newton, Mark. “Science Fiction, Fantasy & Minorities.” Huffpost, October 19, 2011. www​.huffingtonpost​.co​.uk​/mark​-newton​/science​-fiction​-fantasy​-minorities​ _b​_931078​.html. Nissenson, Hugh. “Forcing the End.” In More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 81–88. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. P., Moshe. “Introduction.” In The Stars of David: Jewish Science Fiction, vol. 1, 1–16, edited by D. K. Kessler. Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996. Pascale, Mike. “Kiss of the Spider Yenta.” In Stranger Kaddish, edited by Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth, 59–68. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1997. ———. “A L’Chaim with Bru-Head.” In Strange Kaddish: Tales You Won’t Hear from Bubbie, edited by Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt, 59–66. Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996. Pearlmann, Dan. “Medizinmann.” In Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil, 120–169. New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999. Peterseil, Yaacov. “Lip Service.” In Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil, 77–98. New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999. Peretz, Nitay. “My Crappy Autumn.” Translated by Emanuel Lottem. In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem. 249–280. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Pollack, Rachel. “Burning Bears: The Dreams and Visions of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt.” In People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, 13–26. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010. Review of “People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, ed.” Jewish Book Council, 2021. ww.jewishboo kcouncil.org/book/people-of-the-book-a-decade-of-jewish-science-fiction-fantasy. Rossner, Rena. “Rise.” In Jews Versus Zombies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 6–13. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Sampliner, Joe. “Can Androids Be Jewish.” In The Stars of David Jewish Science Fiction, edited by D. J. Kessler, vol. I, 19–214. Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996. Sasson, Mordechai. “The Stern-Gerlach Mice.” Translated by Emanuel Lottem. In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 157–168. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Semel, Nava. “Hunter of Stars.” Translated by Emanuel Lottem. In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 126–130. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Silver, Steven H., Michael Burstein, and Valerie Estelle Frankel, “People of the (Futuristic) Book.” Jewish Museum of Maryland, March 4, 2021. Silverberg, Robert. “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 84–103. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. “The Last Demon.” In More Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 89–98. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. Swirsky, Rachel. “The Reluctant Jew.” in Jews Versus Aliens, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 45–52. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015.

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Tambour, Anna. “Wiseman’s Terror Tales” in Jews Versus Zombies, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 61–69. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Tenn, William. “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.” In Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann, 7–40. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Teitelbaum, Sheldon and Emanuel Lottem. Introduction to More Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 1–32. USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021. ———. Introduction to Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 1–32. Simsbury, Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Tidhar, Lavie. “Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet.” In People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace, 188–195. Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010. ———. “The Smell of Orange Groves.” In Zion’s Fiction, edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, 33–45. Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018. Tidhar. Lavie, and Rebecca Levene, Introduction to Jews Versus Aliens, edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, 6. Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015. Weinbaum, Batya. “Early U.S. Sci Fi: Post-Nationalist Exploration for Jews in Outer Space?” Studies in American Jewish Literature 24 (2005): 180–201. Weingrad, Michael. “Fiction and Fantasy: Grasping the Special Virtues of Zion’s Fiction.” Mosaic, October 17, 2018. mosaicmagazine.com/observation/a rts-culture/2018/10/the-first-ever-anthology-of-israeli-science-fiction-and-fantasy. Weiss, Sol. “Miriam’s World.” In The Stars of David Jewish Science Fiction, edited by D. J. Kessler, vol. I, 215–411. Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996.

NOTES 1. Additional anthologies like With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction and The Jewish Book of Horror are slightly outside the genre scope here but recommended. 2. Mark Newton, “Science Fiction, Fantasy & Minorities,” Huffpost, October 19, 2011, www​.huffingtonpost​.co​.uk​/mark​-newton​/science​-fiction​-fantasy​-minorities​_b​ _931078​.html. 3. Dario Miccoli, ed., Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature: A Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2017), 1, 3. 4. Papo, 282–283. 5. Naar. 6. E.H. Leelavathi Masilamoni and Leslie Feidler, “The Fiction of Jewish American: An Interview with Leslie Feidler,” Southwest Review, 64, no. 1 (1979): 45. 7. Naar. 8. Batya Weinbaum, “Early U.S. Sci Fi: Post-Nationalist Exploration for Jews in Outer Space?” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 24 (2005): 184–185. 9. Naar.

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10. “Jewish Statistics,” in American Jewish Year Book, ed. Herbert Friedenwald, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909), 192; Joseph M. Papo, “The Sephardim in North America in the Twentieth Century,” in Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History, ed. Martin A. Cohen and Abraham J. Peck (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 270. 11. Weinbaum. 12. Tracy K. Harris, “The State of Ladino Today,” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 44, no. 1 (2011): 52, accessed March 8, 2021, http:​//​www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/41444099. 13. Papo, 271. 14. Steven H. Silver, “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Primer,” Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018, uncannymagazine.com/article/ jewish-science-fiction-and-fantasy-a-primer. 15. Steven H. Silver, Michael Burstein, and Valerie Estelle Frankel, “People of the (Futuristic) Book,” Jewish Museum of Maryland, March 4, 2021. 16. Lavie Tidhar, “Introduction,” in Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene, eds., Jews Versus Aliens (n.p.: Ben Yehuda Press, 2015), 9. 17. Isaac Asimov, “Why Me?” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 2, 3. 18. Asimov, “Why Me?,” 1–2. 19. Moshe P., introduction to The Stars of David: Jewish Science Fiction, vol. 1, ed. D.K. Kessler (Eugene, DLZ Media, 1996), 9. 20. Peterseil, ed., Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids, dedication. 21. Joseph S. Drew, “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” Contemporary Jewry 3, no. 27 (September 1976), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/BF02965640. 22. William Tenn, “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 7. 23. Avram Davidson, “The Golem,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 41. 24. Robert Silverberg, “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 84–103. 25. Isaac Asimov, “Unto the Fourth Generation,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 50; Horace L. Gold, “Trouble with Water,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 106, 116. 26. Carol Carr, “Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 68, 70. 27. Avram Davidson, “Goslin Day,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 75–81. 28. Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 142. 29. George Alec Effinger, “Paradise Lost,” in Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 173, 177. 30. Paul Levinson, “Shout-Out to Jack Dann and Joseph F. Patrouch: from 1974 to Now,” Futurism, 2017, vocal.media/futurism/shout-out-to-jack-dann-and-joseph-f-patrouch.

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31. Phyllis Gottlieb, “Tauf Aleph,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 5–24. 32. Barry N. Malzberg, “Leviticus: In the Ark,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 25–28. 33. Harvey Jacobs, “Dress Rehearsal,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 75–80. 34. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Last Demon,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 89–98. 35. Mel Gilden, “A Lamed Wufnik,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 57–68. 36. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Last Demon,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 89–98. 37. Hugh Nissenson, “Forcing the End,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 81–88. 38. Barry N. Malzberg, “Isaiah,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 69–74. 39. Harland Ellison, “Mom,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 157–168. 40. Joe W. Haldeman, “The Mazel Tov Revolution,” in More Wandering Stars, ed. Jack Dann (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 99–116. 41. Joe Sampliner, “Can Androids Be Jewish,” in The Stars of David, ed. D. J. Kessler (Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996), 34, 35, 52. 42. Sol Weiss, “Miriam’s World,” in The Stars of David, ed. D. J. Kessler (Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996), 220, 229, 318–319. 43. D. J. Kessler, ed. The Stars of David (Eugene: DLZ Media, 1996), 416. 44. Clifford Lawrence Meth, introduction to Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 2. 45. Meth, introduction, 1. 46. Harlan Ellison, “Go Toward the Light,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 3. 47. Clifford Lawrence Meth, “I, Gezheh,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 29–42. 48. Sid Gevurah, “Last of the Mo Greenbaums,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 49–58. 49. Bill Messner-Leobs, “Homeland,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 15–28. 50. Shira Daemon, “Under Cover of Night,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 43–48. 51. Mike Pascale, “A L’Chaim with Bru-Head,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 59–66. 52. Neil Gaiman, “In the End,” in Strange Kaddish, ed. Clifford Lawrence Meth and Ricia Mainhardt (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1996), 67–70. 53. Neil Gaiman, “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock,” in Stranger Kaddish, ed. Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1997), 75.

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54. Mike Pascale, “Kiss of the Spider Yenta,” in Stranger Kaddish, ed. Jim Reeber and Clifford Lawrence Meth (Morristown, NJ: Aardwolf, 1997), 59. 55. Yaacov Peterseil, “Lip Service,” in Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, ed. Yaacov Peterseil (New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999), 80. 56. Larry Fine, “The Shalom Zachor,” Jewish Magazine, November 2006, http:​//​ www​.jewishmag​.com​/108mag​/shalomzachor​/shalomzachor​.htm. 57. Miriam Biskin, “My Clone and I,” in Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, ed. Yaacov Peterseil (New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999), 111, 116. 58. Mark Blackman, “The Night of the Leavened Bread,” in Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil (New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999), 173, 175, 176. 59. Dan Pearlmann, “Medizinmann,” in Jewish Sci-fi Stories for Kids, edited by Yaacov Peterseil (New York: Pitspopany Press, 1999), 130, 131, 134. 60. Review of “People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Rachel Switsky and Sean Wallace, ed.,” Jewish Book Council, 2021, ww.jewishbookcouncil. org/book/people-of-the-book-a-decade-of-jewish-science-fiction-fantasy. 61. Michael Weingrad, “Fiction and Fantasy: Grasping the special virtues of Zion’s Fiction,” Mosaic, October 17, 2018. mosaicmagazine.com/observation/ arts-culture/2018/10/the-first-ever-anthology-of-israeli-science-fiction-and-fantasy. 62. Rachel Pollack, “Burning Bears: The Dreams and Visions of Joseph ben Jacob, Lord Viceroy of Egypt,” in People of the Book, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010), 13–26. 63. Lavie Tidhar, “Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet,” in People of the Book, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010), 188–195. 64. Neil Gaiman, “The Problem of Susan,” in People of the Book, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010), 196–202. 65. Theodora Goss, “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm,” in People of the Book, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010), 48. 66. Michael Blumlein, “Fidelity: A Primer,” in People of the Book, ed. Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2010), 91. 67. Rachel Harris, “Israeli Literature in the 21st Century the Transcultural Generation: An Introduction,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 33, no. 4 (2015): 1–14. 68. Rachel Swirsky, “The Reluctant Jew,” in Jews Versus Aliens, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 45. 69. Swirsky, “The Reluctant Jew,” 45. 70. Elana Gomel “The Farm,” in Jews Versus Aliens, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 67. 71. Gon Ben Ari “Don’t Blink,” in Jews Versus Aliens, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 87. 72. Ofir Touche Gafla, “The Scapegoat Factory” in Jews Versus Zombies, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 19. 73. Sarah Lotz “The Friday People,” in Jews Versus Zombies, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015).

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74. Anna Tambour, “Wiseman’s Terror Tales” in Jews Versus Zombies, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 61. 75. Tambour, 68. 76. Tambour, 64. 77. Rena Rossner “Rise,” in Jews Versus Zombies, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 9. 78. Rossner, 10. 79. Shimon Adaf, “Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith,” in Jews Versus Zombies, ed. Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene (Great Britain: Jurassic London, 2015), 28. 80. Adaf “Like a Coin,” 36. 81. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, introduction to Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 6. 82. Teitelbaum and Lottem, introduction, 10–12. 83. Teitelbaum and Lottem, introduction, 6. 84. Teitelbaum and Lottem, introduction, 1. 85. Jonathan Kirsch, “The Truth Is Out There in Israeli Science Fiction,” Jewish Journal, January 23, 2019, jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/books/292769/ the-truth-is-out-there-in-israeli-science-fiction. 86. HaCohen, “An Enemy from Another Dimension.” 87. Lavie Tidhar, “The Smell of Orange Groves,” in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 34. 88. Tidhar, “Orange Groves,” 34. 89. Tidhar, “Orange Groves,” 44. 90. Tidhar, “Orange Groves,” 35. 91. Nava Semel, “Hunter of Stars,” trans. Emanuel Lottem, in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018). 92. Mordechai Sasson, “The Stern-Gerlach Mice,” trans. Emanuel Lottem, in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 168. 93. Sasson, 162. 94. Gail Hareven, “The Slows,” trans. Yaacov Jeffrey Green, in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 48. 95. Nitay Peretz, “My Crappy Autumn,” trans. Emanuel Lottem, in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 264. 96. Peretz, 265. 97. Peretz, 254. 98. Peretz, 254. 99. Peretz, 266. 100. Peretz, 255. 101. Peretz, 249. 102. Peretz, 256. 103. Peretz, 277.

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104. Elana Gomel, “Death in Jerusalem,” in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 199. 105. Adaf, Simon, “They Had to Move,” trans. Emanuel Lottem, in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 284. 106. Adaf, “They Had to Move,” 282. 107. Adaf, “They Had to Move,” 283. 108. Savyon Liebrecht, “A Good Place for the Night,” in Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, 2018), 181. 109. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem, “Introduction,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 16. 110. Guy Hasson, “The Assassination,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 78. 111. Yivsam Azgad, “Life in a Movie,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 253. 112. Galit Dahan Carlibach, “Composting,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 278. 113. Rotem Baruchin, “Latte, To Go,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 329. 114. Baruchin, 365. 115. Teitelbaum and Lottem, “Introduction,” 13–14 116. Dafna Feldman, “Askuni-Askuni,” in More Zion’s Fiction, ed. Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem (USA: Zion’s Fiction, 2021), 317. 117. Feldman, 319. 118. Feldman, 320. 119. Newton, “Science Fiction, Fantasy & Minorities.” 120. Silver, “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy.” 121. Novels and uncollected magazine stories, predominantly written by Ashkenazi Americans, reflect this trend as well. 122. Silver, “Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy.” 123. Asimov, “Why Me?” 4.

Chapter 15

Writing the Jewish Heroine’s Journey Evonne Marzouk and Patti McCarthy

Many modern and traditional stories have the hero’s journey as their foundation. Less familiar may be the heroine’s journey, a feminine adventure with a different story arc. The heroine’s journey differs from the hero’s journey, reflecting the role of women in modern Western culture and ancient traditional thought. In this chapter, we will explore how hero and heroine stories function in literature, how they interface with character archetypes in traditional Jewish and modern Western stories, and how the blending of each of these can create a story that inspires Jewish women and teen girls to experience themselves as heroines within their own tradition and in the modern world. STORIES OF HEROES AND HEROINES The hero’s journey is a common trope in modern literature. The story tells of a man who starts out in an ordinary world, gathers allies and tools, crosses a threshold into the unknown, sets out toward a goal, has the choice of whether to awaken to his full potential, and succeeds or fails based on this choice. A hero is subject to three main expectations of society: performing, providing and protecting. If he is victorious, he comes home changed or transformed. If he is willing to transform, he finds his authentic self. Because he knows who he is and what he’s striving for, he has the courage to face the villain and is victorious. If he is not willing to transform, he rebels and fails.1 While the hero proves himself to the group; the archetypal heroine needs to discover her own powers and believe in herself. He is told to save and protect, 249

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but if she is saved, she is kept from her journey. Instead, she must go forth and find a way to grow. And so, the heroine also begins in an ordinary world, but her “perfect” world is quickly revealed to be an illusion. Unlike the hero, who has a choice to awaken at the end of his story, the heroine awakens at the beginning when she is betrayed or realizes her power has been diminished or stolen away, usually by someone in authority. After this realization, the heroine makes a life-changing decision and descends into another world. The world of descent can be a beautiful experience, or more times than not, feel life-threatening. Ultimately, the heroine will reach a moment of crisis and face her own death or virtual death. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Estes states, “As long as a woman is forced into believing that she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine gifts and impulses of her psyche continue to be killed off.”2 Old lies, or belief systems that held her back from her path, now are set aside. This is a traditional conflict for the heroine and especially the Jewish woman who is torn between her own desire or inner truth and her duties to her family, religion, and community. Balancing inner life with outer duty is difficult for anyone—even more so for the Jewish prophetess who is asked to mediate not only between self-desire and community, but also be the “voice” and agent of God. She must be courageous and strong, but also carry the added burden of moral righteousness. And this added weight is what often differentiates the Jewish heroine from the Western archetype—her relationship with her God. The non-Jewish heroine often realizes a male authority figure has played her false (in most cases representative of the patriarchy) or is impotent to help her (which forces her to figure things out on her own). In contrast, both prophets and prophetesses in Jewish tradition are called upon to be the classic “voice in the wilderness,” the “light in the dark,” to advise biblical patriarchs who have gone morally astray or need special insight that will save the Jewish people. In Jewish thought, prophets and prophetesses do not undertake an external quest to war and glory but seek the more intimate calling from within. Jung identified the medial woman’s listening “to the tiny voice from within” as a sacrifice. “The ego sacrifices a customary sense of jurisdiction and entitlement, in order to hear this voice. There is a certain relinquishment of everyday rational control.”3 Valerie Estelle Frankel explains in her guide to the heroine’s journey, “Each woman already bears the feminine deep within, and only needs evoke it.”4 VALUING THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE From a young age, most, if not all heroines, are taught by their culture that girls and women are less valuable than boys and men.5 Western culture puts

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less value on traditionally feminine attributes, such as empathy, insight, and vulnerability, and does not see someone with those gifts as “strong.” These types of attributes are frequently portrayed in movies as the kind (feminine) that must be protected by someone with physical strength (masculine). This valuing of the masculine over the feminine is not limited to stories. In real life, women in positions of power are often expected to display masculine gifts and are discouraged from displaying their more sensitive side. Because of this, girls and women may seek out the attention of men and emulate their fathers and distance themselves from the women in their lives, including their mothers.6 In “The Conscious Feminine: Birth of a New Archetype,” Connie Zuweig writes: Because most mother-daughter relationships are sorely lacking in intimacy and/ or independence, we find ourselves longing for the mother who never was— and who never could be. For this reason, as adults, we may want to learn to re-mother ourselves by finding, through a range of options, a means to awaken within ourselves those mothering qualities that we seek from outside.7

