Poem for an older Cousin

A Picture from a Nursing Home

When the photo came I had to turn it round

and round before I realized what it was

or who, and when I recognized you, I found

my tongue gone dry and shed the tears that pass

all understanding ; my memory produced

another image, more than half a century before,

a teenage girl, slender, smile induced

by pride and confidence, on skates—the door

once opened, the years poured out, your stay with us,

the family who protected you at first,

the boy I was, merely a child, the fuss

I could not understand, how you were cursed

and loved ; but always after you were there for me

when no one else would come—only now I see.

Life after Boro Park, Part 2

Sharing an old Cadillac

One of my roommates in Alfred owned a huge late 1930s Cadillac.  When I say huge I mean quite large and heavy, sort of like a military tank.  It had descended to him through some family connections and he thought it a good idea to bring to university.  This despite the fact that he really didn’t know how to drive and could not afford to pay for the gas to run it.    Nevertheless, it was an automobile that, in isolated, often snowbound western New York State was something not to be sneezed at, especially for someone in his early twenties and a college boy to boot.  Today someone might describe it as a girl magnet.

So my roommate and I made a deal.  I would keep the Cadillac filled with enough to petrol to facilitate our needs and in return I could drive it on certain days when he, let us call him George, did not require a vehicle.  Now to be most particular, the bargain also included that we both would drive to the big grocery store in nearby Hornell once a fortnight or so when we would stock up on food and other domestic items not available in the Alfred, which was then still classified as a fourth-class village.  Otherwise, as you can probably guess from other sections of my memoirs, that our needs, requirements and casual social activities were fairly minimal.  In brief, at best once a month, George and I would arrange to go with our friends, and even more rarely female persons, to the movie house in Wellsville on what we hesitated to call a date.  As the only one of us who could drive, I acted as chauffeur.  Having no other need for the car, it was theoretically mine all other days, meaning everyday, except that, because of the lack of funds to provide enough funds to fill up the tank for more than one or two excusrsions for shopping and going to the cinema, I had no reason to drive the Cadillac.  Or, to put it still another way, it remained unused for approximately 96% of the time. 

If anyone, such as the village’s one policeman ever asked who owned that big black monster parked outside on the street where we rented the small top floor of a house, the answer would be George. However, if this officer of the law should then request that the vehicle be moved in order for some sweeping of leaves to be effected or for the sake of pleasing an actual resident of the town who found it blocking his own driveway, it was my duty to drive the car to some other part of town for several hours, and George would have to explain, if he were alone when the doorbell rang, that he had loaned me the keys and it would be necessary to wait until I returned from some class or other.  As everything ground very slowly back in those days and in that neck of the woods, provided the car were actually shifted sometime in the next three or four days, all was well.  Aside from an occasion when, for reasons that need no explicit explanation, George found himself in need of a place to meet in private with a girl from a course he was taking, and invited her to discuss important intellectual matters while sitting together in the Cadillac for several hours one evening, our arrangements worked well.

Now I want to tell you about what happened one late autumn evening when I drove a whole gangful of our friends, mostly male but two females as well, to see a film.  The night was cold and dark.  You could feel that snow was going to fall, but first would come a kind of thin, pointed frozen rain.  After the film, we all piled into George’s old Cadillac for the ride back to Alfred.  With so many people in the car, it was pleasantly warm, though everyone could still feel the needles of ice that had punctuated our walk from the movie house to the street before we shut the doors tightly behind us.  The engine started up without a problem and the lights were working and the windscreen wipers clacked back and forth properly as we began the journey. 

But as soon as we left the little town and entered on the highway through the countryside, it seemd the darkness was thicker and heavier than we could recall from similar rides.  More than that, it seemed that the headlights were dimming slowly and could not pierce the icy air in front of us.  I drove slowly and carefully, glad that there were no other vehicles on the road, though I would have liked it if someone with good bright lights was ahead of us to guide the way.  Everyone was quiet in the car.  Boys and girls huddled up to one another, happy to be so close, and all I could hear was slow heavy breathing in the back and next to me. 

That is, until I started to hear a rumbling under the car and could feel a series of irregular bumps.  I drove even more slowly and tried as hard as I could to look out in front to see if there were something on the road.  The headlamps were now virtually out, a mere pale pair of yellow cones that barely extended a foot or two before me.  I could also hear the stinging pricks of icy rain falling against the windscreen.  The wipers flapped back and forth to no avail.  I slowed down to a halt.  Waited.  Listened.  Peered out with all my might.  Then, I turned off the engine. I listened to the sound of the rain.  Everything was pitch dark around us.  No one stirred in the car, as they snuggled up sleepily to each other.  Someone seemed to whisper « Whasa’ matter ? » Then total silence again.

