Now hear this:
Did you ever hear the Temptations sing Fiddler on the Roof? Connie Francis cover "Tzena Tzena"? "Raindrops keep fallin' on my head" translated into Yiddish and performed by the Barry sisters? Johnny Mathis' rendition of Kol Nidre?
Did you even know these tunes were recorded?
I've now heard these and more, through:
And you shall know us by the trail of our vinyl : Jewish history as told by the records we have loved and lost by Roger Bennett and Josh Kun
It's a book of album covers showing the world of the Jewish LP. The book is drawn from the collection of Jewish vinyl gathered by kindred spirits Josh Kun and Roger Bennett. They found each other and clues to their own Jewish identities as they pawed through stacks of albums. They pooled their collections, word got around and soon ... their garages were overflowing with vinyl.
• NPR story
• Photo gallery of album covers
• The official website / blog
Think Fast!
The Sunday Boston Globe runs an entertaining feature excerpting recent research in the social sciences.
Here's an interesting tidbit from the November 23rd column:
How to get happier in a hurry
QUICK, READ THIS paragraph out loud as fast as you can! Feel better? You should, if a team of Princeton and Harvard psychologists is right. Motivated by the observation that euphoria is often accompanied by "racing thoughts" among manic individuals, the psychologists conducted a series of experiments - including one that had people narrate the famous "Job Switching" episode of "I Love Lucy," at fast or slow playback speeds - to test whether being forced to think faster results in a more positive mood. Not only was thinking faster significantly associated with positive mood, but there was some evidence that thinking faster inflated self-esteem and made it harder for people to stop talking. Other research by the authors even found that thinking fast about ostensibly depressing things can improve mood too. The authors conclude that "experiences that can succeed in making us think fast may have desirable consequences for affect (and, perhaps, for energy and self-confidence). In a world where we often could use an extra boost to our mood, simple manipulations of thought speed may have valuable practical importance."
Pronin, E. et al., "Psychological Effects of Thought Acceleration," Emotion (October 2008).
In other words, act and the mindset will follow.
Not entirely trusting the glib paraphrase of the popular press, I've been looking up other writings on the topic by the primary author. From oldest to newest,
- Pronin, E., & Wegner, D. M. (2006). Manic thinking: Independent effects of thought speed and thought content on mood. Psychological Science
- Pronin, E., & Jacobs, E. (2008). Thought speed, mood, and the experience of mental motion. Perspectives on Psychological Science
- Pronin, E., & Jacobs, E. & Wegner, D. M. (2008). Psychological effects of thought acceleration. Emotion
Rambles Reviews: Two Recent Reads
I've been doing a lot of reading lately in an effort to wrap my mind around Merchant of Venice, which I saw two weeks ago.
Shylock : a legend and its legacy by John Gross
Fascinating book and strongly recommended to anybody interested in the character.
It's divided into three parts: aspects of the character within the play, a chronological history of interpretations through WW2, followed by thematic chapters on modern history (the play's use in psychiatry and economics, for example).
Then, after nearly 350 pages covering 400 years, Gross reveals his own opinion of the play, as informed by his research. I thought it would be too long to qualify as fair use, but then I found most of that chapter excerpted in the New York Times, albeit intermixed with portions of an earlier chapter on antisemitism.
So, here's what he had to say:
We have no way of knowing what was in Shakespeare's mind when he began writing "The Merchant of Venice." Even if we had, what he intended and what he accomplished are not necessarily the same thing. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale."
Still, we can take a reasonable guess at his intentions, and we can reasonably assume that they were at least partly fulfilled. The remarks that follow simply represent what I believe myself — although I am reinforced in my belief by the fact that many critics and commentators, perhaps the majority, have held roughly similar views.
Shylock is meant to be a villain. There can be arguments about his motives and his personality, but there can be no serious argument about his behavior. Given the opportunity — one that he himself has created — he attempts to commit legalized murder.
He is also a Jewish villain. He did not have to be; Christians were moneylenders, too, and the story would have worked perfectly well with a Christian villain. What would be almost inconceivable, on the other hand, would be for him to be Jewish — in a play written in the 16th century — and for it not to count, except in some minor or attenuated sense. Jewishness is one of his primary characteristics: he emphasizes it himself, and it is emphasized for him by everyone with whom he has dealings.
His Jewish villainies, moreover, are strictly traditional. He is a usurer; he is cunning and cruel; he pursues a vendetta against Christians — or against their noblest available representative. Behind his plot against the altruistic Antonio lie fantasies of ritual murder, ultimately going back to the Jews' supposed role in the Crucifixion.
How much weight Shakespeare would have wanted us to attach to the religious motifs in the play is uncertain. He was writing an Elizabethan comedy, not a medieval morality. But Elizabethan England was a society that was still pervaded by Christian beliefs and assumptions; and Shylock's role, in its main outlines, was a product of Christian folklore. It must be remembered, too, that the playwright went out of his way to impose a religious solution (or so it would have seemed to his audience) on the problem of Shylock. As far as we know, there was no precedent in his sources for the forcible conversion.
As a villain, Shylock was supposed to be a hate figure. As the villain in a comedy, whose designs were thwarted, he was, paradoxically, someone to be taken seriously.
Invested with Shakespearean power and, in time, with Shakespearean prestige, Shylock the Jewish villain became part of world mythology. He may not have added anything to existing stereotypes, but as the most famous Jewish character in literature he helped to spread them and to keep them vigorously alive. He belongs, inescapably, to the history of anti-Semitism.