The heroine in all women needs to recognize that being feminine is not a weakness but a strength. Accepting this truth constitutes a large part of the heroine’s journey. Finding a balance between both masculine and feminine attributes is key. Some sensitive men struggle with society’s expectations of their strength, and some women are more comfortable with traditionally masculine roles. We can use stories to explore the value in both types of roles, so that we can all maximize the use of our individual strengths. And perhaps, if feminine attributes were valued in our culture, we could resolve some of the crushing dilemmas our society faces today. Becoming a leader with insight into both feminine and masculine attributes can bring the heroine an even greater spiritual awakening. Jewish heroines such as Sarah, Hulda, and Esther embody this divine truth, bringing forth both feminine and masculine attributes as they speak with divine wisdom in moments of crisis and thus claim their authority in the everyday world. Archetypes scholar Victoria Lynn Schmidt explains of the mystic, “The aesthetic need for balance—a sense of order in life, a sense of being connected with something greater than herself—is what drives her. She has a spiritual need to connect or create. She knows she’s not alone on earth and sometimes senses the life forces around her.”8 As the medial figure and leader, the seer saves and nurtures her community by sharing what she’s learned—instead of keeping the new-won knowledge or gifts for herself, as the hero is wont to do. After such a journey, the heroine fully understands the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. “Order, pattern, and meaning became much

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more apparent.”9 “For the heroine, this is not the king’s abstract intellect; it is the nurturing wisdom of the queen, guiding her people through strength, compassion, and love.”10 In the final act of her story, the heroine integrates these “hidden” or forgotten aspects of her self and experiences a rebirth. The heroine finds clarity, reveals a truth, and emerges victorious (spiritually and otherwise), then returns to her ordinary world with new wisdom she shares with others in her community. She may even choose another to go on the journey next. HEROIC FEMININE ARCHETYPES IN GREEK MYTH AND THE JEWISH TRADITION Archetypes, defined by both psychologist Carl Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, are repeating characters in narratives the world over, which find expression in religion, myth, dreams, fantasy and fairytales, and so on. Jung maintained that archetypes—like heroes or heroines, reflect different aspects of the human mind and that our personalities divide themselves into these characters to play out the dramas of our lives, symbolically turning our anger into ogres, our resentment into witches, and our fears into dragons and villains which we can slay with the promise that everything will turn out alright. Theses archetypes can find roles as heroes/heroines or villains depending on the needs of the story.11 Jung argued these archetypes came from a deeper source, however—the collective unconscious of the human race.12 The archetypal form is a “potentiality for experiencing, representing, and reacting to the world” and dwells not only within the individual psyche, but by extension, finds expression in both our history and culture.13 As such, archetypes appear in world mythology and the more specific Jewish tradition. What seems to differentiate “the contribution the Jews made to Western mythology was to present heroes worth emulating for their morality, not merely their strength or courage. Heroes like Moses, David, and Saul were warriors, liberators, and kings, but they carried the added burden of having to adhere to the incredibly complex Mosaic laws of the Old Testament.”14 In ancient Jewish texts, we have men who are patriarchs, kings, scholars, soldiers, rabbis, prophets—and although women’s stories are often less developed, we also have women in a wide variety of roles. Beyond prophetesses, Jewish traditional texts feature a broad range of roles for Jewish women to emulate. Archetypes are not static, but “living, changing” energies that evolve with the collective needs of a culture and people. Not only “traditional” mother archetypes and those “who long to be mothers,” these archetypes include strategic partners, rape victims, singers and dancers, breastfeeding surrogates, legal claimants, good and evil queens, at least one assassin—and

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of course, we have prophetesses. This range of archetypal resources, more deeply explored, can create a range of powerful and feminine roles for Jewish women to experiment with and live out in various combinations. Rabbi Everett Gendler outlines “Ten Feminine Archetypes in the Jewish Bible,” emphasizing how archetypes are universal throughout the world’s foundational tales.15 Some, but not all, of the women who are considered prophetesses in the Jewish tradition have been linked by Rabbi Gendler to traditional Jungian archetypes such as The Maternal, The Jealous Wife, or The Amazon. But these do not address the special attributes of The Prophetess, who is often overlooked in archetypal studies because of her feminine power and disconcerting medial connection with the unknown. This glaring absence reinforces the need to consider The Prophetess archetype in greater detail and begs continued research. Public skepticism, if not outright fear and condemnation, usually provoked by those in power who feel threatened, provide an additional challenge for the seer. In her novel of the Babylonian Talmudic scholars, Enchantress: A Novel of Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Maggie Anton writes, “Legitimate Jewish magic became the province of men—mystics and Kabbalists—while women who maintained the ancient craft were viewed as superstitious at best, and witches at worst.”16 Women have historically been viewed as a threat to men in power—doubly so when they have been gifted by God. Still, like Deborah, every Jewish Biblical heroine must claim her identity as a woman of the community and speak out. Brave heroines who persist, like Hannah and Ruth and Esther (who must also convince their men to follow the path shown to them) provide a strong model here. They are sent to maintain the safety and structure of Jewish society or take action on behalf of their personal beliefs to protect the family and the larger community. As such, they are interceders. PROPHETESSES IN JEWISH TRADITION Jewish tradition names seven prophetesses (Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther).17 As with prophets, there were likely many more whose names we have not heard. These are matriarchs and maidens, growing in wisdom through seeking communion with the divine. These prophetesses, along with other women in Jewish texts, display a wide variety of gifts and talents—both feminine and masculine. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, is described by Jewish tradition as displaying beauty, righteousness, and modesty. According to tradition, she is the only woman spoken to directly by God, whereas the other righteous women are spoken to through an angel.18 She also displays the skill of problem-solving and the ability to make and enforce difficult decisions for the good of her

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child. God himself supports Sarah’s role as prophet when He tells Abraham, “Whatever Sarah tells you, do as she says.”19 Sarah is also both the recipient and conduit of divine miracles and blessings. After many years as a barren woman, Sarah conceives at ninety. When she conceives, the Midrash teaches that “many barren women conceived with her, many deaf became capable of hearing, many blind became capable of sight.”20 According to Jewish tradition, Miriam, sister of Moses, prophesizes before he is born that “My mother is to bear a son who will redeem Israel.”21 When he is thrown into the Nile, she stays to watch for him when he is sent down to the river. This moment, described with the same watching stillness often used to describe God’s actions, suggests protection and guardianship: “The verb [stood] suggests that the divine presence lives in the girl. The Spirit is at work in her, and the divine presence, as the Hebrew notion would have it, already casts its shadow over the future savior of Israel,” explains Christianne Méroz in Three Women of Hope: Miriam, Hannah, Huldah.22 Miriam’s watchfulness is a sign of deep sensitivity. “In order to discern the divine and creative word in the Unseen, Miriam stands at a distance (Ex. 2:4). She not only keeps a physical distance but also makes a kind of inner retreat from events as they unfold before her eyes.”23 After this she is clever enough to ensure that her own mother is hired to nurse the infant child. Famously, she is filled with such faith and gratitude that she leads the women in dance after the parting of the Sea of Reeds and is there named a prophetess (Ex. 15:20). In the desert, Jewish tradition teaches of a well traveling with the people to provide them water in her merit.24 The prophetess Deborah has the military strategy and spiritual insight to defeat Jabin, king of Canaan and the general of his army Sisera.25 While advising the people as an insightful judge, she dwells under the Palm Tree of Deborah to maintain her integrity and avoid inappropriate seclusion with men.26 She also shows gratitude through song. Esther Fuchs explains in “Status and Role of Female Heroines in the Biblical Narrative”: “Deborah is not only a political and strategic leader, but she is also a self-conscious feminist. Aware of the status of women in Hebraic patriarchal society, she warns Barak, son of Avinoam, not to brag of his future military victory.”27 As she puts it in Judges 4:9, “For the Lord will give Sisera over into the hand of a woman.” Hannah, a woman struggling with infertility, prays with such devotion that her prayers are used as the archetype for the perfect Jewish prayer. She enters God’s sanctuary, a path into deeper spirituality and communion with the self. There, she bargains with Him as Abraham once did: “If you will only look on the misery of your servant, give to your servant a male child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life.”28 When God hears and remembers her, she devotes her child to returning righteousness to the

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land. Further, she displays striking agency in the story, as critic Ilse Müllner reveals: “Hannah has authority both to decide her child’s career and to make and fulfill a vow (cf. Num 30:3–16). She chooses the child’s name, decides how she will participate in worship, and presents her son to service in the sanctuary. Hannah’s presence dominates that of the other people in the story; she is a partner in every narrated dialogue.”29 Müllner adds: Hannah’s closeness to God is expressed in her threefold prayer, in which the third part has the form of a song of thanksgiving. Her song sets Hannah alongside the psalmist David (2 Sam 22:2–23:7). Hannah’s and David’s songs of thanksgiving stand at the beginning and end of the books of Samuel and are the only psalms in these narrative books. Hannah’s song probably points to a women’s tradition of songs of victory and thanksgiving on the occasion of a birth.30

The matriarch Abigail uses wisdom and humility to save herself and her entire family from King David when her husband refuses to give him food; David himself thanks her for saving him from making a terrible mistake,31 and the sages say she acted through prophecy.32 Müllner adds, “God sends this woman to make his will known, and in this moment Abigail is God’s prophet. . . . God is against senseless shedding of blood, and it is altogether remarkable that here, in the tradition of the great ones of Israel, a woman proclaims this message and successfully carries out God’s mission.”33 As David’s wife, she is the wisewoman, continuing to counsel him and her sister wives. Hulda, a prophetess in the times of King Josiah, delivers a prophecy of rebuke so effective that the king undertakes a major religious revival in his time.34 She is a prominent Israeli woman, a prophet, judge, and wealthy leader. “Numerous psalms describe Huldah’s righteousness. When she was in her fifties and sixties, she helped to govern the Egyptian exiles as an elder, and she led her people in revolt against Babylon.”35 Esther becomes queen during the Persian exile and displays courage and cleverness to defeat an enemy trying to kill the Jewish people. Though the other young women taken by the king are granted­whatever adornments they wish when they are invited to him, Esther requests nothing.36 She understands that outward adornments are merely a symbol. In fact, Jewish tradition teaches that when the text says she “donned royalty,” it means she was clothed with divine inspiration.37 In addition to these prophetesses, we can see demonstration of feminine gifts such as kindness; curiosity; compassion; shrewdness; morality; strategic use of time, resources and help; insight and intuition; empathy; and intense efforts toward protection of loved ones in Biblical women such as Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Tamar, Serach bat Asher, Yocheved, the daughters of Tzelofchad, Rahav, Yael, the Shunammite woman, and Ruth.38

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For young women discovering their modern heroine’s journeys, all these women offer strong models. Specifically, their faith leads them to protect their communities while their knowledge of God’s law inspires and strengthens them. Even in a heavily patriarchal society, the women speak out, assured by their connection with God that they’re saying what must be said. They use their words to not only protect their communities but to impart God’s teachings: compassion, tradition, courage, and faith. CRAFTING THE JEWISH PROPHETESS: A MODERN HEROINE’S JOURNEY Several writers have called upon The Prophetess archetype and the nine-stage heroine’s journey structure to empower the modern Jewish woman. The novel The Prophetess uses the framework of the heroine’s journey, as well as both modern Western and traditional Jewish feminine archetypes, to create the story of a modern Jewish heroine using characters both based on traditional Western archetypes and grounded in Jewish culture. The heroine’s journey structure can be employed by writers to empower heroism in Jewish women and girls, encouraging them to fulfill their biggest dreams, while enabling them to see themselves as modern characters in the context of Jewish tradition. To illustrate how this archetype functions within the nine-stage heroine’s journey structure, what follows are examples from The Prophetess and other stories that include parallels and allusions to Jewish characters and themes found in Jewish literature and Biblical texts. Act 1: Containment 1.  The Illusion of a Perfect World 2.  The Betrayal or Realization 3.  The Awakening—Preparing for the Journey The Illusion of a Perfect World Heroines begin their journey in a “perfect world” that turns out to be not quite so perfect. In The Prophetess, Rachel, named after the Jewish Biblical heroine and her own grandmother, is a typical Jewish American seventeen-year-old with good grades, a summer job, and a crush on the Catholic boy down the street. Her poetry journal—the first gift mentioned in the story—is perfect because it’s empty.39 Books, a symbol of knowledge, are common gifts for questing heroines and questing Jews, in contrast with the warrior hero’s sword.40 The fact that Rachel’s book is empty suggests she has much to learn, she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with God’s gifts, and/or she feels a

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spiritual void. Moroccan author Ruth Knafo Setton’s story “Suleika and Me” likewise celebrates the power of writing to begin the journey: I cannot explain the urgent desire that led me here to the Jewish cemetery of Fez. A name in a book that suddenly illuminated the page as if it were a medieval manuscript. The letters shone with the promise of mystery, magic, secret. I touched her name on the page the way I used to touch pictures in books as a child, hoping to get sucked into that other world. Already wanting to penetrate every border, open every door.41

Rachel’s perfect world ends when her grandfather dies. Rachel feels his death has broken the chain that connected her back to Abraham. She reports, “Zaide’s death had awakened in me an old, half-forgotten longing.”42 Death is a salient theme in Jewish heroine’s journeys, especially as it relates to a perceived loss of one’s traditions. In Naomi Ragen’s novel, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, Catherine da Costa is dying and fears her grown granddaughters have lost their Sephardic heritage completely. She sends frivolous Francesca and Suzanne to Europe to track down their ancestress Doña Gracia Nasi’s lost autobiography. This may lead to an ancient treasure and with it the Judaism the family so desperately tried to preserve.43 Doña Gracia Nasi, meanwhile, appears as a ghost guiding the women to find what’s been lost. In “Goodbye, Evil Eye,” by Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer (whose parents were from Turkey and Egypt), a similar theme emerges. A character is visited by an angel who instructs him to seek out ancient family graves and consult a seer who shares visions of ghosts and lost songs, which reconnects the family to their Jewish traditions and ancient magic, as well as their lost ancestor, Columbus.44 Many Jewish stories focus on the loss of tradition in the modern world and the need to reconnect to it, but also help female readers reclaim a portion of their heritage from a time when women were Talmudic scholars and worked magic beside men. Ruth Tenzer Feldman’s mentor character, Serakh, spends her young adult trilogy guiding three generations of heroines on time-travel trips to discover feminist power in the past, as with the Daughters of Zelophehad and Serakh’s own adventures in Exodus. Other authors writing about the less-popularized Jewish cultures especially share the traditions of lost Jewish wisewomen. Maggie Anton explains, “Slipped in among the Talmud’s arguments, ignored by most scholars, are numerous tales of demons, curses, and the Evil Eye, and of rabbis and enchantresses who cast spells and inscribed incantations to protect people from them. The few scholars familiar with these passages on magic were embarrassed to admit the great Sages engaged in such nonsense.”45 To counter this sentiment in her books, one of the characters, a mother on her deathbed, tutors her daughters in the most powerful of Jewish magics—even facing the Angel of Death fearlessly.

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Realization Many Jews, ancient and modern, struggle with the connection to an old country they’ve never seen and rituals that fit awkwardly into a secular society. Thus, Jewish characters often quest to reincorporate the lost traditions. In The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, Suzanne thinks, “Rituals and more rituals. Did it really get you anything? . . . Or was it just more useless baggage you dragged around until you had the guts to unload it?”46 Of course, she comes to learn how they can enrich her life. The many rituals Jews have around death make this moment an ideal time for spiritual deepening. Jill Hammer, the author of The Hebrew Priestess, writes: There is a Jewish custom of celebratory pilgrimage, or hillula, on the death anniversary of tzaddikim, holy teachers. A lesser-known holiday, Lag B’Omer, is the yahrzeit of mystic Shimon Bar Yochai; pilgrims from around the world journey to celebrate at his grave. Among Moroccan Jews, pilgrimage has been and remains a primary practice of remembering. All over the world, Jews pilgrimage to the gravesites of rebbes and tzaddikim (holy people) on the anniversaries of their deaths.47

This pilgrimage at the time of a loved one’s death (and both life and death are a journey) allows the heroine to consider what pilgrimage she must now make to support her “new life” as her past life begins to crumble. In Gina B. Nahai’s Iranian novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, the protagonist Roxanna, trapped in the unhappy home of her new husband, learns her mother has committed suicide and is presented with a tear jar that is filled with her mother’s sorrows. Roxanna’s sister warns, “There are ghosts in this house that have been asleep for a long time. One false move, and they will all wake up and haunt you to your grave.”48 No longer able to ignore the miseries of her life, Roxanna goes to the window and flies away—her magic reflecting the freedom she so desperately desires. Awakening/Descent Typically, something earthshattering happens, like a death, that forces the heroine to make a life-changing decision. She can no longer remain complacent. Her decision triggers “a descent into another world,” signaling an “awakening.” The world of descent can feel life-threatening or beautiful—but it presents opportunities for the heroine to be tested and grow. Hero-mythologist Christopher Vogler explains, “Once presented with a Call to Adventure, she can no longer remain indefinitely in the comfort of the Ordinary World.”49 Whether over the rainbow, into the dark forest, back in

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time, or—in the case of The Prophetess—to the land of Israel, the heroine departs to the magical world. In The Prophetess, Rachel’s awakening and preparation begin at the Orthodox synagogue where Zaide attended and where her family has come to observe Yom Kippur. She prays, “Help me grow into my gifts.”50 This is one of the special offerings of the specifically Jewish adventure—peace through the rituals, combined with the welcome of community and a tantalizing hint of God’s acceptance. It is a two-way covenant, of choosing and being chosen. Soon after, Rachel has her first vision and is visited by Yonatan, a holy man who has come to reveal to her the secrets of Jewish prophecy.51 Traditionally, the heroine’s mentor, whether male or female, has already gone through these trials and thus has a maturity and wisdom that can guide the young questor. The Herald’s call signals “the awakening of the self,” as Campbell puts it, an eagerness to cross over into the realm of the spirit.52 The heroine’s test at this stage is to understand the vital nature of her inner call and accept it instead of getting by. As Rachel’s visions become stronger, they being to worry her friends. As Campbell notes: The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unexpected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.53

When Yonatan reveals to Rachel that she is called to be a prophetess, she wants to tell him he’s made a mistake, but she continues learning with him. Her panic here is also traditional. The heroine may decide to reject the call, but fate, one way or another, steps in to force the issue and she ultimately accepts. Here, Yonatan takes on the traditional role as mentor and offers aid where needed. He teaches Rachel meditation, which improves her control over her visions.54 For Rachel, this reflects the fear of leadership and power, followed by a final accepting of its burdens. The other stories described rely on generational magic and thus show the matriarchs of the family inducting the younger heroines into the lost lore. Either path, outside mentorship or inner household, can begin the journey. Act 2: Transformation 1.  The Descent: Passing the Gates of Judgment 2.  The Eye of the Storm 3.  Death—All is Lost