I opened the door carefully, twisted around, took out a flashlight from the glove compartment, and got out of the vehicle.  As quietly as I could, I shut the door : clump !  « Who’s’at ? » and then again silence.  The rain fell in almost invisible strings of ice.  The ground seemed hard but strangely uneven.  I turned on the torch and looked down.  There was no road.  This was dirt, hard, thick dirt.  I walked a few steps, stretched out my hand with the light, and tried to see something.  The thick, hard dirt went on and on.  This was no road.  This was a field.  A few naked stalks of last autumn’s corn dotted the ground. 

The car door opened.  Someone stepped out. The door slammed. 

 « Whas’ going’ on here ? » a sleepy voice said.

It was George.

The darkness is so deep I would not have recognized him as other than a strange silhouette carved into the air except his voice, his intonations, are unmistakable.  He is, I know, a brilliant young man, well-read, and aware of many things about culture ; but also he is more shy than anyone I have ever known,  In a sense, he has come to depend on me for many things, but at the same time, he is aloof, vague and mysterious. 

« We left the road somehow and now we’re in the middle of somebody’s field. »

« Just imagine, » he said.

I stamped my foot on the hard ground.  Little cracks of ice appeared.

When I do such a thing, to stamp my foot, it is, I think, to test if the world is really there still, and I often find myself wondering if the universe would continue to exist if I closed my eyes and kept them shut for a long time.  I fear that somehow everything will disappear and open my eyes quickly, stamp my foot on the floor of a room, in the middle of the street, or, as here, in the middle of a field where for some strange reason the car has planted itself.

« What should we do now? » asked George.

His voice is plaintive.  But I am never sure, when he says such things—and he does often, always unexpectedly—on which word he places the emphasis, or perhaps he has no emphasis to make at all.  When he says « we » in such a statement, I don’t think he means we two, the roommates that have found each other after two years at college ; nor does he mean the whole pack of boys and girls still in the car, those whom I know come together often, partly out of our shared need to remind ourselves we are New Yorkers and Jews and not at all like most of the students at Alfred who are so very different and never let us forget that, even if they have long since saying so out loud.   There is another « we » somewhere else in his mind.  It is a hidden identity.

« Where is the road ? »

My question, of course, is plain and simple.  No one needs to decipher the words.  The fact that we are lost is evident.

The icy rain has stopped.

« It’s really cold.  I am going back in. »

When he says this, George seems like a normal person because it is cold and the best thing to do to keep warm is to go back inside the car, to be close to the others ; and yet, I don’t think that’s what he means at all. He feels a different kind of cold.  The place he wants to go back inside does not mean the car, or at least not in any simple sense. 

« We need to find the road. »

« In the morning, » he said. 

The door opened and shut.

« I’m going to find the road. »

Everything was silent again.  Now that I know that we are on solid ground and that we are in  some farmer’s field, I am pretty confident the road is not too far away.  I point the torch on the ground, so that I walk in a circle of dim light and proceed slowly in one direction.  It doesn’t matter.  Eventually there has to be a fence, and beyond that a road, if not the highway then some other that will lead us to where we can drive back to the university. 

Then off in the distance I see a light.  It seems to appear and disappear and yet get brighter for a while, and then it goes out altogether.  It was a car and the road goes up and down and when the light disappears the car has turned away.  But, yes, I realize, there is a road out there. 

So I walk back the way I came from only a little fearful that the Cadillac with my friends will have disappeared into the blackness, that I may have miscalculated my turn, that the the world is not as solid and real as I hoped.  But in a few moments, I come upon it, a large black mass, and I shine my torch on it to find the door, open it slowly, and want to announce my discovery : we are safe, the road is nearby, so we can go home.  They are all asleep, even George.

When I turn the ignition, the engine splutters a little, but we are safe.  I switch on the headlamps and they are there, albeit a bit dim, so I release the brakes, put the car into gear and turn the wheel hard.  I gingerly go around so it faces the way we came from and then proceed cautiously forward.  The ground rumbles underneath, now in a comforting way.  No one stirs, not even to say « Whasa’ matter ? » or « Whas ‘ g’on. » 

I see the clouds parting, or rather, I see the cliuds, because before the sky was all dark and continuous with everything else.  Now that I can see greyish lumps against the black I know we are going to be home soon. There is a fence and it has an opening which I drive through.