Yet Shakespeare, though he may often have started out with stereotypes, seldom ended up with them. He individualized Shylock; he provided him with motives — not pseudo-motives, but motives that anyone can understand; he equipped him with a private life, with compelling powers of self-expression, with senses, affections, passions. Shylock might easily have been a small character — someone, say, like the villainous Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. But he is a big character, like Falstaff — someone who bursts the bounds of the play in which he appears.
In building him up, Shakespeare was no doubt first and foremost obeying his professional instincts. A contemptible Shylock would have meant a one-sided conflict, a one-sided conflict would have meant a weak play. At the same time, he did not feel impelled to come up with a Napoleon of crime like Marlowe's Barabas. In his outward circumstances, Shylock remains a prosaic, commonplace moneylender, which according to Elizabethan literary convention should have been enough in itself to ensure that he was irredeemably petty and sordid. That he is so much more than that was put down by James Joyce to an element of concealed autobiography on Shakespeare's part: "He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket." Novelists are allowed to indulge in this kind of speculation, critics and biographers do so at their peril — which does not mean that the idea may not have something in it. We know that in real life Shakespeare was a shrewd and successful businessman, and it is perfectly possible that he had a lurking sympathy with Shylock's economic realism. Antonio's altruism may have been preferable in principle, but that was not the way the world worked.
One thing we can be sure of: he was not a secret twentieth-century liberal, animated by programmatic opposition to racial prejudice. (If he had been, he would have done better not to have written The Merchant of Venice at all.) He simply tried to imagine, within the confines of his plot, and within the limits that his culture set him, what it would be like to be a Jew. But dramatic imagination, when it is pitched at the Shakespearean level, becomes a moral quality, a form of humanism, and I agree with what Israel Davis wrote over a hundred years ago: it was a greater step for him to have created Shylock in the sixteenth century than for George Eliot to have written Daniel Deronda in the nineteenth century. The seeds of sympathy are there. Actors who have portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock may often have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave him their opening.
<snip>
In a sense, it is foolish to complain about the treatment meted out to him. The trouble lies in the very concept of his character, in the moneybags and the knife. How can the other characters fail to hate him? And if the question of his Jewishness did not come into it, I doubt whether the rough handling he receives would cause us much distress.
But that is an impossible "if." In the eyes of the other characters, the fact that he is a Jew is an offense in itself. The ways in which they express their feelings on the subject are brilliantly differentiated — they range from the coarse to the high-minded, from the glacial to the vitriolic; but at no point does anyone suggest that there might be a distinction to be drawn between his being a Jew and his being an obnoxious individual. The result is ugly, whether Shakespeare himself saw it that way or not.
If all this were simply one more nastiness on the part of nasty people, there would be nothing more to be said. What is tragic about the anti-Semitism in the play is that it coexists with so many admirable or attractive qualities. Antonio, Portia and Bassanio; Lorenzo in his speeches at Belmont; even Gratiano, in the speech he makes early on in his own defense ("Let me play the fool") — between them they represent, at their best, some of the leading values of their civilization. Unfortunately, though, their prejudice against Jews is as deeply ingrained as any of their virtues.
It is worth repeating that they are not racists in the full modern sense. Shylock can save himself (in principle) through baptism, and Jessica's genes do not prevent her from having always been a Christian at heart, an anima naturaliter Christiana. But from the perspective of the late twentieth century, neither fact can afford us more than very limited consolation.
Exactly where the play now stands depends on one's wider reading of European history. I personally think it is absurd to suppose there is a direct line of descent from Shylock's enemies to Hitler, but that is because I do not believe the Holocaust was in any way inevitable. I do believe, on the other hand, that the ground for the Holocaust was well prepared, and to that extent the play can never seem quite the same again. It is still a masterpiece; but there is a permanent chill in the air, even in the scenes where Portia presides, even in the gardens of Belmont.
"Scorned my nation" : a comparison of translations of The merchant of Venice into German, Hebrew, and Yiddish by Dror Abend-David
While I found the sections on German and Yiddish translations fascinating, the chapter on Hebrew spent too much time for my tastes on Shylock-like characters, the use of Shylock as an epithet, and recent Israeli politics.
Since this book may be the closest readers will get to some of the referenced works, I would've been much more interested in seeing longer excerpts of the translations -- a dozen versions of "hath not a Jew" or "the quality of mercy," letting me explore the subtle variations, and providing the opportunity to actually learn the speeches in another tongue.
Likewise, ASP's panel discussion on Tuesday night made an intriguing reference to all the references to oaths within the play. I find myself wondering how Jewish adapters translated those terms (into Yiddish and Hebrew), and how those choices might relate to the language used in the Kol Nidre prayer.
It seems unfair for me to criticize a book for not being something it's not, which is why I'm letting you know what to expect.
I found the textual analysis portions of the book were among the most fascinating.
For example, Shakespeare begins the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech by having Shylock rail against Antonio thus:
He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew.
A 1791 German translation achieved a massive shift in tone by changing a punctuation mark:
And what is the reason for all that? That I am a Jew?
[Und warum das alles? Weil ich ein Jude bin?]
As Abend-David elaborates:
Schröder turns Shylock's statement into a question, providing some doubt as to whether Shylock's religion is either a legitimate, or even likely cause for Antonio's conduct.
And it really makes an astonishing difference, just in my own perception of that scene.
I'm still not finished with the subject. Just this weekend, I checked out two more books:
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