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Descent/Eye of the Storm Rachel must reconnect with her community and begin to make a new set of choices more aligned with her calling, such as observing kosher dietary laws and resisting her own romantic interests in a boy who is not meant for her. This leads to a traditional conflict for the Jewish woman. She is torn between her own desires, the trappings of the nontraditional world, and her duties to her family, religion, and community. Fantasy quests to far-off lands reflect this inner quest, as the magical world represents the unexplored internal one. Rachel of The Prophetess takes both journeys. Outwardly, she travels to Israel a momentous journey to an unknown place reminiscent of Ruth’s or Sarah’s, rooted only in faith and friendship. Like these matriarchs, Rachel discovers a true place of belonging that has always awaited her, along with her religion and community. In Jerusalem, Rachel meets Devorah, the Teacher of the Generation. A male mentor like Yonatan can only bring Rachel so far in reconnecting to her divine within. Devorah is a stronger, more spiritual mentor for the young heroine, unafraid to expose her to a darker reality. This too is more common for the questing female. Heroines’ mentors sometimes are the villainesses themselves, as with the cruel mother-in-law of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith and many folktales. Even the kinder mentors must bring their charges to face the pain of adulthood. Clarissa Pinkola Estés adds: “Because matrilineal lines of initiation—older women teaching younger women certain psychic facts and procedures of the wild feminine—have been fragmented and broken for so many women and over so many years, it is a blessing to have the archeology of the fairytale to learn from.”55 The wise woman archetype bridges between the old generation and the new and keeps the secrets and hidden lore. Many other Jewish stories focus on the need of the heroine to retrace her lineage and knit together the frayed threads of her belief system—in both herself, her community and her God. This “thread” that the wise woman matriarch provides is frequently symbolized by the tallit, or shawl—which functions as a magical talisman. Traditionally seen as a masculine object, in Feldman’s trilogy, starting with The Blue Thread, a tallit is bequeathed to the heroine from many generations of her family’s women beginning with Miriam the prophet, sister to Moses.56 The importance of a legacy, the passing down of tradition, is central, as the heroine relates, “We are cast out, but the blue threads stay with us—hidden for the next generation and the next.”57 These threads, as she adds, “bind us all in righteousness and justice.”58 The tallit acts as a physical embodiment and spiritual thread that connects these women in blood, spirit, and tradition. In The Prophetess, Rachel will later receive this “thread” from Devorah in the form of an afghan made by the matriarch. In “A Case of Dementia,” by

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Kirchheimer, generational magic is likewise invoked before a girl can return to her family roots. Her mother demands the type of exorcism that only the women of their family can perform. The daughter performs the ancient ritual, naming her ancestresses of the maternal line. She thinks, “This is our answer to the Ashkenazim, the evil eye incantation in lieu of chicken soup.”59 In The Prophetess, Rachel continues her journey by being welcomed into the prophetic community among the prophets who live and pray together in Tzfat. As Shabbat is beginning there, Rachel accepts her calling using the biblical prophetic response: “Here I am.”60 This moment, while providing a link to the bible and its prophets, also emphasizes Rachel’s prior knowledge and growing understanding of Jewish teachings. This isn’t a quest to a foreign magical world—it’s a quest to her birthright and sundered aspects of her culture. Like other female characters and prophets, the Jewish questor carries the magic within herself and only needs to perceive it. The “thread” is always already something that she carries within. It reflects another level of the inner journey to the unexplored aspects of the self. After her trip to Israel, Rachel begins to use her gifts to help people in her own life who are faltering, such as a drug-abusing friend and her older sister who is struggling with an eating disorder. Still, Rachel also finds that her unintended mistakes have real consequences for herself and Yonatan. The heroine of Rav Hisda’s Daughter likewise finds that she can save some strangers and loved ones but not always those she’s most desperate to protect. This is the complication of the seer’s journey—the desperate calling to act balanced with the real-life repercussions of doing so. The spiritual world matters but so does the real one. Finding the balance is the key to successful adulthood. Death—All Is Lost As the heroine travels to the depths of her magical, spiritual world, she reaches a point of no return. She faces her own death, or at least a near-death experience. In The Prophetess, Rachel loses connection with the other prophets and is unable to meditate. This pause in the quest, a moment of retreat from expectations, is also traditional for the heroine. “Women and artists know instinctively that there are times in life where we must be unreachable, times when we must insist that those around us, especially those nearest and dearest, remain at a distance if anything significant is to develop inside us,” explains critic Joan Gould.61 Frankel adds, “This is the place to learn and grow, to encounter the deepest self and integrate it into one’s consciousness. This fearful withdrawal is its own initiation, though it comes with a price.”62 This is why the heroine of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith flies away, to discover who she is without the needs of her family. This can be a moment

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of doubt but also discovery. Rachel indeed wonders if she has lost her gifts, but in a vision, she is called back to Jerusalem with a traditional formulation reminiscent of Abraham: “L’chi Lach L’yerushalayim.”63 The voice in the vision says, “Come . . . before it’s too late.”64 For the prophetess, the call to adventure can be much more literal than for other archetypes, a summoning that’s more personal and urgent because it emerges from one’s innermost being. Often the biblical prophets, especially Miriam, Deborah and Esther, understand that lives rest on their decision and they cannot delay—they have been placed where they are to intercede and make a difference. When Rachel arrives in Israel, she falls ill and experiences overwhelming visions. This moment shows her overwhelmed and submerged by her own gifts, as she and the other prophets wonder if she can pass the test and become a large enough vessel for the divine gifts she is being given. Rachel says, “I can’t help . . . I’m not—I can’t.” Her companion prophetess Tirtza reassures her: “You can. We all know you can.” Tirtza’s support, representing the community’s, help bolster the heroine for the task ahead. In a vision, Rachel is called upon to save a life—and at a key moment, is successful.65 Saving innocents is the quest for many biblical women like Abigail, Esther, and Miriam. It also reflects saving the most vulnerable part of the self and integrating it into consciousness. Estés writes: “This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself. The one who re-creates from that which has died is always a double-sided archetype. The Creation Mother is always the Death Mother and vice versa.”66 In Rav Hisda’s Daughter, the heroine apprentices until she is able to banish demons in the name of the Almighty and discovers the power of cursing and love spells—wielding both life and death. In The Prophetess, as an expression of this creatrix/devourer duality, after Rachel has Rachel triumphantly saved a life, she is devastated to learn that Devorah, the leader of all the prophets, is dying. Rachel has discovered that she and Devorah, as her spiritual mother, share a deep connection; Rachel can feel Devorah’s pain and her life ebbing away. She wonders, “What would happen to me when she dies?” ACT 3: EMERGENCE Act 3: Emergence 1.  Support 2.  Rebirth—The Moment of Truth 3.  Full Circle—Return to the Perfect World

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Support Here, the Jewish community becomes essential, as the other prophets support and help her.67 She takes heart within the circle of her faith. In Feldman’s series, mentor and heroine Serakh (Serah), based on the Biblical figure, likewise confronts death and finds solace in her community. According to the midrash referenced in the novel, she is subsequently blessed by Jacob who tells her that because she revived Jacob’s spirit, she will live forever. Her connection with death, as she oversees each generation’s passing, makes her a revered advisor. Setton’s “Suleika and Me” likewise describes how Moroccan women beseech the famous martyr Suleika to intervene with them: Arab women bring couscous and hamsas to her tomb. “Meanwhile the Jewish women light a candle and place it in one of the niches in the white dome over her tomb. The niches are filled with remnants of white candles, burned prayers. The women chant, pray, sing, cry, beg her to hear their voices.68 Again, this reinforces the heroine’s role as mediatrix, both giver and taker of life, womb and tomb. Rebirth/Full Circle Having worked through the darkness and connected to the light of divinity on the other side, the heroine can transcend her humanity and reassociate herself with the powers of Nature, her God, and the buried feminine within. She is fully reborn, stronger than ever before. Bolstered by her ordeal, Rachel returns home in The Prophetess, makes peace with her family and loved ones, and graduates from high school, reflecting on how far she’s come. She learns to wield and love all the parts of herself: the frightening prophecy, the power to effect change, and the bond with loved ones. The heroines of the other stories likewise take their places as matriarchs and protectors of their communities. The multigenerational heroines of Feldman’s series confront unsavory history and find power through acknowledging it and fighting for a better future. In Seven Stitches, the mixed-race heroine Meryem explores slavery in sixteenth-century Istanbul, while Miriam of The Blue Thread defies her family’s conformity to campaign for suffrage. The family of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith likewise integrates the painful aspects of their legacy, including the tear jar, to find peace at last. The Ghost of Hannah Mendes teaches its questors the tortures of the Inquisition to show them the way forward. The darkness of Jewish history often makes the responsibility of memory a path to enlightenment. By the end of The Prophetess, Rachel, like the other Jewish heroines mentioned throughout, is armed with truth, clarity of vision, a connection to the

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divine, and a deep and abiding love of self and others. All stand ready to share their newfound and hard-won rewards with others in the Jewish community who are willing to listen or who know where to look—within. Conclusion The field of Jewish literature, and especially young adult literature, would be enhanced by more complex use of Jewish feminine archetypes and the heroine’s story. The Prophetess archetype in particular confronts the darkness within and incorporates it bravely into the self. This kind of writing can help young women find their place in the Jewish story throughout history and today. Demetra George notes in Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess that losing this type of storytelling has diminished young women’s ability to cope with the world: Today we are afraid of many of the dark moon teachings, such as alchemy, astrology, and other spiritual or psychological disciplines, which reveal information about the unconscious or subtle dimensions of being. . . . Yet it is these teachings, based on the timing of cyclical patterns, that give us the guidance that enables us to pass through the dark nonphysical dimensions of being—of death and rebirth, endings and new beginnings, or spontaneous healings—with clarity and confidence instead of panic and terror.69

Hopefully, this discussion can provide a model to be used by other writers seeking to develop meaningful and inspiring Jewish literature, especially for our teens. BIBLIOGRAPHY Anton, Maggie. Enchantress. New York: Penguin, 2014. ———. Rav Hisda’s Daughter. New York: Penguin, 2012. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Collins, Jan Clanton. “The Shaman.” In Mirrors of the Self: Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life, edited by Christine Downing, 241–243. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Feldman, Ruth Tenzer. The Blue Thread. Portland, OR: Ooligan Press, 2012. ———. Seven Stitches. Portland, OR: Ooligan Press, 2016. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. Chosen One: The Heroine’s Journey of Katniss, Elsa, Tris, Bella, and Rey. USA: Smashwords, 2016.

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———. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Fuchs, Esther. “Status and Role of Female Heroines in the Biblical Narrative.” In Women in the Hebrew Bible, edited by Alice Bach, 77–84. New York: Routledge, 1999. Gendler, Rabbi Everett. “Ten Feminine Archetypes in the Jewish Bible.” The Gendler Grapevine Project, 1980. www​.gendlergrapevine​.org​/articles​-teachings. George, Demetra. Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Gould, Joan. Spinning Straw into Gold. New York: Random House, 2005. Hammer, Jill. The Hebrew Priestess. Teaneck, NJ: Ben Yehuda Press, 2015. Hasidah, Yisrael Yitshak, and Yishai Chasidah. Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 1994. Jung, C.G. Four Archetypes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Kavanagh, Preston. Huldah: The Prophet who Wrote Hebrew Scripture. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012. Kirchheimer, Gloria DeVidas. “A Case of Dementia.” In With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, edited by Daniel M. Jaffe, 67–75. San Francisco: Invisible Cities Press, 2001. ———. “Goodbye, Evil Eye” In Goodbye, Evil Eye: Stories. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000. Knowles, Christopher. Our Heroes Wear Spandex. San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2007. Marzouk, Evonne. The Prophetess. USA: Bancroft Press, 2019. McCarthy, Patti. “The Heroine’s Journey: Claire Beauchamp Reclaims the Feminine.” In Adoring Outlander: Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience, edited by Valerie Estelle Frankel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. ———. “Jack Frost and the Heroine’s Journey: Genderbending Back to the Goddess in Rise of the Guardians.” In Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Valerie Estelle Frankel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. Méroz, Christianne. Three Women of Hope: Miriam, Hannah, Huldah, translated by Dennis Wienk. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014. Molton, Mary Dian and Lucy Anne Sikes. Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited: A Study in Opposites. USA: Fisher King Press, 2011. Müllner, Ilse. “Books of Samuel: Women at the Center of Israel’s History.” In Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, edited by Luise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker, 140–158. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012. Nahai, Gina B. Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1999. Ragen, Naomi. The Ghost of Hannah Mendes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Saul, Laya. Sisterhood of the Copper Mirrors. USA: Kadima Press, 2019. Schmidt, Victoria Lynn. 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001. Setton, Ruth Knafo. “Suleika and Me.” Lilith Magazine, December 14, 1997. lilith.org/articles/suleika-and-me.

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Ulanov, Ann Bedford. The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. USA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998. Young, Willow. “Drawn by the Feminine Divine.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 10, no. 33 (2016), 83–90. dx.doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2016.1191115. Zuweig, Connie. “The Conscious Feminine: Birth of a New Archetype.” In Mirrors of the Self: Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life, edited by Christine Downing, 183–191. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

NOTES 1. Victoria Lynn Schmidt, 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters (New York: Writer’s Digest Books, 2001). 2. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 50. 3. Mary Dian Molton and Lucy Anne Sikes. Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited: A Study in Opposites (USA: Fisher King Press, 2011), 227. 4. Valerie Estelle Frankel, From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 46. 5. Patti McCarthy, “Jack Frost and the Heroine’s Journey: Genderbending Back to the Goddess in Rise of the Guardians,” in Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Valerie Estelle Frankel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019), 150. 6. Patti McCarthy, “The Heroine’s Journey: Claire Beauchamp Reclaims the Feminine,” in Adoring Outlander: Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience, ed. Valerie Frankel (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 183. 7. Connie Zuweig, “The Conscious Feminine: Birth of a New Archetype,” in Mirrors of the Self: Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life, ed. Christine Downing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 189. 8. Schmidt, 72. 9. Jan Clanton Collins, “The Shaman,” in Mirrors of the Self: Archetypal Images That Shape Your Life, ed. Christine Downing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 243. 10. Frankel, From Girl to Goddess, 146. 11. An example of these archetypes outlined by Schmidt in her book 45 Characters include Female Heroes and Villains: 1) Aphrodite: The seductive muse/femme fatale; 2) Artemis: The Amazon/Gordon; 3) Athena: The Father’s Daughter/Backstabber; 4) Demeter: The Nurturer/Overcontrolling Mother; 5) Hera: The Matriarch/Scorned Woman; 6) Hestia: The Mystic/Betrayer; 7) Isis: The Female Messiah/Destroyer; 8) Persephone: The Maiden/Troubled Teen. 12. C.G. Jung, Four Archetypes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 13. Ann Bedford Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 14. Christopher Knowles, Our Heroes Wear Spandex (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2007), 28.

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15. Gendler, “Ten Feminine Archetypes,” 77–79. He sees the archetypes as The Maternal (both nourishing/devouring) Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Leah; The Mater Dolorosa (the grieving mother) Rachel; The Jealous Wife, Leah, Rachel, Peninah, Hannah; The Hetaera (sexual partner) Rahab; The Desirable Beloved (described in Song of Songs; The Wise, Self-Sufficient Woman Helpful to Men, Woman of Valor in Proverbs; The Independent Widow or Divorced Woman, Tamar; The Amazon, Deborah, Yael; Artemis, sister of Apollo, Miriam; The Priestess/Virgin, Miriam, Huldah, Jephtha’s daughter. 16. Anton, Maggie. Enchantress (New York: Penguin, 2014), 370. 17. Christianne Méroz, Three Women of Hope: Miriam, Hannah, Huldah, trans. Dennis Wienk (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 1. 18. Lekach Tov, Bereshit 23:1, as cited in Yisrael Yitshak Hasidah and Yishai Chasidah. Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah, 1994), 522. 19. Gen. 21:12. 20. Bereishit Rabbah 53:8, as cited in the Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities, 525. 21. Megilah 14a, as cited in the Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities, 338. 22. Méroz, 10. 23. Méroz, 10. 24. Ta’anis 9a, as cited in the Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities, 338. 25. Jud. 4:2–5:31. 26. Yalkut Shimoni Shoftim 42, as cited in the Encyclopedia of Biblical Personalities, 128. 27. Esther Fuchs, “Status and Role of Female Heroines in the Biblical Narrative,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible, ed. Alice Bach (New York: Routledge, 1999), 82. 28. 1 Sam 1:11. 29. Ilse Müllner, “Books of Samuel: Women at the Center of Israel’s History,” in Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, ed. Luise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 142. 30. Müllner, 142. 31. I Samuel 25:2–42. 32. Seder Olam Rattner 21. 33. Müllner, 147. 34. II Kings 22:14–23:14. 35. Preston Kavanagh, Huldah: The Prophet Who Wrote Hebrew Scripture (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 27. 36. Esther 2:15. 37. Megillah 14b. 38. Laya Saul in her book Sisterhood of the Copper Mirrors describes some of these heroines in detail and suggests how Jewish women may be inspired by feminine Jewish archetypes and attributes. 39. Evonne Marzouk, The Prophetess (USA: Bancroft Press, 2019), 5. 40. Valerie Estelle Frankel, Chosen One: The Heroine’s Journey of Katniss, Elsa, Tris, Bella, and Rey (USA: Smashwords, 2016).