In half an hour, we come to the little village of Alfred, with its street lamps and its paved streets.  Everyone wakes up.  I leave them off in front of the post office, so that everyone can find their way back to dormitories or the houses they rent.  Then George and I drive down to our place just around the corner.

As we separate for the night, I ask George.  « Well, did you like the movie ? »

« Someday, » he says, «  you must tell me what it was all about. »

« Good night, » I say.

Life after Boro Park, Part 1

My Adventures as a College Boy

By the roaring roaring banks

Of the old Kanakadea

They were a strange lot, those Victorians who went to university in the late nineteenth century in upstate New York, or as the anthem went “’neath the watchcare of sentinel pines.”  In another little ditty, whose key lines are cited above, they sang the praises of the tiny stream—you could stand with one foot on either bank with no trouble stretching—as though it were a mighty mountain torrent.  Somehow in Alfred, in the southern tier of the Niagra Frontier, not too far from Corning and a bit further from Rochester, out in the New York side of the Pennsylvania oil fields they imagined themselves to be like the Ivy League schools nearer to the Atlantic.

Of the Kanakadea I recall one little incident.  Coming down from a big wooden structure that served as the main lecture theatre, after our eight am lecture on Western Civ (as it was known), we all jumped across the stream and then hurdled a small wooden fence in order to arrive at our next destination, the small red brick building in the valley below.  One of the young women in our group did not quite negotiate the trip over the fence and flopped down in a most awkward posture.  She then stood up and nervously declared to all of us staring in wonder: “Thank goodness for pantyhose.”  As this was in the early 1960s and we were all still somewhat lagging in whatever advanced morals and technology enjoyed by our counterparts in larger universities and in bigger population centers, we were startled, or at least I was.  First, because for a member of the female sex to speak out with gusto about an embarrassing situation was rather unique. Second, because it was the  first time I had ever heard anyone of any sex say the word “pantyhose” in public and, though it had appeared in newspaper advertisements, this gave me the first glimpse—excuse the wordplay—of what they actually were.  Third, because though everyone laughed raucously with and at her after she made her declaration, it was only later, speaking in confidence with a classmate, that I understood what she had been saved from.  It was good that this discovery was made somewhat later in the relative privacy of the men’s toilet because as the implications of what she had said sunk in I turned a rather bright red.  Such was our, or my, affinity with the weird Victorian era which had confused the thin little trickle of the stream running through the valley with some song-worthy river, and our old-fashioned university with those which were the subject of many early films about college life.

Now you may well wonder how a naïve Jewish boy from Boro Park in Brooklyn became a student in this “pioneer college of western New York” fame, if for anything, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for almost nothing, except that, as having been founded (with a land-grant) as a Seventh Day Baptist (not Adventist) theological seminary it had the privilege of a post office that was closed on Saturday but open on Sunday, the only one, so we were told, in the United States.  It also had a small nursing school somehow affiliated with some teaching hospitals in Corning and Rochester, and thus was properly a university rather than a college, despite the fact that it had no graduate program to give Masters of Doctoral degrees.  In addition, thanks to the proximity of Corning and its properly world-famous pottery works, the New York State University system located its School of Ceramics on the campus as part of Alfred.  This was quite unlike the School of Agriculture located on the other side of the village named Alfred; it was a separate institution altogether.  Yet the School of Ceramics was the making of the university in the sense that with the Soviet launching of Sputnik and the inauguration of the space race, the United States government poured a lot of money into Alfred in order to promote ceramics engineers needed because the nose-cones of rockets were made of ceramics.  To train such engineers, the money also went into the development of the departments of mathematics and physics, and into the other departments there to fill out those bachelor and master degrees. 

