Yes, dear blog readers, self finished The Gallery of Miracles and Madness last night. She picked up the pace after the halfway point, because it is depressing to read about how a failed artist like Young Adolf Hitler, only minimally educated (He could read and write, obv, but not much. HA! Sounds like another demagogue self knows), could build one idea (cultural degeneracy) into a political platform, which he then used to wield absolute control over, first, his party, then his country, and, ultimately, Europe.
Now she is reading a novel about one of those people Young Adolf hated so much: Mende Speismann, a young woman in a Russian shtetl.
. . .a man tells his wife he is going into town to learn a trade, only to be swept up in the intellectual circles of Odessa; a father swears to his daughters that he will come back with a hefty dowry and, all of a sudden, one hears that he is “kissing the mezuzahs” of Kiev bordellos. Mende knows that only fools find consolation in the knowledge that others suffer the same woes as they, and yet contentment steals over her as she reads, overcoming any sentiment of feminine solidarity that she might have felt with these women. She is not like them, she will never be like them. She has not rushed off to publish advertisements, she has not complained to the leaders of the community, and she has not circulated descriptions of Zvi-Meir Speismann, the man who tore her life to pieces.
The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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