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41. Ruth Knafo Setton, “Suleika and Me,” Lilith Magazine, December 14, 1997, lilith.org/articles/suleika-and-me. 42. Marzouk, 20 43. Naomi Ragen, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). 44. Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, “Goodbye, Evil Eye,” in Goodbye, Evil Eye: Stories (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000). 45. Maggie Anton, Rav Hisda’s Daughter (New York: Penguin, 2012), 369. 46. Ragen, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, 261. 47. Jill Hammer, The Hebrew Priestess (Teaneck, NJ: Ben Yehuda Press, 2015), 183. 48. Gina B. Nahai, Moonlight in the Avenue of Faith (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1999), 141. 49. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (USA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1998), 15. 50. Marzouk, 25. 51. Marzouk, 29. 52. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 51. 53. Campbell, 8. 54. Marzouk, 92. 55. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 264. 56. Ruth Tenzer Feldman, Seven Stitches (Portland, OR: Ooligan Press, 2016), 161. 57. Ruth Tenzer Feldman, The Blue Thread (Portland, OR: Ooligan Press, 2012), 113. 58. Ruth Tenzer Feldman, Seven Stitches, 161. 59. Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer, “A Case of Dementia,” in With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, ed. Daniel M. Jaffe (San Francisco: Invisible Cities Press, 2001), 73. 60. Marzouk, 120. 61. Joan Gould, Spinning Straw into Gold (New York: Random House, 2005), 98. 62. Frankel, Chosen One. 63. Go forth to Jerusalem, a feminine variant of the instruction to Abraham in Genesis 12:1. 64. Marzouk, 239. 65. Marzouk, 259. 66. Estés, 33. 67. Marzouk, 274. 68. Setton, “Suleika and Me.” 69. Demetra George, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 51–52.

Chapter 16

Teaching Jewish Speculative Fiction Judy Klass

I was teaching at Vanderbilt University, but not enough to be a full-time employee: not enough to receive health insurance. Some courses were for the Jewish Studies program (which has recently become a department). I have no insights into the Talmud or Maimonides. I taught fun, accessible pop culture courses: “gateway drug” Jewish Studies courses, like Jewish Humor. I lured people into the program by teaching about Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Larry David. The chair mentioned a new course, and, whatever it was, I was determined that I could make it work! “Is there enough ‘there,’” she asked, “for a course on Jewish Science Fiction? Is there anybody besides Isaac Asimov?” I answered with rhetorical bombast, my mind racing: “Is there anybody besides Asimov! Why, there’s . . .” I rattled off some names. I thought of more later. But the real breakthrough came when I contacted my Uncle Phil. My father’s brother, Phil Klass, was a Golden Age of Science Fiction writer: Asimov’s contemporary. Phil and Ike Asimov were in the Army together during World War II—in a special unit for smart young men who’d scored highest on a test. (Later, the Army grew wary of that unit, which seemed a little too smart, and broke it up—leading to a high casualty rate among the brilliant young men, added to other units that had gone through training together and gelled.) Phil wrote science fiction under the pen name William Tenn: not to hide his Jewishness. He thought, if he wrote more “literary” fiction one day, he’d use his real name for those works, without being viewed as a pulp genre writer. Phil taught English at State College in Pennsylvania. He was brilliant, with encyclopedic knowledge on many subjects—and he knew the science fiction 269

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community. He’d watched it form in the 1940s and 1950s, saw it change, and had thoughts about magazine editors, fans, writers and their work. When I called, he was glad to help. I don’t know that I could have built the course without him. It certainly would not have been as good. Phil spoke of how the Holocaust affected writers who were barely aware, previously, of their Jewishness. He had the inside “scoop” on people, and tipped me off about works that might be especially resonant in the course I was designing. I write SF myself, with one story published in Asimov’s Magazine. I grew up in an SF-friendly household, aware of the genre’s great themes: the amazing voyage, time travel, utopias and dystopias . . . and themes first explored in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. I’d taught a general science fiction course at a different institution, and, in addition to discussing Jewish “themes,” I wanted students to understand the genre. As in most of my Jewish Studies courses (Jewish Humor, Jewish Songwriters, Jews and Hollywood) I focused on the twentieth century: showing how events like the Holocaust, the McCarthy Era, 1960s experimenting and 1970s feminism impacted Jews, in particular. I read up, discovering some wonderful texts on my own. A few writers from the late 1800s and 2000s are in the mix—and some writers from the UK, Canada, Eastern Europe and South America. I decided to “cheat,” though the course is called Jewish Science Fiction. I let “SF” refer to speculative fiction—to fantasy, horror, slipstream and magical realism, as well as science fiction. I include works like Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I wanted to call the course Aliens and Alienation, but that sounded, to some, too downbeat and unappealing for a “pop culture” course. It’s called “Imagining the Alien.” But I tell students it’s about aliens and alienation—and Kafka explores those themes pretty intensely. I argue that even irreligious Jews may feel like aliens or the Other in mainstream society; this allows them to envision how very different beings might see the world. They may feel part of society, yet also outside of it, with unusual perspectives: seeing society’s faults and potential with greater clarity. Some works I’ll discuss here can be bought as hard copy books or ebooks. Some are out of print. With a few exceptions, I won’t get into recommendations about what students should buy, what faculty should lend/put on reserve, what should be required and what is optional, what constitutes fair use, what can be referenced, with a few paragraphs read aloud in class, and what makes a good term paper book. I’ll simply mention texts that work well in a Jewish SF class—and discuss works with complementary themes. But if anyone wants to talk to me about compiling/editing a Jewish SF reader for college students, full of stories and excerpts, I’m open for business. In terms of the amazing voyage theme, the 1934 story “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum, who died tragically young, the next year, gives a sense of the promise of pulp magazines before the Golden Age.1

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The characters travel to Mars—and a character named Jarvis meets a series of interesting, truly alien aliens. Especially memorable is Tweel: intelligent, simpatico, but very different from humans. Their efforts to communicate are fascinating. Early in the term, I talk about comic books. There are lots of Jewish SF writers, but Jews didn’t dominate the field during the twentieth century as they did in other subjects I teach. In the Jewish Humor course, I note that while Jews were usually around 2 percent of the population, over 70 percent of comedians were Jewish throughout the twentieth century. When I teach Jews and Hollywood, I use Neal Gabler’s book How the Jews Invented Hollywood—and he makes a good case. Or, when I teach Jewish Songwriters. One can argue that the Broadway musical (and with it the “Great American Songbook”) was almost exclusively developed by Jews, with an occasional person like Cole Porter in the mix. Jews had no such hold over SF—but with comic books, the role of Jewish creators is striking. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster gave us Superman. Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn) gave us Batman. Gil Kane gave us Green Lantern. Students nowadays know the Marvel universe far better than the DC universe, but there’s also plenty to talk about in terms of Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg), Joe Simon (born Hymie Simon), etc. One can mention Will Eisner, and Jules Feiffer who wrote about earlier artists. Obviously, superhero comic books and speculative fiction are related. I bring a big replica of the first edition of Action Comics to class and pass it around. All the superheroes who have “secret identities” resonate with how many of their creators changed their own names to sound less Jewish. We talk about nerds and wish-fulfillment hero fantasies. Early on, we read the first 150 pages or so of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which fictionalizes the start of comics and struggles of Jewish creators.2 It’s fun, there are Kafka references, it involves World War II—plus it’s speculative, as there’s a golem in it. Some students finish the book on their own, for their term papers. Speaking of golems, my Uncle Phil referred to Mary Shelley as the Mother of Science Fiction. Her 1818 novel Frankenstein expressed anxieties about the Industrial Revolution. With the scientific method, advances came rapidly: new industries, new medical procedures and new technologies. Fears about turbo-charged progress, and people realizing how to do things—before considering whether, for ethical/practical reasons, they should do those things— are still with us, and a lot of science fiction springs from them. Shelley sees the issue in more religious terms than most modern SF writers (since modern SF writers, Jewish and Gentile, tend to be secular) and the full title of her book is Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein is, of course, the name of the doctor, not the being he brings to life. (One can emphasize

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this to students but many keep referring to the “monster” as Frankenstein, anyhow) As Prometheus offended the Greek gods by bringing fire to man— the author suggests that her doctor offends God by playing God: taking upon himself the ability to bestow life. Shelley famously wrote the book at age 19 while vacationing with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron and others, by the shores of Lake Geneva during a cold, rainy summer. They passed time with a contest: each writing a ghost story. Talk of whether it dead matter could be re-animated certainly fueled the novel Mary Shelley wrote. But did Lord Byron tell her stories of golems in Jewish culture? Huge, lumbering beings created by rabbis? There is evidence to suggest perhaps he did. If so, the Mother of Science Fiction drew on Jewish folklore to write her seminal work. In Jewish culture, rabbis who create golems are not seen as transgressing/ usurping the role of God. They are wise, holy men who have been granted this special power.3 But modern retellings of “the Golem” story sometimes incorporate issues/ideas discussed in other works of SF, including Frankenstein. A story by the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz called “The Golem” is only a few paragraphs long—it can be read aloud in class. It talks about the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, creating a golem out of clay to fight the enemies of Jews in the ghetto there. (The Maharal is a real historical figure, and the creation of a golem is often ascribed to him.) The story says the golem is concealed in the Prague synagogue to this day (in real life, they’ve searched the Old New Shul in Prague pretty thoroughly—there’s no golem up there!) but Peretz writes that no one alive knows the name to whisper into the ear of the golem to give it life again to defend the Jews. At the end of this 1893 story, written as the Jews of Europe faced great persecution, Peretz urges the reader: “Do something—if you can!”4 Peretz also mentions, in this very short story, how a grandson of the Maharal deliberates over “whether it is proper to include such a golem in a minyan or in a company for the saying of grace.”5 This detail resonates with another important theme of science fiction: what is a human being? What qualities make us people? If an artificial being is designed by humans—can that being ever be considered human also? How about other kinds of AI? How about intelligent aliens, like Tweel in Weinbaum’s story—should they be treated with the respect accorded to human beings? Who gets to decide? After Peretz, other writers emigrated and brought the golem lore with them. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Europe, came to the US and wrote mostly in Yiddish about the shtetl world of his childhood—obliterated during the Holocaust. Perhaps his most famous story is “Yentl.” As he transmitted stories of the old world to Jews of modern America, he wrote a children’s book called The Golem, illustrated with wood cuts, published in 1982.6 It’s out of print. It’s not famous, but it’s a good way “in” to the golem story.

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Fairly long, it’s not just for kids; there are sophisticated ideas that college students can find valuable. Singer also sets his story in Prague centuries earlier but (perhaps for variety?) he calls his golem-maker Rabbi Leib, not Rabbi Loew. The book explains how the blood libel worked—when Jews would be accused, and often tortured and killed in Europe, on the false charge of killing Christians (often children) to use their blood to make matzah. It depicts the tenuous existence of the Jewish community of Prague within their ghetto, barely tolerated by Christian neighbors. As with most golem stories, it shows things getting chaotic: the rabbi unsure how to control the powerful man of clay he’s created. This fictional rabbi, though well-intentioned, causes the golem to grow less obedient by asking it to perform a task not directly related to protecting the Jewish community. And the book presents the golem as a person, or a being with dignity, in his own right. This relates to another science fiction theme coming down to us from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the protagonist as lab rat. In the novel, Frankenstein’s monster doesn’t lumber around like Boris Karloff and grunt, or say things like “Fire bad!” He’s quite articulate: a co-equal protagonist with Victor Frankenstein. He narrates what he’s done since his creator fled, horrified by the sight of him, describes his interactions with people, and essentially asks Victor Frankenstein: “Mommy, why did you abandon me?” (The Mel Brooks/Gene Wilder movie Young Frankenstein is worth including in the course, and it explores similar themes.) In Singer’s book, the huge golem insists on joining a cheder for children learning to read. He tries different ways of fitting into the community. Once, when Rabbi Leib sat in his study reading a book, the golem entered. Until then, the golem had always barged in with noise and tumult. This time, he opened the door quietly and came in with quiet steps. Rabbi Leib lifted his eyes from the book. “Joseph, what do you want?” he asked. The golem did not answer immediately. He seemed to hesitate for a minute, and then he asked, “Who Golem?” Rabbi Leib looked at him in bafflement. “You are Joseph the golem.” “Golem old?” “Not old.” “Golem Bar Mitzvah?” Rabbi Leib could not believe his own ears. Where did the golem learn about such things? “No, Joseph.” “Golem want Bar Mitzvah.” “You still have a lot of time.” The golem kept silence. Then he asked, “Who golem father?” “The father of all of us is in heaven,” Rabbi Leib answered.

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“Who golem mother?” “You have no mother.” “Golem brother, sister?” “No, Joseph.” The golem winced. Suddenly he let out a harrowing cry. Rabbi Leib trembled. “Why do you cry, Joseph?” “Golem alone.” A great feeling of compassion took hold of Rabbi Leib. “Don’t cry. You have helped the Jews, you have saved the whole community. Everybody is your friend.” The golem seemed to ponder these words. “Golem no want be golem,” he cried out. “What do you want to be?” “Golem want father, mother. Everybody run from golem.” “I will let it be known in the synagogue on the Sabbath, before reading from the Torah, that no one should ever run from you. Now bend your head.” “No!” Rabbi Leib bit his lips. “Joseph, you were not created like everybody. You have done your task, and now it is time for you to sleep. Bend your head, and I will put you to rest.” “Golem no want rest.” “What do you want?” “Golem no want be golem,” the golem cried out in a wailing voice.7

The book doesn’t suggest, as the novel Frankenstein does, that the creator of this new being has shown hubris and tried to usurp God’s role—but it does suggest the rabbi has done an ethically problematic thing by creating this lab rat protagonist with no place in the world, even if the golem does express himself more like a Boris Karloff Frankenstein’s monster than like Mary Shelley’s monster. (Students might also comment that the golem expresses himself like The Hulk—and The Hulk and The Thing are two Marvel heroes that seem like direct descendants of the golems of Jewish myth. Christopher Knowles in Our Heroes Wear Spandex identifies these two as well as Batman as reimagined golems protecting their community.8 Indeed, many superheroes are, arguably golems—doggedly defending the innocent, often at the expense of their personal lives. Superman—strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men—can be seen as a golem. And of course, Ma and Pa Kent find baby Kal El in the rocket ship from Krypton much as Pharaoh’s daughter finds baby Moses in the bulrushes, and raises him as her own.) The theme of the protagonist as lab rat is also crucial to the famous story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. Students may have read the short story or the novel version in high school. This story of a mentally challenged

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man who desperately wants to be smart may not be obviously Jewish—the only Jewish reference happens when a busboy breaks crockery in a restaurant and a patron jeeringly shouts “Mazel tov!” But pressure to prove that one is smart and scholarly is a huge part of Jewish culture. Charlie is abused and isolated when his mind is slow; he hopes the operation that increases his intelligence will win him love and acceptance, but he winds up equally isolated and alienated when he rapidly becomes a genius. The doctors who rush to use experimental techniques on Charlie call to mind issues raised in Frankenstein, and the work is named for Algernon, the mouse who has undergone similar surgery, to underscore the fact that Charlie is a lab rat protagonist. Another story exploring these themes is by David Brin, who wrote the post-apocalyptic novel The Post Man. In “Dr. Pak’s Pre-School” in his 1990s story collection called Otherness, Brin follows Reiko, a Japanese woman whose husband decides they will have a genius son, for the greater glory of his company and Japan. He takes her to a clinic in Korea where an egg selected for optimum genes is implanted in Reiko, and later a device is implanted in her uterus, emitting sounds and light visible through her skin, to tutor the fetus. Scientists find ways to put unborn babies to work as engineering geniuses unhampered by conventional notions of space. If students read this story, it can lead to interesting discussions of whether an author has the right to write in the voice of someone very different. Some Asian students say they find the story offensive, in its stereotyping of Asian women and men, and how it presents a Korean clinic oppressing/abusing a Japanese woman. Other Asian students are okay with the story. Writers want to show they can write about more than their own experience—and tap into human universals—and SF especially taps into themes of “otherness,” referenced in the title of Brin’s book. But when discussing a story like this, I get into issues that are more pervasive in other Jewish Studies classes I teach: issues of appropriation, ventriloquism and minstrelsy. Of course, Brin isn’t just getting into the head of a Japanese person; he’s a man presenting a pregnant woman’s viewpoint. The same is true of Ira Levin, who invented the “evil children” horror genre that blossomed in the 1970s when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby—which makes a good option as a term paper book in a Jewish SF course.9 And I include Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives in my course. It reads quickly; students consume it over the course of a week. It’s yet another tale with a male author in the head of a female protagonist, but I believe it explores feminist themes seriously—which cannot be said of the ridiculous, failed 2004 film version. (The 1975 film does better, but I don’t urge students to see it. I show trailers for both films in class.) The Stepford Wives also (spoiler alert) touches on issues relating to AI, which we discuss all term—though no AI is a Stepford “protagonist,” any more than a blender or an inflatable doll could be a credible protagonist.