In brief, as though anything I set out to say can be brief, by the time I was finishing high school and my father was to choose which university I would go to, since Alfred had had a meteoric rise in standing to one of the top ten small colleges (read: universities) in the north-eastern United States, excluding the Ivy League in New England.  It had two other advantages appealing to my father, and perhaps also my  mother—though she probably would have preferred me to go to Brooklyn College so I could stay home: it was a rural institution and my father thought that I should have the advantage he never had of experiencing life in a small town among mountains and forests.  It also had dropped its formal exclusion of Jewish students and staff, something typical of rural colleges.  In fact, this part of New York State, swinging out over the long flat Pennsylvania border towards the Great Lakes—a permanent disaster area in terms of poverty and virtual ghost-towns once the oil wells proved unprofitable in the early twentieth century—this was a hotbed of the Klu Klux Klan.  As in some mid-western states, this part of New York had been where the Klan most flourished, rather than in the border states of the south, as is usually supposed.  One of the fraternities on the campus kept a remnant of that fact in its title as Klan Alpine. 

After my father told me that that was where I wanted to go and I duly sent in my application, along with a very few others, including Brooklyn College, I was accepted, and I then discovered that a few of my friends from Stuyvesant were also going there, probably because their parents had told them that that was what they wanted to do.  So in the autumn my parents drove me in a packed car up to the “valley so fair/ Where the forest trees share/ Dominion o’er hillside and glen.”  I was to be a freshman amongst a small contingent of other “Jew Yorkers” in this nice WASPish school of higher education.  There were actually so few of us that young men from local communities attending the university came running to see if I or my fellows had horns, goat’s feet and other marks of our Jewish heritage.  We probably disappointed them greatly because they mostly avoided us for the next four years, with a few exceptions.

The main exception for avoiding us came when we were confronted.  It happened two years later, during our attempt—that is, the small group of Jewish students who decided to support NAACP in the Civil Rights movement by carrying signs in front of local fast-food chains in nearby Wellsville and Hornell—to demonstrate in public.  As this group of about twenty of us walked back and forth, holding up signs saying things such as “Integration” and “No More Jim Crow,” a bus carrying football players from Alfred University’s team drove up and disgorged a crowd of two dozen or so rather drunken young men.  They streamed across the street and started pushing us around, throwing some punches, and saying rather rude things about our protest march.  As this went on, I noticed that the President of the University and the local Police Chief were standing together down the road, smiling and whispering to one another.  All this went on for some fifteen minutes or so.  Then someone somewhere blew a whistle, the brave athletes desisted from their violence, and returned to their bus.  We looked about, somewhat stunned, but could no longer see the officials from Alfred.  It was then decided that we had made our protest and, as no one was seriously injured, aside from a few blackened eyes, some bruised arms, and a little torn clothing, we would return to the university. 

Old Thoughts from a Distant Youth

Learning the Art of Writing Poetry

By Feeling Sorry for Yourself and

Sitting all Alone in the Student Café,

Alfred University, 1959

Many years ago, when I would sit alone,

sip tea or cocoa in the corner of the room,

when outside rain and sleet, when wind would groan

through the valley, and all the fates would loom

around the wheel deciding how to  wind

my fate, a dream would linger in my mind, the kind

that innocence unravels when it thinks it’s sinned,

but you also know is empty, like the rind

around a rotten orange shrunk in itself,

and I would sit there feeling sorry, writing verse

about unspoken words and hope an elf

would suddenly spring up: If you immerse

yourself in idle fancies, you are lost,

and I would answer, Someday, with fingers crossed.

Better to have Shakespeare on your side than against the Jews

Although I have just published on my own BLOG and on EEJH a longish essay on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, I am drawn back to the topic for a few more comments by a piece composed by Lev Raphael for the online Huffington Post.[1]  Raphael is himself commenting on a certain scholar named John Hudson whose bona fides are apparently somewhat vague and whose argument in Reform Judaism that all of some of Shakespeare was written by Aemelia Bassano Lanyar.[2]  As much as Raphael treats Hudson in a rather mocking tone, treating this suggestion of female authorship of the Great Bard’s work as rather cranky, to say the least, and dismissing out of hand her claim to Jewish identity because scholars have emphasised her father as a secret Jew.

Since I don’t know this John Hudson nor for that matter Lev Raphael, I will try to avoid the temptation to speak of them in the same way as dilettantes, and rather look at some of the points raised in a more serious way.  In so doing, I will attempt something else, honouring the memory of Florence Amit, an Israeli artist and amateur student of Shakespeare, who died a couple of years ago.  Though we never met in Be’er Sheva, where she lived and produced her art, I did have many years of contact through emails, and on several occasions published her essays on The Merchant of Venice with its argument that Shakespeare, if not a Jew himself, had learned about Judaism—Italian traditions—through his friendship with the Italian musicians who had come to Henry VIII’s court and remained in England for many years after.[3]  That Aemelia Bassano Lanyar grew up in that environment of Crypto-Jews and secretly practicing Jews is a theory I learned about first from Germaine Greer’s studies of women poets in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.  It is now much more than idle speculation than Lanyar was the Dark Lady of the Shakespearian sonnets.  What Florence Amit did was to extend this line of thought to see what would happen if we started to read all of Shakespeare as though he knew quite a bit about Jewish traditions through those Italian connections, and even at times as if some of the key speeches in plays like The Merchant made more sense if it was assumed that they had been composed in Hebrew.[4] 

While I can’t go as far as seeing that Shakespeare himself was a Jew or a child or grandchild of conversos at any time since the Expulsions of the 1290s, I don’t find the suggestion that he could have learned some Hebrew on the pillow, as one says, and a fair bit about Jewish customs and practices from conversations, dinner parties and other visits amongst the not all-that-hidden Italian Jewish musicians and later-comers from silk-merchant families.  The reason scholars have backed off such a picture of the Bard’s involvement with the Jews of London derives, if not strictly by their snobbish rejection of any ideas proposed by non-academic scholars and especially those who don’t toe the line of post-modernist ideology, but their unquestioned assumption that since Shylock is a figure of foul, demonic wickedness, then Shakespeare must have been an anti-Semite, at least as rabid as his young rival Christopher Marlowe who Jew of Malta shows definite animus towards the Hebrew people and their religious traditions.  To merely hint that William Shakespeare may have been taunted into writing an answer to Kit Marlow’s horrible ranting piece of anti-Jewish smut seems to receive no encouragement.  As good a reason as any, let us venture, is that Shakespeare had a Jewish mistress and a lot of Jewish friends.  Of course, as he had done with a Moor in Venice, Shakespeare was interested in exploring cultural and racial difference itself as motif for tragedy, so that one need not wonder whether the author were a secret African to understand how he came to write Othello. 

Another stumbling block for critics approaching the presence of Jews in Elizabethan and other pre-modern literatures is that they tend on the whole not to understand what they are supposed to be looking for when they talk about Jews.  It is not that they are anti-Semites (though all too often many are, such as T.S. Eliot), but that they assume either, if they were good Christians that Judaism is a religion of the Old Testament and its adherents are hide-bound literalists—taking the letter of the Law rather than the spirit as the essence of Scriptures—or, if they are would-be cultural anthropologists, that all Jews always were what they see when they look down the hallway at their colleagues: Americans with a background in Ashkenazi East European Yiddishkeit.  Even too many contemporary Jews who specialize in English Literature have so far left their ancestral home that they know about their grandparents and further back from comic shticks on television and old movies. 

To me, it seems that we come close to understanding Shakespeare’s imagination best when we see it, first, and properly in terms of the conceits, ingenious emblems, and Baroque distortions of the seventeenth century artists and poets, but also when we pay attention to modern Sephardic authors who express themselves in terms quite different to those of anxiety-ridden Yiddish writers and their followers.  Here, for instance, are the words of Haim Sabato in his “Agnon Memorial Lecture” given at Beit Agnon in Jerusalem:

I followed in Agnon’s footsteps in immersing my stories out in the traditional sources…but I felt a few layers were completely missing from his language.  I wondered, where are the wordplays of the Sephardic kabbalists, what about the homiletics of the Aleppo scholars, the halachic terminology of Moroccan rabbis, the Aramaic translations of Yemenite Jews, and the Ladino scholars of Jerusalem who mix Midrash and Bible, dip it in Rashi, and create Ladino idioms.  I was zealous for them, so their language not be forsaken and lost. [5]

That is not to say that Shakespeare—or his poetic girl friend Aemelia Bassano Lanyar—deliberately steeped himself in Sephardic culture and sought to be a part of its ocean of wisdom, as a true chacham would do.  But if the Bard did become familiar with Judaism through his London-based Italian connections, he would come out more on the side of Haim Sabato than S.Y. Agnon, the great Yiddish-Hebrew author and winner of an early Novel Prize in Literature.  What the Sephardic writer of short stories claims as his goal, a recapturing and modernization of Jewish norms of thinking, feeling, remembering and articulating his imaginary experiences, certainly sounds familiar to those who study Shakespeare’s plays and those who see them performed well.