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Some might say: Why not teach The Boys from Brazil as your course’s Ira Levin novel? It includes a Nazi hunter modeled on Simon Wiesenthal! But for me, it’s not as powerful or successful a book as The Stepford Wives. I don’t find the idea of (again, spoiler alert) lots of little clones of Adolf Hitler terrifying—because I don’t think you need to clone Hitler to have a similar threat face Jews and the world. I’ve long felt that way, and the last few years have brought the point home for me; the present is terrifying enough, so who needs literal Hitler clones, with an ample supply of aspiring metaphorical ones? Also, I have my own, odd interpretation of The Stepford Wives. I see that novel as touching on the Holocaust as well. I tell students to bear with me, as I expound my loony theory in class. I think Levin may use the married women who live in Stepford and “change” as metaphors for Jews who stayed in Nazi Germany and countries it controlled. I think it’s a novel about the limits on the imagination: what those of us who trust those close to us, and our communities, cannot comprehend because we have too much faith in mankind. We cannot grasp that those who seem to see us as people may lose all sense of our humanity—and may stop being human in important ways themselves. I point to clues I think Levin has littered throughout the book—starting with the Welcome Wagon lady, in her Volkswagen. There are references to wire fences on Hogan’s Heroes, to the Stepford wives as hausfraus, to a severe German maid, and nerve gas. There’s a librarian called Miss Auslander, and as the point-of-view character, Joanna, reads old newspapers and learns crucial things about Stepford, the librarian calls down to her in the basement to put the newspapers away in the right order and turn out the lights. “Jawohl!” Joanna replies.10 Her maiden name is Ingalls; her husband’s name is the German name Eberhart. These are minor details, but I think they add up to something deliberate. And of course, Joanna’s best friend in Stepford is a funny Jewish woman named Bobbie Markowe (her husband has changed his name from Markowitz) who shares Joanna’s horror at the Stepford wives and how they “change,” and who drinks bottled water in case the change is caused by chemicals. The scene where Joanna, and the reader, realize that Bobbie herself has changed is more chilling, for me, than anything in The Boys in Brazil. (But that novel and the 1978 film based on it make a fine term paper project.) Many 1960s and 1970s feminist leaders were Jewish: Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Anne Roiphe, Erica Jong, Bella Abzug, etc. A few get referenced in The Stepford Wives, along with the Women’s Movement. And the early 1970s was a time when many people fled NYC for suburbia, but may have felt lost, uneasy and oppressed by the perceived blandness of their new towns and neighbors, and by more traditional gender roles. This 1972 horror novel may also be a satirical allegory for scruffy, political, distinctive urban ethnics who

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feel pressured to assimilate into, or who become swallowed up by, suburban WASP culture: somewhat analogous to Jordan Peele’s 2017 film nightmare about an African-American in White America called Get Out. I’ve mentioned that I tie talk of robots and AI to Frankenstein, and golem stories. At the start of the term, students who are not Jewish may feel anxiety when I mention golems, dybbuks and other creatures mentioned in Jewish folklore and the Kabbalah. They assume Jewish kids know about this stuff, and that they are at a disadvantage. I assure them, early on, that Jewish students sitting next to them are also thinking: What the hell is a golem? What the hell is a dybbuk? Many Jewish SF writers come from non-religious families—some from families that, back in Europe, were Misnagdim: opponents of Hasidic orthodoxy. Yet the writers may turn to elements of folklore and religious belief to create fantasy and magical realism texts. To help familiarize students with dybbuks, I show the trailer for The Possession, a 2012 film in the tradition of horror books/films that Levin started with Rosemary’s Baby. It’s basically The Exorcist with Jews and rabbis instead of Catholics and priests performing an exorcism. I show the “Tevye’s dream” sequence from the movie Fiddler on the Roof to indicate how pervasive superstitious beliefs about the supernatural may have been among Jews living back “in the shtetl,” in Europe. Re: robots and AI—I have students buy Asimov’s book I, Robot. It gets called a novel, or a “fixup novel,” but it’s really a collection of short stories, written between 1940 and 1950. It’s very much from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Asimov dedicates it to the editor of Astounding who was key to the Golden Age: “To John W. Campbell, Jr, who godfathered The Robots.” One contribution that Asimov, who immigrated to America from Russia at age three and added much to the new science fiction tropes of the Golden Age, made to SF is the idea of a writer creating a “universe” of his own, and setting disparate stories—with different characters, set in different locations, over many decades—within that universe. What unites all the stories in I, Robot is the premise that it unfolds in a future in which people can create useful robots with positronic brains—and they all must be programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics: First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.11

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These laws were published on a page by themselves at the start of old editions of I, Robot. Nowadays, they appear on the back cover. One law or another is directly or implicitly referenced in each story in the book. The laws are indicative of why Asimov wrote these stories. He was tired of SF stories with evil computers out to destroy mankind, and killer robots running amuck. He thought they reflected a fear of knowledge and science, and a tendency toward superstition in mankind that holds us back. He called this the Frankenstein Complex. In a conversation he had with people at SUNY Brockport in 1976, Asimov said: “In the first place, I don’t feel robots are monsters that will destroy their creators, because I assume people who build robots will also know enough to build safeguards into them. Secondly, when the time comes that robots—machinery in general—are sufficiently intelligent to replace us, I think they should.”12 Asimov didn’t mean robots should wipe humans out, obviously; he meant that we should allow them to be on the “top rung” in terms of running things. The very idea of AI made his heart leap up, as it did for British codebreaker Alan Turing and, perhaps, few other people. One can understand how someone so brilliant, in the face of a world full of human stupidity, waste, short-sightedness, bigotry, egotism, swagger, insecurity, corruption and violence might have a preference for purely rational, efficient and selfless rule by AI. But it’s not a popular view. Some argue that Alex Proyas’s 2004 film I, Robot is faithful to the book. I strongly disagree. The film stokes the irrational fear of robots that Asimov wrote his stories to dispel—whatever caveats are tucked into it. When Will Smith’s character in the movie says “‘I told you so’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.” he might as well be admonishing Asimov himself.13 Also, the action film embraces macho swagger, with the character of Dr. Susan Calvin reduced to a non-entity—another useless, credulous fool who naively believe we don’t have to worry about robots. In the stories, Dr. Calvin (whose retirement is used as the framing device to unite the stories into a “novel”) is a strong, brilliant woman, even if the stories implicitly accept 1940s/1950s notions that a woman in science must be “stunted” in terms of her emotional and sexual life. Dr. Calvin may be the character most often voicing Asimov’s own views: a brilliant nerd channeling a brilliant nerd. The first story in the book, “Robbie,” is a kind of Lassie, Come Home tale; in fact, Gloria, the little girl in the story, rejects a collie her parents offer her when she’s heartbroken over her robot disappearing. The story starkly contrasts with usual killer robot scenarios. Robbie is a nursemaid robot, who plays with and genuinely seems to love Gloria. We discuss in class whether a robot could be programmed/coded to love, and have emotional intelligence, as Robbie clearly does. We discuss how Robbie doesn’t always obey Gloria’s demands. Does that square with the Laws of Robotics? Robbie seems to pout

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when Gloria is unjust, and loves to hear her stories; is Robbie programmed to be like another child, or like an adult socializing and teaching Gloria, and building up her self-confidence?14 There are moments when the hatred and fear some people have of robots in the story sounds like bigotry toward a minority group. Robots aren’t allowed on the streets after a curfew hour (as Jews were not allowed out of their European ghettos at certain times, centuries ago). The story called “Reason” is a send-up by Asimov, a militant atheist, of organized religion. The story called “Liar!” features Dr. Calvin, and when she lashes out at a mind-reading robot who’s told humans what they want to hear (compelled by the First Law of Robotics), she feeds it a kind of paradox, similar to how Captain Kirk on Star Trek a few decades later would often psyche out a robot or computer. Another story featuring Dr. Calvin is “Evidence.” It’s about a man running for office who’s accused of being a robot. I suggest to students that he may be a figure like the British Prime Minister Disraeli; Disraeli’s father converted the family from Judaism to the Church of England, but many continued to see Disraeli as a Jew. Students can read the rest of the stories in I, Robot and write about the book for their term paper. They can watch the Proyas movie, and I’ve given A’s to papers with which I strongly disagree, which argue that the film is a good, faithful rendering of ideas in the book. Students can also read, and write term papers about, Asimov’s later books of robot stories: The Caves of Steel from 1954, for example, or Asimov’s 1976 novella The Bicentennial Man or the 1992 novel it grew into, The Positronic Man, adapted into a 1999 film called Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams. This work delves into the question of what it is to be human, and whether an artificial being could ever be viewed as a person. The robot in the story trying to earn his freedom may resonate with the situation of enslaved people. I also encourage students to read the first Foundation book (1951) by Asimov for term papers.15 It’s the first in another hugely important series of Asimov works: another imaginative universe he pioneered, recently adapted into a miniseries. In this book, historians in another galaxy develop psychohistory: a reliable method to predict what will happen. They foresee a collapse of their Galactic Empire, analogous to the Fall of Rome. They wish to mitigate/shorten the coming dark times. As with Asimov’s robot stories, these stories can be seen as pitting those who are smart, rational and can see the big picture against standard yahoos. The Foundation trilogy and related works are quite appealing and significant: 1966 winners of the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels. As mentioned earlier, another important SF theme is utopia, imagining a perfect world—and the inevitable corollary: dystopian nightmare worlds. I tell students about Sir Thomas More’s book Utopia, which obliquely

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criticized features of the England in which More lived by reporting on life in a newly discovered, enlightened country called Utopia. College students these days, of course, know dystopian fiction, with the “renaissance” in dystopian YA literature in the last few decades, and they’re receptive to the notion that, like a utopia, a dystopian nightmare vision of a different/future world can really be a means of commenting on our own society. A dystopia, of course, can also be a warning: a way of saying about problems in our society, “if this goes on,” something terrible will follow. The one work of utopian fiction that I share with Jewish SF students is the end of Theodor Herzl’s novel The Old New Land, available on Project Gutenberg.16 Herzl founded the Zionist movement. He thought Europe’s Jews had learned important values and ideas from Europe, as well as from Jewish culture, and, in a state of their own, they could implement them. In the portion I have students read, characters see school children playing, and rich and poor students are dressed alike. Schooling is free from early years through university; everyone has the same start in life and can move ahead by virtue of personal merit, talent and work. A man from a poor background is unexpectedly chosen to be the new president. These may not sound like revolutionary changes, but for Herzl, democracy, a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, and a resolution of “the Jewish question” with Jews free to be themselves, in a free society, was a realistic yet beautiful aspiration. I also have students read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I acknowledge that it’s not science fiction—in fact, it’s not fiction at all. But it’s a kind of a blueprint for a utopia, and therefore, arguably, relevant to that part of the course. Immediately afterward, we read the dystopian novel Anthem by Ayn Rand. (Both books are short and read quickly; they’re hardly more than pamphlets.) Rand (who was born Alisa Rosenbaum), lived through the Russian Revolution, and I’d argue this early SF novel of hers is of interest for some of the same reasons that (Gentile) Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We is of interest. Rand is, of course, furiously anti-communist; she presents a bitingly critical and satirical view of a communist, coercively egalitarian society in Anthem—a society in which individuals can only say “we” because the word “I” has become lost. I show the interview with her on YouTube with Mike Wallace from long ago—from a time, I remind students, when both major US parties supported high tax rates on rich people and invested in infrastructure and safety nets. It’s a vigorous debate, Rand is a smart, strange figure, and students find it interesting. As opposed as she and Marx are, neither has any use for organized religion; both focus on economics. (At Rand’s funeral, there was a huge floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign by her coffin.) Each is far better at criticizing the system he/she wishes to destroy than at articulating how a proposed, putatively better system would work.

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Anthem was first published in England, and it’s possible George Orwell read it, and that it influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Both books begin with someone starting a diary, knowing it may lead to his execution, both fictional dystopian states maintain mind control through slogans, eliminate forbidden words, etc.) It surely influenced Ira Levin’s 1970 novel This Perfect Day, in which people also have names followed by a string of numbers. Levin may have had China and its Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in mind, more than Stalin’s Russia. But there are stories (difficult to confirm) that Levin attended Objectivist lectures expounding Rand’s philosophy in the late 1960s and was taken with her ideas.17 Perhaps Levin makes the protagonist of This Perfect Day interested in architecture as a tribute to her novel The Fountainhead. This Perfect Day also plays with the trope of an evil computer running society. It makes a good term paper book. At one point in the novel, characters in exile live an existence akin to that of Marranos or Jews in a ghetto. Harry Harrison was half-Jewish and half-Catholic. He was a friend of my Uncle Phil’s, and my father’s. His dystopian 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! does not focus primarily on economic systems and disparities (though they certainly do come up) but on ecological disaster.18 It’s the basis for the 1973 film Soylent Green. Hollywood sometimes seems dedicated to having a film say the opposite of what the author says in the original book. As mentioned, Asimov’s vision of robots as non-threatening friends to mankind is turned inside out in Proyas’s film of I, Robot. Philip K. Dick (not Jewish) took a far more negative, sinister view of androids in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In a sense, they’re stand-ins for sociopaths who appear human and seem to feel empathy. But when Ridley Scott made the film Blade Runner, he did away with that aspect of the book; he seems to say, essentially, that replicants are people, too, and we must not be prejudiced against them. There is a similar inversion of the author’s purpose in the film Soylent Green. Harrison’s novel features an elderly Jewish man named Sol (played onscreen by Edward G. Robinson).19 In the book, Sol rails for pages about the ignorance of the Catholic Church, and the damage it did by forbidding people to use birth control. Prohibitions on contraception have led to the overpopulated, poisoned, starving, overheated nightmare world where the characters live. Harrison all but leaps onto a soapbox and waves his arms in those pages: giving the warning at the heart of the book. In the film Soylent Green, there’s no talk of how the world got so polluted, so stripped of greenery and natural food, and so overpopulated. There’s only fatalism: this is how it is, no one can change things, how sad. Among the only people still possessing values and compassion, and respecting human dignity, are Catholic priests; their Church

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is a place of refuge. The film feels, at times, like an apology for the book it’s based on, and a deliberate silencing of the warning the book contains. The book and film together add up to a good term paper project. Another book we start in class that students can finish for term papers is He, She and It by Marge Piercy. It relates to many themes already discussed. It’s set in a dystopian nightmare future where our environment has been largely destroyed and most people live wretched, lawless lives of horror. Even the rich live in oppressively hierarchical, conformist enclaves. It deals with the creation of a cyborg, a kind of “lab rat” protagonist, and questions the ethics of the scientists who designed him. The book deals extensively with the issue of whether he can be considered a human being. Unlike many texts discussed here, He, She and It is also an explicitly Jewish, feminist novel. Shira, its protagonist, leaves the sleek compound of a multinational corporation and returns to Tikvah, the idealized Jewish community of her childhood. Her grandmother, Malkah, tells “bedtime stories” to the cyborg—stories about the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew, creating a golem. The book presents the golem in Prague centuries ago and the cyborg Yod as parallel beings, and explores Frankenstein. He, She and It is a cyberpunk novel, and the story of how Marge Piercy came to write it is interesting. In her Acknowledgements at the end, she writes of talking to a student at Loyola at Chicago about SF, and “he told me that when he read Woman on the Edge of Time, he couldn’t believe the date of publication, because the alternate universe that Connie blunders into in chapter 15 anticipated cyberpunk. What’s cyberpunk? I asked, and he started me off.”20 She read books by William Gibson and enjoyed them. Piercy is not known as a science fiction novelist, but her 1976 book Woman on the Edge of Time follows a woman named Connie Ramos, involuntarily committed to a mental hospital and heavily drugged (something of a feminist version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), who mentally travels to a utopian future where problems of our society have been solved. At one point, however, impatient to see her friend in the future, she travels on her own—and lands in a horrific, dystopian, alternate possible future. That is chapter 15. Connie finds herself in an apartment in New York, occupied by another woman: The woman’s hair, stippled mauve and platinum, was arranged in an intricate tower of curls and small gewgaws, dripping pearls like a wedding headdress. She wore a long dress of slippery substance that changed color as she moved and emitted a tinkling sound; it was slit away up the side and cut out here and there so that her breasts occasionally peeked out or her navel appeared and reappeared. When Connie had materialized, the woman had been lying back on a mound of ball-shaped pillows smoking a pipe and chewing what looked like

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orange marshmallows from a small bowl on the hairy coverlet. The room was air conditioned cool.21

The woman, Gildina, is kept by a rich man who’s signed a contract, but he may get rid of her when it’s up for renewal. It’s a brutally hierarchical, dehumanized, hyper-capitalist society where the environment’s poisoned to the point where no sunlight gets through, only the rich live comfortably, for centuries, while poor people die at around age forty, people (especially women) are heavily modified through plastic surgery and take lots of drugs, multinational corporations run the world, and everything has been commodified, including sex and people’s bodies. (Gildina gets threatened with being scrapped for parts at the organ bank.) The line between what is artificial and real is blurred. These things do anticipate the cyberpunk genre. If students finish He, She and It on their own, it can lead to good term papers, or they can read Woman on the Edge of Time—or both. Other women writing on feminist themes worth including are Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, and Cynthia Ozick — whose novel The Puttermesser Papers makes a good term paper book. The protagonist is “Othered” for being a woman as well as Jewish, like Shira in Piercy’s He, She and It. The book gets “speculative” only occasionally, but one section features a female golem. My Uncle Phil mentioned Henry Kuttner and Alfred Bester as two authors who were not terribly concerned with Judaism, but once the death camps were opened and the full horror of the Holocaust understood, it affected them powerfully. Phil considered Bester’s 1953 novel The Demolished Man his masterpiece; Phil saw it as connected to Bester’s anguish and distress at that time. (I’m more bowled over by Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination. Both make good term paper books.) One feels a clearer link to the Jewish experience when reading Mutant by Henry Kuttner. It’s out of print. It shouldn’t be.22 Mutant is another “fixup” book—a collection of stories originally published at different times, held together by a framing device more convincing than the one in I, Robot.23 The 1953 book is set in a post-apocalyptic future, after World War III. (Throughout the course, I impress upon students the extent of the nuclear anxiety people felt during the Cold War—expecting a war to kill all of us at any moment.) Cities of survivors dot America, amid unlivable areas filled with radiation. In some ways people are back in a more primitive era, but they have flying ships and other technologies we lack. The book focuses on “Baldies”: people born hairless, who read minds, due to a mutation caused by radiation. There are three kinds of Baldies: those who are insane, those who function in human society, and the “paranoids”—full of resentment toward the majority that cannot read minds, seeing themselves as superior.