An approach to the Jewishness that someone like Shakespeare might have experienced in London during the last half of the sixteenth century means knowing about Italian Jews, Sephardi and Mediterranean culture, and the history of the small illegal clusters of families and communities of Jews who either lived under the radar of ecclesiastical courts after the 1290s or who came to England under various disguises thereafter, many escaping the Inquisitions of Spain and Portugal and their various European and colonial territories.  It may be too much to say that that no Jews were able to live on the Scepter’d Isle until Oliver Cromwell sort of let them back in around 1660—there was no formal repeal of the Expulsion orders, only a tacit understanding to turn a blind eye to the presence of Jewish merchants in the City of London.  It is also overly nice to say that if Judaism and its rabbinical institutions were illegal in England anyone who thought of him or herself as Jew was a hypocrite, a heretic or a self-deluded fool.

Surely it would be better to have someone like Shakespeare on our side than to cast him off as an enemy because theatrical and critical history continue to misinterpret him in the reflection of their own prejudices. d lost.[5]

---

NOTES

[1] Lev Raphael, “Was Shakespeare Jewish?” Huffington Post at (28 February 2010) http://huffingtonpost.com/ lev-raphael/was-shakespeare-jewish_b_662765.  But see also Jennifer Lipman, “Shakespeare ‘hid his Jewish toors’ – or He would have been Bard” The JC.com  (02/09/2012) http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/63337/ shakespeare-hid-his jewish-roots-or-he-would have-been-bard (you may groan at the bad pun) and also http://www.yetnews.com/articles/ 0,7340,L-3309633.00.

[2] With a movie out making the rounds recently to say that the Shakespearean canon of plays and poems had to be by someone like Roger Bacon or Sir Philip Sydney or another well-educated bigwig of the time and not a simple, barely educated actor like the Shake-a-spear or –lance from Stratford-on-Avon, it is again fashionable to turn to women authorship (as Virginia Woolfe did back in the twenties when she called on Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway to claim the honours: but she only got the second best bed in Will’s will for her efforts) or others who think Kit Marlow wrote them, only pretending to have died in a duel so as to closet himself in anonymity and reap the honors by proxy).  Ben Jonson, in one of his rare priggish and snobbish moods, wrote about his popular rival as having “only small Latin and less Greek,” meaning he didn’t go to university himself where he could have learned a lot of Latin and some Greek and, even, as it was fashionable to to know how to read the Old Testament in the original, some Hebrew.  The only satisfactory answer to all this mad speculation is to say that if Shakespeare didn’t write his plays as everyone in his time assumed he did; it must have been someone else with the same name, no matter where he came from.

[3] Norman Simms, “William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; or, The Jew of Venice” on East European Jewish History  (Part 1, 26 July; Part 2, 28 July; Part 3, 28 July; Part 4, 29 July;   Part 5, 31 July ; Part 6, 31 July ; Part 7, 1 August; Part 8, 2 August; Part 9, 12 August)  online ateejh@yahoogroups .com; and posted on the blog site “Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations.”  References to Amit’s essays that appeared in Mentalities/Mentalités are given in that nine-part essay.

[4] Her family had her monograph produced as an electronic book and it is now available as Three Caskets of Interpretation (AuthorHouse 2012).

[5] Cited by Daniel Bouskila, “A Sephardic S.Y. Agnon,” JewishJournal.com (18 April 2013) online at http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/print/a_sephardic_s.y._agnon.

     Here is the list of publications going back to my university days and first full-time lectureship at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg).  I have left out hundreds of short book reviews that appeared in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, etc., as well as poems, short stories and odd little reports and jokes.  The earliest extant piece I can find was a front-page article in the Stuyvesant High School newspaper from 1960.

1960-1969.

Poems.  Alfred, NY: Alfred Sun, 1962.

Review. "An Idiot Joy" Far Point 2 (1969), 63-68.

1970-1979

"Notes Towards a Poetics of Alliterative Verse, William of Palerne", in Proceedings of the Third AULLA Congress, Monash University, August, 1970, ed., J.R. Ellis (Melbourne, 1972) pp. 362-381.

"Some Social and Theoretical Aspects of Late Medieval Drama in London", Parergon  4 (1972). 10-19.

"Comedy as Sentimental Deflation in 'Floris and Blaunchefleur'" (synopsis) in Proceedings and Papers of the XIV AULLA Congress at Otago University, ed., K.I.D. Maslen (Dunedin, 1972), p.250.

Time and Time Again.  (Poems) Dunedin:  Cavemen Press, 1973.

William of Palerne:  A New Edition of a Middle English AlliterativeRomance, Philadelphia:  Norwood, 1973. repr. 1975, 1978, 1980, etc. (Published version of Ph. D. thesis of Washington University [St Louis, MO], 1969.)

Ritual and Rhetoric:  An Annotated Bibliography on the Intellectual and Ceremonial Backgrounds to Middle English Literature (ed.) Philadelphia: Norwood, 1973.

Handbook to the Romanian Studies Conference at the University of Auckland in August 1973 (ed.) Hamil-ton:  New Zealand Romanian Cultural Association, 1973.

"Medieval Theatre in London", Playbill (Hamilton, 1973) 16-17 and 19.

Supplement to the Romanian Studies Conference Handbook (ed.) Hamilton: New Zealand Romanian Cultural Association, 1973.

"A Preliminary Report on the Church at Țiganeşti", Miorița  2:1 (1974).

"A Funeral at Țiganeşti", Miorița  2:2 (1974), 2-12.

"Chaucer's Allusion to Jack Straw", Parergon  8 (1974), 2-12.

"From Stasis to Freedom in Mihail Sadoveanu's The Hatchet", Mosaic (Winnipeg), 7:2 (1974), 45-56.

"A Glimpse at Romania", New Zealand Monthly Review 169 (1975), 15-16.

"Poet, Critic, Teacher", English in New Zealand (September, 1975), 51-66.

"Romania and Maori Cannibalism", Miorita  2:2 (1975), 74-75.

"Multi-Cultural Education in Romania:  A Comparison", Multi-Cultural School 2 (1975), 36-39.

"Partenidon, the Disappointed Prince of Greece--Some Social and Literary Backgrounds to the English Alliterative William of Palerne" Revista de Istorie si Teoria Literatura  24 (1975), 57-65.

A Bibliographical Index of All Books, Stories, Poems and Articles by Romanians and About Romania published in New Zealand between 1970 and 1975 (ed.) Hamilton:  Outrigger, 1975.

Other Times, Other Places. (poems)  Hamilton:  Outrigger, 1975.

Review of Richard Axton's European Drama of the Early Middle Ages  in Parergon 13 (1975), 51-56.

"Review of Jamieson's Marxism and Form", Cahiers roumains d'études littéraires 5 (1975), 121-124.

"Romania's Chaucer, Mihail Sadoveanu:  A Study of Hanu Ancutei"Synthesis  2 (1975), 181-197.  Reprinted as "Mihail Sadoveanu, un chaucer al României:  Studiu despre Hanu-Ancuti", trans. into Romanian by Ileana Verzea, Secolul XX, nr. 11-12 (1981) 145-154.

"Calinescu the Critic", Miorita  3:1 (1976), 24-33.

"Dressing Our Literary Window:  Book of the Month Review of Vincent O'Sullivan, ed. Anthology of Twentieth Century New  Zealand Poetry, second edition".  New Zealand Bookworld, 31 (December 1976), 22.

editor, Judith Wright:  An  Appreciation.  Hamilton:  Outrigger and University of Waikato, 1976.

"Chaucer and the Fourteenth Century Englishman's Awareness of  'Walakye'", Balkan Studies  17:2 (1977).

"Peasant Rebellion as a Folk Language", Miorita  3:1 (1977) 16-22.

"Clamor Horrendissimus - The Sacred Shout in Folklore, Myth and Literature", in Dialogue on Religion - New Zealand Viewpoints 1977  eds. Peter Davis and John Hinchcliff (Auckland University:  Chaplain's Office, 1977), pp. 75-81.

"Luceafarul by Mihail Eminescu:  An Introduction to the National Poet of Romania", Miorita  3:2 (1977), 100-123.

"Conversation with Norman Simms (and Bah Kah Choon)"  Commentary  n.s. 2:4 (1978).

"Problems of an Editor", in Papers from the 45th Conference New Zealand Library Association ... comp. by A.P.U. Millett (Wellington, 1978), pp. 147-151.

"Fair Rosie" and Other Tales of New Zealand Folklife (editor), Hamilton:  Outrigger and Waikato Technical Institute, 1978.

"Imitating the Corpus-Christi: In Search of a Secular Self", in Religious Studies in the Pacific, eds. John Hinchcliff, Jack Lewis and Kapil Tiwari (Auckland University, 1978), pp. 163-175.

"Ned Ludd's Mummers Play" Folklore  89:2 (1978) 166-178.