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Readers root for the Baldies living among non-mind-reading people; these Baldies work to thwart the plotting of the paranoids. “Assimilated” Baldies wear wigs, avoid taking advantage of their powers, absorb scapegoating, insults and suspicion in mild, de-escalating ways, and otherwise mollify “normal” people. It’s not hard to see them as a metaphor for Jews, and, as the book goes on, they talk less about worrying that lynch mobs will come after Baldies and talk more about the danger of a pogrom. A story about a Baldy who loves a girl who’s not a telepath may be seen as allegorically referring to Kuttner himself, and his love for Gentile C.L. Moore. I don’t know if anyone at Marvel Comics writing about Mutants got ideas from Kuttner’s stories, but Mutant is a wonderful book: very relevant for the course. Kuttner takes time to show how telepaths might communicate and the etiquette of their mental conversations, different shades of meaning communicated simultaneously, etc. The first story in the book, “The Piper’s Son,” reflects on how “alien” the minds of children are, to adults—and that theme is important to the most famous short story by Kuttner (and Moore) called “Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” turned into the 2007 film The Last Mimzy. Just as Mutant should still be in print, so should my Uncle Phil’s book Of Men and Monsters. In some ways, it’s classic boy’s adventure story and coming-of-age story; in some ways, it’s a parody of such tales. Phil was going to speak to my first Jewish Science Fiction class, but, at age 89, he became very ill. Over winter break, I visited him in a medical facility and interviewed him on camera, a few months before he died. I showed that interview to my class when we returned, and I show parts to each class. Phil told me in the interview that when he was growing up, his favorite author was a man he referred to as “Swift-aire”: a combination of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. The influence of both is clear in Of Men and Monsters.24 Eric, the protagonist, is a wide-eyed innocent in a deeply corrupt world, much like Candide. The novel satirizes organized religion, military fervor and tribal feelings of superiority—as Voltaire does in Candide and as Swift does in Gulliver’s Travels. The humans who see themselves as brave warriors are, essentially, equivalent to mice or cockroaches living in the walls of the homes of huge aliens that have taken over Earth. We talk in class about how Nazis and others classified Jews as vermin—and so, when Kafka presents Gregor Samsa as, essentially, a giant cockroach, and when we talk about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and other works where people are equated with vermin, we’re aware of it. Short stories satirizing the militarized national security state in the late 1940s and early 1950s include Phil’s story “Brooklyn Project.” It was a brave story to write in the late 1940s, critiquing secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project, and how discussion of the dangers of new weapons systems was forbidden in that era, and how the press caved to government edicts.25 Similarly brave is Alfred Bester’s 1953 story “Disappearing Act,” about people in a

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militarized America in an endless war who have the ability to teleport themselves to another time of their own creation. Both of those satirical stories, which dared invite government ire in the era of HUAC and Senator McCarthy, are also, in another great tradition of SF, time travel stories, (as is “Mimsy Were the Borogroves”). My uncle’s story “Me, Myself and I” is far more light-hearted: the kind of time travel paradox story that Golden Age writers like Phil and Robert Heinlein enjoyed creating, to perplex the brain. A useful time travel novel for the course, which makes a great term paper book, is The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove. In it, White South Africans from the Apartheid era go back to the US Civil War and give AK-47s to Robert E. Lee and Confederate soldiers. The book thus becomes “alternate history,” in the tradition of other stories in which the South wins the Civil War, including Harry Harrison’s A Rebel in Time. Turtledove, who is Jewish, has also written many alt-Jewish histories including In Darkest Europe, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, and the Worldwar series. Perhaps the most famous Jewish alternate history is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh becomes President of the US instead of FDR winning a third term.26 That’s the last book students start in my class and can finish for their term papers. It resonates strongly with Jewish issues. Joe Haldeman wrote his novel The Forever War soon after returning from his traumatizing tour of duty in Vietnam. It’s another powerful work criticizing militarism, and, since soldiers travel at light speed and come home to a world that, to them, is the future, it’s a kind of time travel story and a metaphor for how army life dislocates returning soldiers. Writers from other countries included in my course include Neil Gaiman, who wrote the Sandman graphic novels and went on to create American Gods, Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, Coraline and The Graveyard Book. He’s adapted his work for the screen. His quirky, disturbing story about a Jewish boy at a British public (meaning private) school called “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” references the title of American author Harlan Ellison’s story “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,” which is its own time travel type of tale. Phyllis Gotlieb was the mother of Canadian science fiction. She has a number of overtly and indirectly Jewish stories, such as her story “Tauf Aleph” in Jack Dann’s More Wandering Stars, about a lumbering robot that’s also a golem. It touches on issues like “Who is a person?” and “What is a Jew?” (My Uncle Phil’s story “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” in the first Wandering Stars also asks those questions, with a narrator who echoes Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye.)27 The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s mother suffered a horrifying attack during a pogrom in Eastern Europe that blighted the rest of her life. Clarice Lispector didn’t write on Jewish themes. But she has a short story

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called “The Chicken”—so short it can be read aloud in class.28 It’s not speculative, exactly, but it plays with the personification of a chicken—presented sometimes as a sympathetic protagonist, sometimes as just a thing—with the third-person narrator and characters in the story granting and rescinding the chicken’s personhood. The story suggests, perhaps, that the same can be done to actual people. Moacyr Scliar is another Brazilian writer famous for speculative stories. His “The Lions” from the 1960s is, again, very short. It presents an alternate reality in which government scientists from, presumably, First World countries, destroy all the lions, describing events in a kind of parody of military/scientific jargon: A great mass of them, gathered near Lake Chad, was destroyed by one single atom device of medium explosive force dropped from a bomber one summer day. After the characteristic mushroom cloud disappeared, it was ascertained by means of photographs that the nucleus of the leonine mass had been completely disintegrated, and was now surrounded by a two kilometer-wide band that was strewn with chunks of bloody flesh, fragments of bone, and bloodstained manes. Dying lions lay on its periphery.29

Students understand the story resonates with environmental issues, issues of people in the “developed” world making sweeping decisions that affect everyone, and the scapegoating and demonization of groups, sometimes suddenly and at random. Another writer with very short stories that work well in the course is Israeli writer Etgar Keret. I mention that he once wrote for a kind of Israeli equivalent to SNL. His story “The Plague of the First Born” presents the plagues of Egypt from the perspective of an Egyptian family trying to survive the wrath of the God of the Hebrews. I also show episodes of The Twilight Zone written by Rod Serling in class. I’ve written another essay about that show. Most students have never seen it, and I enjoy introducing them to it. I give a movie quiz at the end of the course. Students choose from a list of films and watch five on their own. Four “films” can be episodes of TOS Star Trek by Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, David Gerrold and/or Robert Bloch. I wrote a TOS novel that was published by Pocket Books when I was in college; it’s a particular pleasure to introduce my students to Star Trek. They can watch the silent, German Fritz Lang film Metropolis (robots, dystopia), the 1978 film Superman, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, (Cold War nuclear terror, a Doomsday device, and the issue of America using Nazi scientists), or a documentary on Harlan Ellison called Dreams With Sharp Teeth featuring Neil Gaiman. I now give the movie quiz one-on-one over Zoom; it’s more of a conversation.

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Teaching Jewish SF has allowed me to discover remarkable texts and see Otherness inherent in Diaspora depicted against the backdrop of the universe. Questions about what makes us human and what makes us aliens, what constitutes a perfect or a nightmare society and other SF themes dating back centuries tie in well with cultural exploration, political allegory, phasers, capes and religious myths about monsters. BIBLIOGRAPHY Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. 1951. New York: Del Rey, 2018. ———. Interview. Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 1 (March 1987): 68–69. ———. “Robbie.” 1940. In I, Robot, 1–24. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004. ———. “Runaround,” 1942. In I, Robot, 25–45. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004. Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. Fleischer, Richard, dir. Soylent Green. 1973. Burbank, CA: Warner Entertainment: Turner Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Harrison, Harry. Make Room! Make Room! The Classic Novel of an Overpopulated Future. 1966. New York: Orb Books, 2008. Herzl, Theodor. Altneuland. 1916. Project Gutenberg, 2008. https:​//​www​.gutenberg​ .org​/files​/25282​/25282​-h​/25282​-h​.htm. Knowles, Christopher. Our Heroes Wear Spandex. San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2007. Kuttner, Henry. Mutant. New York: Ballantine, 1953. Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. New York: HarperTorch, 2000. Lispector, Clarice. “A Chicken.” In The Complete Stories. Translated by Katrina Dodson. Edited by Benjamin Moser, 127–130. New York: New Directions, 2015. Peretz, I.L. “The Golem.” 1893. Translated by Ruth R. Wisse. In The I. L. Peretz Reader. Edited by Ruth R. Wisse, 130–131. New Haven: Yale University Press: 2002. Piercy, Marge. “Acknowledgements.” Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991. ———. He, She, and It. New York: Ballantine, 1991. ———. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991. Proyas, Alex, dir. I, Robot. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Riggenbach, Jeff. “Ayn Rand’s Influence on American Popular Fiction.” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 91–144. https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /41560271. Scliar, Moacyr. “The Lions.” The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar. Translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Singer, I.B. The Golem. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1983. Tenn, William. “Brooklyn Project.” 1948. In Immodest Proposals. Edited by James A. Mann, 239–248. Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 2001.

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———. Of Men and Monsters. New York: Ballantine, 1968. Trachtenberg, Joshua. Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. New York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1939. The Sacred Texts Archive. http:​//​www​ .sacred​-texts​.com​/jud​/jms​/jms00​.htm Weinbaum, Stanley G. “A Martian Odyssey.” In The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Vol. 1: 1929–1964. Edited by Robert Silverberg, 1–23. New York: Tor, 2003.

NOTES 1. Stanley G. Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey,” in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1: 1929–1964, edited by Robert Silverberg (New York: Tor, 2003). 2. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (New York: Random House, 2000). 3. Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1939), The Sacred Texts Archive. www​ .sacred​-texts​.com​/jud​/jms​/jms00​.htm, 85–86. 4. I.L. Peretz, “The Golem,” in The I. L. Peretz Reader, edited by Ruth R. Wisse, translated by Ruth R. Wisse (1893; New Haven: Yale University Press: 2002), 131. 5. Peretz, 131. 6. I.B. Singer, The Golem (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1983). 7. Singer, The Golem, 65–67. 8. Christopher Knowles, Our Heroes Wear Spandex (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2007), 145. 9. For more on Jews’ influence on horror, see Jason Zinoman, Shock Value (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Nathan Abrams, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018); and Nathan Abrams, “Why Rosemary’s Baby Was Really a Jewish Horror Movie,” Forward, April 12, 2018, forward.com/culture/398478/why-rosemarys-baby-was-really-a-jewish-horror-movie. 10. Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (New York: HarperTorch, 2000), 150. 11. Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” in I, Robot (1942; New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004), 37. 12. “A Conversation with Isaac Asimov,” Science Fiction Studies 14, no. 1 (March 1987): 68–69. 13. I, Robot, directed by Alex Proyas (Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2004), DVD. 14. Isaac Asimov, “Robbie,” in I, Robot (1940; New York: Bantam Spectra, 2004). 15. Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951; New York: Del Rey, 2018). 16. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, 1916 (Project Gutenberg, 2008), www​.gutenberg​ .org​/files​/25282​/25282​-h​/25282​-h​.htm. 17. Jeff Riggenbach in “Ayn Rand’s Influence on American Popular Fiction,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 91–144, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/41560271 mentions Levin as one of the writers she influenced. 18. Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! The Classic Novel of an Overpopulated Future, 1966 (New York: Orb Books, 2008).

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19. Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer (1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Entertainment: Turner Entertainment, 2003), DVD. 20. Marge Piercy, “Acknowledgements,” Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991), 431. 21. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976), 287. 22. Kuttner wrote with his wife C.L. Moore, and they used pseudonyms, but stories and books that are mostly Kuttner’s often get published under his name. 23. Henry Kuttner, Mutant (New York: Ballantine, 1953). 24. William Tenn, Of Men and Monsters (New York: Ballantine, 1968). 25. William Tenn, “Brooklyn Project,” 1948, in Immodest Proposals, ed. James A. Mann (1916; Framingham, MA; NESFA Press, 2001), 239–248. 26.  Also a 2021 miniseries for Apple TV+, Foundation by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman. 27. Wandering Stars (1974) is celebrated as the first Jewish science fiction anthology. 28. Clarice Lispector, “A Chicken,” in The Complete Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson, ed. Benjamin Moser (New York: New Directions, 2015). 29. Moacyr Scliar “The Lions,” in The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar, translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1999), 3.

Conclusion

In a new era of Own Voices writing, combined with Jews’ growing multiculturalism and mixed cultures, Jewish fantasy is likewise diversifying. The children’s and teen literature section brings in not only LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent Jewish protagonists, but also Jews from blended backgrounds. Some of these also incorporate speculative elements as Jews of all races, colors, and levels of worship build golems and ward off ghosts. Complex television heroes are also arriving, like Batwoman, who’s Jewish and lesbian with significant trauma, or Moon Knight, played by a Guatemalan actor and framed as a Jewish Egyptian avatar with dissociative identity disorder. The era of bringing beloved Jewish characters like Kitty Pryde and Harley Quinn to the big screen minus all traces of their religion is starting to fade. Online, fans are taking advantage of the new medium to add Jewish characters to Harry Potter, Star Trek, and all their favorites. Incal comics are available in English. Online magazines and ebooks make distribution of novels, short stories, comics, and children’s books far easier too. No longer need authors buy foreign stamps and wait years for publication to share their works in other countries. The adult fantasy genre likewise is spreading, with magical realism from South America, Israel, and Iran, as well as new European works. Publishers are seeking content beyond the American-Ashkenazi norms and asking authors to share the subtleties of who they are and how they interact with others. Intersectionality is key, as award-winning stories offer commonality and team-ups with Jews and heroes of other backgrounds. Further, with new streaming services, much more international content is being shared. Amazon’s Undone (2019–) is an adult cartoon that follows a Jewish-Mexican heroine who uses time-travel to reassemble her past. The Dot and the Kangaroo cartoons (1977–1994) by Polish-Israeli-Australian creator Yoram Gross are on Flix and Tubi. The Congress, a 2013 French-Israeli cartoon adaptation of the Stanisław Lem novel The Futurological Congress, is 291

292

Conclusion

on most streaming services. The Israeli vampire show Juda is on Hulu. This last offers great innovation as it considers the intricacies of being a Jewish vampire, from kashrut to Shabbat. Outside fantasy, Fauda, Unorthodox, Yosi the Regretful Spy, Family Business, Shtisel, My Unorthodox Life, The Goldbergs, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are showcasing many types of Judaism in many countries. It’s a new international era, and the Jewish content is only growing. There’s more every day to read, watch, and explore.

Index

1800s, 3–6, 10, 101, 142, 226, 270 1910s, 10, 72, 138, 154 1920s, 21, 32, 102, 149, 186, 193, 220, 226 1930s, 19, 72, 91, 102, 103, 105, 111, 142, 236 1940s, 4, 72, 73, 89, 91, 93, 104, 138, 270, 278, 284 1950s, 4, 42, 71, 107, 232, 270, 278, 284 1960s, 35, 82, 103, 185–99, 225, 227, 236, 255, 270, 276, 281, 286. See also Cold War 1970s, 24, 102, 103, 186, 211, 232, 270, 275, 276 1980s, 109, 113, 139, 178 1990s, 138, 226, 275 9/11, 87 Abigail, 253, 255, 262 Abraham, 44, 160, 244, 253, 254, 257, 262 Abulafia, Abraham, 103, 144, 146, 150 Adaf, Shimon, 232, 236, 239, 247, 248 afterlife, 57 AI, 187, 188, 190, 194, 272, 275, 277, 278 alchemist, 156–57 Aleichem, Sholem, 93, 188, 189, 285

Alfred the Great, 121–36, 143, 163 alien, 11, 25, 26, 94, 104, 110, 137, 139, 142, 143, 145, 168–72, 177, 178, 180, 181, 194–97, 204, 205, 209, 231, 235, 270, 271, 272, 284, 287 Allen, Woody, 229 alternate history, 3, 11, 12, 37, 47, 48, 87–89, 137, 139, 285 alternate universe, 11, 26, 88, 282, 286 Amazing Stories, 142, 226 American, 87–100, 102, 104, 116, 117, 138, 147, 185–89, 194, 197, 212, 220, 225–32, 236, 241–44, 256, 271, 277, 285, 287, 288, 291 androgyny, 21, 23 angel, 38, 73, 76–81, 84, 160, 203, 225, 241, 253, 257 Angel of Death, 73, 257 animated film/TV, 8, 53, 54, 56, 113, 272 anthologies, 11, 12, 102, 225–33, 243, 246, 289 anti-fascist, 153 antisemitism, 2, 4, 10, 12, 19, 44, 73, 87–98, 102, 141, 156, 157, 159, 185, 186, 192, 198, 199, 203, 220 Anton, Maggie, 253, 257, 261, 264, 267, 268 appropriation, 31, 211, 212, 275 293

294

Index

Arabic, 38, 71, 72, 79, 123, 233, 235, 238 Arabs, 38, 40, 45, 79, 82–84, 232–34, 236, 238, 263 Aramaic, 53, 55, 63, 222, 232 archetypes, 249, 252, 253, 256, 262, 264, 266, 267 Argentina, 32, 155 Ark of the Covenant, 42, 123 asexual, 202, 215 Ashkenazi, 4, 19, 21, 75, 108, 110, 204, 212, 225–35, 239, 248, 291 Asia, 45 Asimov, Isaac, 29, 32, 102, 108, 114, 118, 139, 140, 143, 148–50, 167, 169, 171–83, 188, 228, 239, 244, 248, 269, 277–81, 287, 288 assimilation, 19, 79, 92, 95, 101–5, 107, 110, 141, 188, 209, 226, 277 astronauts, 113 Auschwitz, 12, 88, 171 Australia, 1–17, 138, 232, 291; antisemitism, 2; first Jews, 2, 3; immigration, 4; Jewish artists, 4; Jewish leaders, 4 Austria, 142, 154–56, 163 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 142, 163 autistic, 215, 216 Avayou, Shlomo, 79, 82, 84 Aztecs, 32 Bar Mitzvah, 40, 273 Bār-Moshe, Isḥāq, 71, 78, 79, 84 Baruchin, Rotem, 237, 239, 248 Bashe, Ennis Rook, 203, 219, 221 Bathsheba, 124 Bedouin, 238 Ben Ari, Gon, 231, 246 Benjamin, Walter, 20, 21, 22, 24 Bester, Alfred, 283, 284 bible, 42, 57, 63, 66, 68, 77, 80, 94, 122–36, 186, 192, 195, 230, 232,

233, 235, 250, 252–56, 261– 63, 265, 267 birth, 21, 40, 130, 148, 150, 208, 228, 255, 281 bisexual, 202, 208, 213 Black, 207, 211, 212, 238 Black Jewish, 44, 207, 212, 225 Black Panther, 37 blacklisted, 154 Bloch, Robert, 286 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 142 The Book of Esther, 47–49 Borges, Jorge, 155 Botwinik, Leybl, 101–18 Brazil, 285–86 Brin, David, 275 Britain, 2–6, 25, 26, 93, 123, 133, 134, 197, 230, 231, 236, 239–43, 246, 247, 278, 279, 285 British Mandate, 72, 236 Brooks, Mel, 269, 273 Buddhism, 35 Burlesque of Frankenstein, 5 Burstein, Michael, 227, 242, 244 Bush, George W., 87 By Night Under the Stone Bridge, 153, 155, 162–66 Byzantine Empire, 38–40 Campbell, John W. Jr., 227, 277 Campbell, Joseph, 252, 259, 268 Canada, 101, 104–6, 110, 114, 116, 137, 270, 285 Captain Herlock, 26, 29, 34 Carr, Carol, 228, 239, 244 Catholic, 94, 121, 134, 256, 277, 281 Chabon, Michael, 43–45, 49, 50, 271, 287, 288 Chagall, Marc, 194 Chaldean, 2 Charter 77, 138, 148, 149 children’s books, 5, 7–9, 102, 103, 138, 192, 202, 272, 291 Chile, 19–21, 24, 32, 35 Chinese, 25, 111, 126, 212, 234

Index

Christianity, 12, 22, 38, 39, 44, 45, 88, 92, 95, 96, 123, 129, 130, 143, 156, 191, 201, 222, 235, 266, 273 Christmas, 230 Cigan, Chaim, 137–43, 147–51 circumcision, 21, 47, 48 Civil War, 285 Classical mythology, 21–22 climate fiction, 6, 206, 282, 283 cloning, 26, 187 Cold War, 185, 197, 283, 286. See also 1960s Columbus, Christopher, 20, 257 comics, 8, 9, 32, 138, 271, 274, 291; Jewish history, 271 communism, 43, 102, 104, 138, 139, 142 concentration camps, 12, 96, 142, 145, 146, 169, 171, 195, 236 The Congress, 291 conspiracy theories, 88, 92 conversion, 38, 40, 42, 74, 87, 212, 222 Cordoba, 41, 42, 80 Counter-culture, 35 Creacionismo, 35 Crown Heights, 13–14 Crusades, 94 cyberpunk, 282–83 cyborg, 213, 214, 222, 282 Czech, 137–40, 142, 148, 149, 154–56; authors, 138; Secret Police, 139, 142, 145 Czechoslovakia, 138, 139, 142, 149, 150 Dann, Jack, 1, 6, 7, 11–15, 17, 102, 114, 116, 148, 150, 227, 228, 230, 239–45, 285 dark fantasy, 13 Daughters of Zelophehad, 257 Davidson, Avram, 228, 244 Dead Sea Scrolls, 229 Deborah, 253, 254, 262 demons, 13, 14, 73–77, 110, 156, 203, 205, 206, 228, 257, 262 Depart, Depart!, 206, 219, 221

295

Derrida, Jacques, 19, 20, 23, 26, 28–32 desert, 74, 107, 147, 216, 218, 254 A Desolation Called Peace, 209, 219, 221 diaspora, 48, 92, 130, 134, 136, 202, 212, 241, 286 Dick, Philip K., 150, 196, 281 Dictionary of the Khazars, 45, 46, 47, 49 dimensions, 27, 29, 113, 143 disability, 1, 28, 81, 208, 218, 254 Disraeli, Benjamin, 3, 4, 279 divination, 47, 208 Dot and the Kangaroo, 8, 291 Dr. Strangelove, 286 Dune, 24–33 dybbuk, 13, 21, 80, 141, 147, 205, 206, 228, 230, 277 The Dyke and the Dybbuk, 205 dystopia, 6, 235, 279–82, 286 Eden, 43, 55, 57, 65, 67, 68, 77, 78, 80, 167–72, 177, 182 Effinger, Geroge Alec, 228, 240, 244 Egypt, 141–44, 146, 148, 150, 242, 246, 255, 257, 286, 291 Einstein, Albert, 138, 218 Ellison, Harlan, 102, 140, 229, 240, 245, 285, 286 empathy, 214, 233, 251, 255, 281 Emperor Rudolf II, 155, 156, 158, 159 The End of Eternity, 167, 172, 174, 175, 178, 181–83 English, 2, 27, 33, 60, 101–4, 110, 111, 125, 127, 130, 132, 138, 149, 154, 187, 197, 222, 228, 233, 269, 291 environmentalism, 237 Ethiopian, 44, 225 European, 21, 32, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 72, 89, 91, 92, 95–97, 101, 102, 107, 126, 138, 139, 142, 147, 157, 161–64, 182, 183, 201, 226–29, 232, 241, 244, 257, 272, 273, 277, 279, 280, 291;

296

Index

Central, 137, 138, 153, 156, 159, 161, 208; Eastern, 38, 42, 110, 111, 189, 191, 208, 215, 228, 270, 285; Western, 101, 202 Eve, 14, 66, 67, 103, 131 evil, 29, 74, 172, 175, 176, 232, 252, 261, 275, 278, 281 Exasperating Interlocutor, 194, 196 Exodus, 25, 34, 79, 128, 131, 139, 141, 143, 148, 150, 179, 207, 254, 257 Facebook, 88 Facts, 90, 93 faith, 21, 40, 44, 45, 129, 177, 230, 254, 256, 260, 263, 276 fanfiction, 121–27, 130–32, 135 Fantasia 2000, 232 fantasy, 1, 4–12, 14, 26, 37, 48, 49, 50, 74, 77, 79, 81, 82, 89, 91, 99, 103, 115, 119, 126, 137, 138, 140, 148, 149, 153, 157, 160–64, 202, 203, 205, 207, 213, 215, 219, 221, 225, 228, 232, 236, 239–44, 246, 252, 270, 277, 279, 291, 292 FarhÛd, 73 Farjeon, Benjamin, 6 fascism, 8, 88, 89, 142, 149, 160, 171 Feldman, Ruth Tenzer, 238, 240, 248, 257, 260, 263, 264, 268 feminine, 54–56, 59–63, 80, 82, 168, 177, 178, 181, 213, 214, 222, 249–51, 253, 255, 256, 260, 263, 264, 267; sacred, 168, 178, 180, 217, 250 feminism, 2, 47, 49, 64, 66, 69, 122, 130, 203, 211, 221, 254, 257, 275, 282, 283; in Jewish history, 276 Fiasco, 177 Fiddler on the Roof, 277 filmmaker, 19, 23, 32, 98 flash fiction, 237 “Flowers for Algernon,” 274

folklore, 5, 11, 13, 45, 47, 79, 162, 188, 206, 260, 272, 277 foods, 43, 74, 75, 132, 203, 205, 207, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 237, 255, 281 Ford, Henry, 92–93 found family, 203–4 Foundation, 167, 178, 179, 182, 183, 279 Foundation and Earth, 29, 32 Foundation’s Edge, 167, 168, 176, 177, 180–83 The Four Profound Weaves, 216, 219, 223 Frank, Anne, 90 Frankenstein, 5, 226, 270–75, 277, 278, 282 Franks, Jason, 11, 12, 13 free will, 140–44, 146, 205 French, 19, 20, 24, 25, 44, 72, 104, 111, 125, 129, 130, 195, 291 Gafla, Ofir Touche, 231, 240, 246 Gaiman, Neil, 201, 229, 230, 240, 245, 246, 285, 286 Garden of Eden. See Eden gaslighting, 95 gay, 202, 206, 208, 218 Di Geheyme Shlikhes, 101–19 gender, 13, 59, 63, 125, 201–3, 216, 218, 220, 276 genderfluid, 210 generation ship, 25, 207 generational novels, 19, 21, 32, 81, 260, 261, 263 Genesis, 15, 109, 131 genetic manipulation, 23, 171 genocide, 87, 93, 96–98, 209 Gentlemen of the Road, 43, 49 Georgia, 42–43 German, 47, 73, 92, 139, 150, 154, 156, 159, 163–65, 231, 276, 286 Germany, 91, 95, 138, 139, 154, 156, 218, 276

Index

Gernsback, Hugo, 102, 115, 117, 226, 227 Gerrold, David, 102, 286 ghetto, 81, 96, 149, 156, 157, 159, 160, 225, 272, 273, 279, 281 The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, 257, 258, 263, 265, 268 The Ghost Writer, 90, 91, 97, 99, 100 ghosts, 5, 10, 22, 74, 81, 97, 122, 156, 157, 195, 229, 257, 258, 272, 291 Gilden, Mel, 229, 240, 245 Glassman, Shira, 203 Gold, Horace L., 227, 244 golden calf, 78 golem, 48, 103, 149, 188, 213, 215, 230, 239, 244, 271–74, 277, 282–85, 287, 288, 291 Gomel, Elana, 177, 182, 183, 186, 198, 199, 231, 235, 236, 240, 246, 248 Gor, Gennady, 185, 186, 193–200 Gothic, 1, 5, 6 Gotlieb, Phyllis, 228, 285 graphic novels, 12, 13, 19–28, 32, 34, 285 graveyard, 47, 74, 155, 159, 195, 232, 257 Greek, 43, 128, 132, 133, 135, 178, 222 Gregory of Nyssa, 179, 182, 183 Gross, Yoram, 8, 14, 16, 291 Gulliver’s Travels, 5 Haggard, H. Rider, 5 Haldeman, Joe, 102, 240, 245, 285 Hanna, Victoria, 53–59, 62–67, 69 Hannah, 253–55 Hareven, Gail, 234, 241, 247 Harrison, Harry, 281, 285, 287, 288 Hassidic, 35, 113, 205, 210, 221, 232, 277 hatred, 72, 88, 96, 176, 279 Hazan, Uziel, 80, 85 He, She and It, 213, 214, 219, 222, 282 Hebrew, 38, 39, 40, 47, 48, 55, 59, 63, 66–69, 72, 79, 104, 124, 128, 132,

297

134, 136, 146, 179, 192, 193, 222– 36, 243, 246, 265, 267, 268 Heinlein, Robert, 104, 115, 117, 285 hero’s journey, 249 heroine’s journey, 249–51, 256 Herzl, Theodor, 104, 115, 117, 280, 287, 288 hillula, 258 hip-hop, 53, 59, 62, 207 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 218–19 historical fiction, 9, 40, 45, 48 Hitler, Adolf, 72, 218, 276; alternate universe, 139; clones, 276 Holocaust, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 87–91, 94–105, 109–13, 138, 146, 167, 181, 186, 193, 195, 196, 270, 272, 276, 283; after, 3, 4, 39, 72, 102, 103, 138, 227; second generation, 90, 91, 98 horror, 12, 14, 171, 173, 180, 232, 270, 275–77, 283, 288 Hulda, 251, 253, 255 humor, 39, 89, 138, 140, 142, 189, 193 I, Robot, 188, 277–81, 283, 287, 288 identity, 19, 26, 32, 59, 82, 89–92, 95, 121, 124, 126, 130, 137, 140–42, 146, 147, 178, 201, 202, 207, 221, 253, 291 immigrants, 4, 32 American, 102, 226 Israeli, 71, 75, 77, 110, 234 In a Small Freezing Town, 193 Incal, 23–33, 291 initiation, 260–61 intersex, 202, 210 Iran, 80, 81, 258, 291 Iraq, 71–76, 83, 84 Isaacs, George, 5 Israel, 4, 13, 40, 53, 65, 68–85, 104, 107, 109–11, 113, 115, 117, 123–26, 131, 146, 191, 192, 202, 215, 227, 230–37, 240, 241, 243,

298

Index

246, 247, 254, 255, 259, 265, 267, 286, 291, 292; fanzines, 102; fiction, 102, 231–38; founding, 71–74, 105; music, 53, 58; naming and slang, 233; Palestinian conflict, 80, 234, 236; place fiction, 75, 233, 235, 237, 238; visit, 260–62; religion, 235; resettlement camps, 75; speculative fiction, 232, 236; television, 49 Italian, 104, 125, 130, 232 Jacobs, Harvey, 229, 245 Japanese, 26, 275 Jerusalem, 53, 57, 58, 59, 73, 79, 82, 84, 105, 115, 116, 118, 123, 155, 192, 234, 235, 237, 240, 248, 260, 262 Jesus, 123, 190–92 Jewels and Ashes, 7–8 Jewish names, 227, 228, 233 Jewish Science Fiction, 39, 50, 89, 99, 115, 182, 183, 228, 239–44, 246, 248, 269, 270 Jewish Sci-Fi Stories for Kids, 102, 227, 244 Jewish Studies, 66, 69, 241, 246, 269, 270, 275, 284 Jews vs Aliens, 227, 231, 239–43 Jews vs Zombies, 11, 227, 231, 239– 43, 246, 247 jinni, 73, 75, 78, 259 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 19–35 Juan Solo, 22, 30, 32, 33 Juchau, Mireille, 6, 15–16 Juda, 49, 190, 292 Judeo-Arabic, 71, 222 Judeo-Persian, 222 Judeo-Spanish, 79. See also Ladino Jung, Carl, 250, 252, 265, 266, 268

justice, 20, 31, 123, 157, 260 kabbalists, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31–35, 53–55, 57, 59, 61, 63–69, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149–51, 153, 158, 160–62, 164, 186, 214, 253, 277 Kafka, Franz, 154, 187, 270, 271, 284 Kafkaesque fiction, 76, 82, 84 Kalyna the Soothsayer, 208, 220 kashrut, 260, 292 Keret, Etgar, 286 Kern, Sim, 206, 221 KGB, 107 Khazars, 37–51 Khrushchev, Nikita, 185 kibbutz, 230, 237 Kiev, 39 King David, 122–27, 131, 132, 252, 255 King Joseph, 38, 40 King Solomon, 126 Kirchheimer, Gloria DeVidas, 257, 261, 265, 268 Korea, 275 Kuttner, Henry, 283–84 Ladino, 222, 226, 227, 241, 244 Lang, John, 5 The Last Kingdom, 121, 122, 125, 127 Latin, 111, 128, 129 Latin America, 20–23, 32, 33, 111, 125, 270, 291 Lem, Stanislaw, 102, 167–83, 187, 291 Lemberg, R.B., 211, 215, 218, 219, 223 Leningrad, 187, 193, 198–200 Levin, Ira, 275, 276, 281, 288 LGBTQ+. See asexual; bisexual; found family; gay; gender; genderfluid; intersex; nonbinary; queer; sapphic fantasy Lilith, 13, 14, 47, 265, 268 Lindbergh, Charles, 87–96, 99, 285 Lispector, Clarice, 285, 287, 289 Lithuania, 104, 105, 109, 110, 229 Liu, Cixin, 25, 29, 34 Loew, Rabbi Judah, 103, 231, 272, 282

Index

Loop of Hysteresis, 188, 190 Lord of the Rings, 124 lost world, 3, 40, 42 Lotz, Sarah, 232, 246 Löwe, Rabbi Judah, 155, 158, 160 magic, 40, 42, 46, 47, 49, 75, 79, 82, 155, 158, 178, 207, 215, 216, 217, 257, 259, 261; historic Jewish, 253; women’s, 80–81, 257–58 Magical Princess Harriet, 203, 219, 221 magical realism, 71, 72, 81, 82, 235, 270, 277, 291 Maimonides, 231, 269 Malamud, Bernard, 228, 241, 244 Malbim, 231 Malzberg, Barry N., 102, 229, 241, 245 Manhattan Project, 284 Mars, 116, 117, 196, 271 Martine, Arkady, 186, 209, 219, 221 Marvel, 271, 274, 284 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, 292 Marx, Karl, 29, 30, 31, 34, 269, 280 masculine, 213, 214, 217, 222, 251, 253, 260 Master and Margarita, 192 mathematics, 105, 108, 142, 144, 146, 154, 179, 181, 193, 196, 197 Matsumoto, Leiji, 26, 29, 34 medieval, 9, 37–38, 48, 54, 78, 103, 126, 155, 157, 163 Melusine, 1, 11 memory, 27, 76, 80, 90, 94, 108, 109, 110, 127, 140, 143–46, 157, 187, 188, 193–97, 205, 208, 263; of the dead, 209 A Memory Called Empire, 209, 219 menorah, 42, 47, 61 mentor, 186, 257, 259, 260, 263 mermaid, 207 Messiah, 19–35, 42, 73, 137, 139, 141, 143–47, 149, 151, 190, 235, 266; false, 20, 21, 147; Wandering, 25, 26, 27

299

Messianism, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 29–31, 34 metafiction, 40, 46 Metropolis, 286 Mexican, 22, 29, 32, 230, 287, 289, 291 Middle East, 40, 45, 72, 147, 215, 231 midrash, 54, 62–67, 69, 192, 254, 263 mikvah, 42, 43, 81, 159 Miriam, 253, 254, 260, 262 mixed-race, 234, 263 Mizrahi, 71, 72, 75, 215, 225, 227, 241, 243 Modernist, 194 monotheism, 143, 144, 150 Montréal, 101, 104–6, 114, 116 moon, 25, 89, 103, 113 Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, 81, 83, 85, 258, 260, 261, 263, 265 Moorcock, Michael, 26, 30, 34, 230, 240, 245, 285 More Wandering Stars, 12, 102, 227, 285 More Zion’s Fiction, 227, 236, 243 Morocco, 79, 232, 257, 258, 263 Moscow, 43, 192, 198–200 Moses, 39, 82, 85, 128, 133, 136, 141, 143, 148, 150, 167, 178–83, 207, 212, 243, 246, 252, 254, 260, 274 music video, 53–56, 62–64 Muslim, 38, 39, 44, 45, 71–74, 78, 123, 222, 234, 238 mystery, 7, 78, 196 mysticism, 35, 45, 53–57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 78, 79, 150, 158, 160, 161, 178, 180, 232, 251, 253, 258. See also kabbalists Nahai, Gina B., 80–83, 85, 258, 265, 268 Naqqāsh, Samīr, 71–78, 83, 84 Nasi, Doña Gracia, 232, 257 nationalism, 73 Native American, 6, 22, 96, 126, 202, 205, 211, 212

300

Nazi, 37, 47–49, 72, 73, 87, 88, 90–92, 95, 96, 98, 107, 109, 110, 139, 155, 169, 195, 206, 218, 219, 223, 236, 276, 284, 286; hunters, 37; propaganda, 72 negiah, 48 New York City, 11, 226, 232 New Zealand, 1–11, 13–15, 17 Nissenson, Hugh, 229, 242, 245 Noah, 128 nonbinary, 202, 207, 211, 213–16 North African, 21, 82, 85 Odessa, 115, 117, 189 Oedipus Rex, 33 Oficio de tinieblas, 22, 29, 33 Oliver Twist, 3 opera, 79 Orthodox Jews, 2, 9, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 210, 229, 259 Orwell, George, 281 Own Voices, 10, 37, 291 Ozick, Cynthia, 283 paganism, 127 Pale of Settlement, 102, 205, 231 Palestinian conflict, 80, 234, 236 parallel worlds, 27, 28, 139, 140–47 Passover, 205, 208, 230 Path into the Unknown, 188, 196, 198–200 patriarchy, 130, 211, 250 People of the Book, 227, 230, 239–43, 246 Peretz, I. L., 103, 104, 115, 117, 235, 242, 247, 272, 287, 288 Persia, 45, 255 Perutz, Leopold, 153–66 Piercy, Marge, 211–13, 218–22, 282, 283, 287, 289 Pilate, Pontius, 191 pirates, 21, 26, 44 planetmind, 210 Plato, 21, 23, 30, 32

Index

The Plot Against America, 87–100, 285 poet, 38, 123, 187, 196, 197 pogroms, 32, 40, 94 Polack, Gillian, 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14–17 Poland, 48, 94, 236 Polish, 32, 65, 69, 95, 169, 229, 232, 291 Pollack, Rachel, 102, 230, 246 Porter, Chana, 204, 221 The Possession, 277 Prague, 103, 138, 139, 148, 149, 154– 63, 231, 272, 273, 282 prayer, 42, 48, 54, 81, 131, 160, 193, 194, 215, 254, 255 prehistoric, 194 Prelude to Foundation, 179 prison, 80, 158, 171, 176 prophet, 45, 73, 78, 123, 179, 250, 252–55, 260–63 The Prophetess, 253, 256, 259–67 prophetesses (Jewish thought), 253 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 92 psalms, 123, 128, 131, 255 publishers, 9, 25, 291 pulp adventures, 45, 142, 147, 269, 270 Queen Esther, 130, 251, 253, 255, 262 Queen of Sheba, 44 queer, 13, 14, 201, 202, 206, 207, 213, 215, 218–21; history, 201. See also asexual; bisexual; found family; gay; gender; genderfluid; intersex; nonbinary; sapphic fantasy Rabbi Shimon, 54, 55, 57–60, 63, 64 Rafael, Rivqa, 1, 11–13, 15, 17 Ragen, Naomi, 257, 258, 265, 268 Rand, Ayn, 280, 281, 287, 288 rap, 53, 59, 62, 64 Rav Metivta, 57 rebirth, 252, 264 Reform Jews, 206, 229 reincarnation, 141

Index

“Robby,” 187–90, 196, 199 robot, 27, 149, 179, 181, 188, 194, 195, 277, 278, 279, 285 Romans, 43, 44, 129, 149, 198, 199 Rome, 104, 105, 107, 110, 279 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 87, 92, 285 Rosemary’s Baby, 275, 277 Rossner, Rena, 232, 242, 247 Roth, Philip, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 97–100, 285 Russia, 40, 94, 134, 136, 142, 154, 198, 215, 231, 277, 281. See also Cold War; Pale of Settlement; Soviet; space race; steppes Ruth, 253 Safed, 80, 232 saints, 78, 121 Sambatyon River, 39, 102, 103, 110 Sapphic fantasy, 203 Sarah, 251, 253, 254 Sasson, Mordechai, 234, 242, 247 Satan, 12, 192 satire, 11, 89, 142, 187, 189, 191, 228, 229, 235, 284, 286 A Scheme of Sorcery, 203, 219, 221 science fiction, 1–9, 14, 19–29, 32, 33, 37, 39, 79, 89, 101–4, 112, 113, 137–40, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 153, 160, 162, 185–99, 222, 225–29, 232–35, 238, 239, 269–73, 277, 279–82, 285, 289 scientific atheism, 191 scientific romances, 102 Scliar, Moacyr, 286, 287, 289 search for Earth, 167, 179–81 The Second Mango, 203, 204, 219 The Seep, 204, 205, 220, 221 Self-determination, 178, 214 Sephardic, 21, 38, 53, 58, 59, 71, 83, 201, 203, 215, 225–27, 231, 241, 243, 257 Serakh, 257, 263 Setton, Ruth Knafo, 257, 263, 265, 268

301

Shababo, Shoshannah, 80, 83, 85 Shabbat, 39, 56, 203, 261, 292 Shekhinah, 56–58, 60, 62, 65, 67, 68, 79, 178, 183, 214 Shelah HaKadosh, 231 shtetl, 37, 40, 226, 272, 277 Shulchan Aruch, 61 Siberia, 193, 195, 197 Silver, Steven H., 39, 50, 89, 97–99, 227, 238, 244 Silverberg, Robert, 102, 140, 149, 228, 244, 288 Sinai, 107, 108, 110, 212 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 229, 245, 272, 273, 274 Six Day War, 191–92 Slovak, 137, 142, 145 Snir, Reuven, 71, 82–84 social media, 207 socialism, 226, 280 Solaris, 49, 51, 167, 168, 176–83 Solomon, Rivers, 207, 208, 218, 220, 221 South Africa, 12, 231, 232, 285 South America. See Latin America Soviet, 39, 102, 104, 107, 113, 140, 185–200, 233; Yiddish writers, 103 Soylent Green, 281 Space 1999, 25, 30, 34 space opera, 202, 209 space race, 185 space travel, 103, 110, 142, 144, 176, 209 Spain, 21, 32, 33, 111, 125, 127, 146, 149, 155, 161, 231, 232. See also Ladino, Sephardic Spector, Elijah Kinch, 208 Spiegelman, Art, 284 Spinrad, Norman, 102, 286 spirituality, 38, 43, 57, 78, 123, 132, 143, 194, 221, 251, 252, 254, 257, 258–61, 262, 264 St. Peter’s Snow, 153, 164, 165 Stalin, Joseph, 43, 185, 193, 195, 281

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Index

Star of David, 126, 132 Star Trek, 110, 286, 291 Star Wars, 33 The Stars of David, 227, 241–45 steampunk, 48 The Stepford Wives, 275, 276, 287, 288 steppes, 37, 39, 40 stereotype, 12, 44, 275 Strange Kaddish, 227, 229, 239–42, 245 Stranger Kaddish, 227, 229, 240, 242, 245, 246 Strugatsky Brothers, 186, 187, 192, 198, 199 suburbs, 11, 12, 13, 230, 277 subversive, 59, 138, 187, 190, 191, 210 Sukkot, 44 survivors, 4, 8, 104 Swirsky, Rachel, 230, 231, 239, 240, 242, 243, 246 Swissa, Albert, 79, 83, 85 synagogue, 3, 13, 40, 42, 59, 62, 72, 76, 77, 149, 159, 193, 205, 206, 210, 259, 272, 274 Taaffe, Sonya, 134, 205, 206, 220, 221 Takács, Bogi, 210, 220, 221 tallit, 260 Talmud, 103, 128, 129, 186, 197, 201, 202, 212, 219–22, 253, 257, 269 Tambour, Anna, 11, 232, 243, 247 Tanenboym, Avner, 102, 115, 116 Tantal, 75, 76, 83, 84 tefillin, 143, 147, 150 Tel Aviv, 65, 67, 111, 155, 233–40 Temple (original), 39, 57 Ten Days of Awe, 159 Ten Lost Tribes, 102, 107, 110 Tenn, William, 227, 228, 243, 244, 269, 284, 285, 287, 289 Tevye, 228, 277, 285 Three Laws of Robotics, 277 thriller, 137, 139, 147, 206 Tidhar, Lavie, 140, 148, 149, 227, 230– 34, 239–44, 246, 247 time jumps, 73

time travel, 12, 101, 103, 107, 108, 137, 139–47, 187, 190, 192, 194, 211, 257, 270, 285, 291 Tisha B’Av, 234 Torah, 38–42, 53–64, 66, 69, 74, 107, 123, 124, 159, 274 trans, 50, 51, 83–85, 113, 116, 144, 182, 201–7, 214–16, 218, 220, 222, 223, 247, 248, 267, 289 trauma, 72, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 141, 194, 206, 208, 218, 291 trickster, 75 Trump, Donald, 88 Turkey, 39, 40, 46, 48, 79, 257 Turtledove, Harry, 102, 285 The Twilight Zone, 286 Twitter, 88 Ukraine, 21, 32, 104, 198, 199, 215. See also Kiev; Odessa; Soviet United Kingdom. See Britain Unorthodox, 292 utopia, 1, 6, 171, 204, 211, 212, 279, 280, 282 vampire, 12, 28, 37, 292 Varshavsky, Ilya, 185–99 Verne, Jules, 101, 102, 116, 226 Vietnam, 285 Viking, 9, 44, 124, 133, 135 Vogel, Sir Julius, 1, 2, 5, 6, 15, 16 Waititi, Taika, 8 Wandering Stars, 7, 12, 102, 148, 150, 227, 228, 239–45. See also More Wandering Stars Weinbaum, Stanley G., 270, 288 Wells, H.G., 101, 104, 108, 116, 117, 133, 135 Wiesel, Elie, 146 The Wind of the Khazars, 39, 40, 49 wish fulfillment, 39, 40, 49, 89 Woman on the Edge of Time, 211, 212, 220–22, 282, 283 Wonder Woman, 37

Index

World War I, 92, 96, 154, 163 World War II, 96, 101, 105, 110, 139, 162, 169, 181, 194, 269, 271; alternate, 47. See also Hitler; Holocaust; Nazi yarmulke, 30, 190, 228–31 Yehudah Ha Levi, 38 Yemenite, 235 Yiddish, 13, 39, 101–18, 188–91, 193, 197, 204, 222, 226–32, 272; science fiction, 102 Yolen, Jane, 7

Yom Kippur, 74, 76, 259 young adult, 9, 204, 257, 264 Zable, Arnold, 7–8 Zeruiah, 126 Zion’s Fiction, 102, 227, 232, 233, 239–43, 246–48. See also More Zion’s Fiction Zionism, 72, 93, 104, 192 Zohar, 53–69. See also kabbalists zombies, 146

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About the Editor and Contributors

ABOUT THE EDITOR Valerie Estelle Frankel is Lexington’s editor of the series Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s the author of over 80 books on pop culture, including Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism; Inside the Captain Marvel Film; and Who Tells Your Story? History, Pop Culture, and Hidden Meanings in the Musical Phenomenon Hamilton. Her Chelm for the Holidays (2019) was a PJ Library book, and now she’s the editor of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, publishing an academic series that begins with Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1945. Jews in Popular Science Fiction is the latest release. Outside academia, she published the popular overview, Discovering Jewish Science Fiction: A Look at the Jewish Influences in Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, DC, Marvel, and so Many More. Once a lecturer at San Jose State University, she now teaches at Mission College and San Jose City College and speaks often at conferences. Come explore her research at www​ .vefrankel​.com. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Cameron Barrows is an independent scholar interested in the interrelationship between aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the history of ideas across mediums. Previous publications include: “Utopia and Biopolitics: The Need for an Ethics in Biotechnology” in Utopia and Biopolitics (2015), “The Mystical and the Beautiful: The Construction off Plotinian Aesthetics of Film” in Plotinus and the Moving Image (2017), and “The Construction of a Queer Rhizomatic Hermeneutics Through an Exploration of Dennis Cooper’s HTML Novels” In Orbis Litterarum (2019). He currently resides in Warsaw.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang served as a Spanish and Latin American studies instructor from 2007 to 2022 at the US Army Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He now teaches Spanish in the Humanities Department at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco. His research interests include film studies, postcolonial/national and globalization studies, graphic novels and science fiction studies. Blanc-Hoang contributed chapters to the following collection of essays and journals: the World Film Locations book series (Intellect Books, 2011–present), Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Comics as History, Comics as Literature (2014), The Camino de Santiago in the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Global Views (2015), French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction (2017), Studies in Comics (2017), Revista Iberoamericana (2017), and more recently Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, Special Issue: Jewish Identities in Latin American Cinema (2019). Bettina Burger is a research assistant and lecturer at the Heinrich-Heine University of Dusseldorf in the field of English Studies. Their dissertation (defended in May 2022) argues that fantasy literature ought to be considered as world literature in its scope and that world literary readings of individual examples of world fantasy are highly productive as well as necessary. They have co-edited a collection on Nonhuman Agencies in The Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel (2021) and have published several articles in the field of speculative fiction. Additionally, they have been a Digi Fellow and project co-leader for “Charting the Australian Fantastic” in 2021, for which they still produce Open Educational Resources. Stephen M. Cohen began reading science fiction at age eight. Meanwhile, he pursued studies in chemistry, receiving his PhD from Rice University. His books include America’s Scientific Treasures (2020), and What’s in a Name?: A Young Person’s Jewish Genealogy Workbook (Hakodesh Press, 2017), and is completing a graphic history of chemistry for World Scientific Publishing. His research interests include chemical terminology in Yiddish and the life of his cousin Haim Kantorovitch. He is a member of the Board of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association. He arranges Jewish choral music, is a professional Judaic calligrapher, and researches his genealogy. He raised both his children to be Yiddish speakers. Steven B. Frankel has worked at several top universities. He’s been published in multiple scholarly projects, including Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 2. Essays on Television Representations,

About the Editor and Contributors

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2013–2019 (2019). He enjoys cosplaying as an airship officer or steampunk mad hatter with a collection of miniature steam engines and paneling and leading workshops decorating ray guns, parasols, and fans. Fittingly, he has his own franke axe. Ilana Goldstein recently completed the first year of Northeastern University’s PhD program in English. She is a graduate from George Washington University's English MA program. Ilana published her Master’s thesis on “Narratives of Second-Generation Holocaust Trauma: Artistic Expression and Jewish-American Commemorative Practices in the Works of Spiegelman, Roth and Potok” in the Spring of 2020. Ilana continues to focus on “postgenerations” in novels, graphic novels and memoirs, and film to explore the narrative fractures that occur when inherited Jewish traumas grate against American identity and cultural practices. Marat Grinberg is a Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He’s the author of “I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011) and Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), along with many academic papers, chapters, and journalistic pieces, and the co-editor of Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2013). He published essays and articles on the Strugatsky brothers and has a chapter on them in his newest book, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines, from Brandeis University Press’s the Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry (2022). An avid reader of speculative fiction, Julie A. Hawkins has always loved researching astronomy and exploring ancient cultures. She has taught English at secondary and tertiary levels, and both studied and worked as an academic at the University of New England, Armidale, in History, Literature, and Communications Studies, where she has enjoyed developing Eco-Lore as a sub-discipline of Folklore. With an MLit in Mediaeval Background, she also holds two doctorates, one in Speculative Fiction and one in Philosophy and Mysticism. She has a young grand-daughter, who inspires her to research ecological philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, with a strong sense of purpose. Akiva Hoffman is a genderqueer writer and scholar of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In 2021, they cofounded the Speculative Wisdom online Jewish book club, dedicated to analyzing speculative fiction through the lens of Torah and Jewish tradition and highlighting work by BIPOC, queer, and disabled authors (www​.tchiyah​.org​/scifi). Previously, they taught linguistics in a California college and lived in southern Africa and the Middle East.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Some of Mara W. Cohen Ioannides’s book chapters are in Judaism and Gender (2021), In Search of the Interior Borderlands: Where Does the Midwest End and the Great Plains Begin? (2019), Who Is a Jew (2014), and Jews and Non-Jews: Memories and Interactions from the Perspective of Cultural Studies (2015). Her articles span Jewish culture with a number of her articles in the Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal (2019), Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies (2017, 2012), Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal (2022, 2017). Eight of Judy Klass’s full-length plays have been produced onstage. Cell was nominated for an Edgar and is published by Samuel French/Concord. Judy wrote a TOS Star Trek novel published by Pocket Books and a YA book published by a small press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Magazine, Albedo One, Space & Time, Satire, Wind Magazine, Terra Incognita, Suffusion, Harpur Palate, Outer Darkness, Phoebe, The Courtship of Winds, Bryant Literary Review, and elsewhere. She wrote about film versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four for Starlog. She teaches courses, mostly for the departments of English and Jewish Studies, at Vanderbilt University. www​.judyklass​.com Evonne Marzouk grew up in Philadelphia and received her B.A. in Writing with a minor in Religious Studies from the Johns Hopkins University. From 2004 to 2014, as founder and executive director of Canfei Nesharim (recently merged with GrowTorah), she developed and shared Jewish teachings and programs about protecting the environment, and co-edited Uplifting People and Planet: Eighteen Essential Jewish Lessons on the Environment (2013). Evonne’s inspirational Jewish novel, The Prophetess, was published in 2019 and she enjoys speaking to schools, Bat Mitzvah programs, synagogues and book clubs about the book’s themes and Jewish lessons. In 2022, she launched a new Heroine’s Journal using Jewish mystical concepts and personal growth principles to empower teen girls and women to grow into all their gifts. Patti McCarthy, PhD, MFA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film & Communication Studies at Whittier College where she teaches film production, film theory, film aesthetics and screenwriting. She has written several essays on the Heroine’s Journey, including. “The Heroine’s Journey: Claire Beauchamp Reclaims the Feminine,” in Adoring Outlander: Essays on Fandom, Genre and the Female Audience (2016) and “Jack Frost and the Heroine’s Journey: Genderbending Back to the Goddess in Rise of the Guardians,” in Fourth Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019). Two of her books on the

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subject, Outlander: The Heroine’s Journey and The Heroine’s Journey for Screenwriters and Filmmakers are slated for future publication. Martine Mussies is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender and Diversity of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She writes her thesis about the Cyborg Mermaid. Besides her research, Martine is a professional musician and desigNerd. Her interests include Asian Studies, autism, medievalism, music(ology), (neuro)psychology, karate, King Alfred and science fiction. For more, visit www​.martinemussies​.nl. Gillian Polack is a Jewish Australian speculative fiction writer, with ten novels and around fifty short stories published. Several have been short-listed for awards and her 2019 novel, The Year of the Fruit Cake, won the 2020 Ditmar award for best novel. Her novels are mostly contemporary fiction with fantastical elements, or science fiction. She was the 2020 recipient of the A. Bertram Chandler (Australian lifetime achievement in science fiction) award. She is an ethnohistorian with a special interest in how story transmits culture, both Medieval and modern. Her current research examines how contemporary speculative fiction novels serve as vectors for cultural transmission. Her most recent book on this subject is Story Matrices: Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in the Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2021). She is an Ambassador for Australia Reads and is affiliated with Deakin University. Michaela Weiss is Associate Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the Institute of Foreign Languages at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. She teaches courses on English and American literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, and Creative Reading and Writing. Her main areas of interest include American Jewish literature, graphic novels, and women’s studies. She has published monographs Jewishness as Humanism in Bernard Malamudʼs Fiction (2010) and Tradice a Experiment: Americká židovská próza v období modernismu (Tradition and Experiment: American Jewish Prose in the Modernist Era, 2020) as well as papers concerning metamodernism, comics, and adaptations. Katharina Hadassah Wendl works as a PhD researcher in the interdisciplinary project “Materialized Holiness. Torah scrolls as a codicological, theological, and sociological phenomenon of Jewish scribal culture in the Diaspora” based at the Freie Universität Berlin. In her work, she focuses on the historical development of Hilchot STaM—Jewish law concerning Torah scrolls, Tefilin and Mezuzot. In the past, she was involved in digitization projects of German-Jewish texts for Sefaria, YIVO and Yad Vashem. She has degrees in Education and Jewish Studies from the University of Vienna.