"A Maori Literature in English.  The Prose Writers, Part 1:  Patricia Grace", Pacific Quarterly  3:2 (1978) 186-199.

"Maori Literature in English:  An Introduction", World Literature Today  52:2 (1978) 223-228.

"A Maori Literature in English.  The Prose Writers, Part 2:  Witi Ihimaera", Pacific Quarterly 3:3 (1978) 336-348, reprinted in Contemporary Literary  Criticism. eds,  Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1988).

Review of Alexandru Duţu,  Romanian Humanists and European Culture  in Miorța  5:2 (1978), 206-211.

Intersecting Worlds.  (Poems) Hamilton:  Outrigger, 1979.

"Alexandru Duţu and the History of Mentalities", Comparative Literature Studies  XVI:3 (1979), 250-261.

"'Scotch Cattle':  Una forma gallese di spettacolo.  Il dramma folkloristico alla luce della storia del teatro in Europa", Biblioteca Teatrale 23/24 (1979), 117-131.  (Translated by Cesare Molinari.)

Review of James S. Fu, Mythic and Comic Aspects of the Quest in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature  6:4 (1979), 440-443.

Two Fin-de-siecle cases Featuring Jews

Over the past few months, because of its centenary, the case of Mendel Beilis has been the subject of several conferences and seminars, as well as television documentaries in the Ukraine.  Like the Dreyfus Affair a decade earlier in France (from 1894 through to 1906), the allegations against Beilis and the charge that he was responsible for the ritual murder of a young boy, became a cause célèbre and exposed the deep and divisive roots of anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia. 

There are a few significant differences between these two instances in which a Jew is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and brought to trial.  Alfred Dreyfus was a young military officer on his way up through the ranks and was serving in the intelligence service of the French Army when he was charged with treason and espionage: a single document indicated that someone in the department had offered to sell state secrets to the German Embassy in Paris.  As soon as Dreyfus’s name appeared on a list of possible suspects, the men in charge noticed he was a Jew—the only one in the department—and that was enough to make him seem guilty.  A military tribunal held a trial in which basic procedures were ignored or perverted, not least withholding evidence from the defence lawyer, but also including teasing references to other documents too sensitive to be exposed in an open court.  As a Jew, Dreyfus was found guilty because it was unanimously decided that no Jew could be loyal to the French Republic.  Later after his conviction, when he was sent off to Devil’s Island in isolation for the term of his life, various forgeries were constructed to bolster the case in the event a retrial was ordered—as it was indeed in 1899; so that, although a civilian panel of judges had found the whole first court martial unsafe and ordered a second court martial to clear Dreyfus’s name, when that tribunal met in Rennes, not only were all the forgeries presented, but many witnesses perjured themselves, and thus the defendant was found guilty a second time, albeit with extenuating circumstances and no unanimous verdict.  Within a few days, however, a new government more sympathetic to the Dreyfus cause, issued a pardon which was accepted on the grounds of poor health and the possibility of Dreyfus pursuing further legal steps to clear his name fully.  Throughout the period from 1894, Dreyfus’s family, especially his brothers and sisters, and his wife Lucie, pressed for a re-trial.  Thanks to Emile Zola’s public letter J’accuse (I Accuse) in 1898, more and more Frenchmen and women pushed to quash the conviction, so that eventually by 1906 there was a nearly complete exoneration of Alfred’s name. 

Though many of the principle participants in the outrageous cover-ups and false testimonies died before that exoneration or were granted pre-emptive pardons, there were three major consequences.  First, as public opinion turned increasingly towards belief in Dreyfus’s innocence, the government of France shifted radically to the left, to an anti-clerical position, which resulted in a separation of Church and State, and to a more anti-militarist stance.  Thus second, when the First World War broke out, France was not fully prepared to meet the German invasion, having lost many of its experienced generals.  Dreyfus himself, who had retired from the army, went back into service in 1914 and remained active until 1918, but never received the recognition his age and training deserved.  At one point when he requested an assignment on the Western Front, his superiors snidely wrote that they weren’t sure on which side he would fight, the French or the German.  Then the third consequence was that in the 1930s, as anti-Semitic parties and movements grew in France, grudges by the surviving anti-Dreyfusists flourished, and when the Germans occupied the north of France and a defeatist Vichy regime was set up in the south, many of the same figures who had slandered Dreyfus came to power and initiated anti-Jewish actions to take revenge on those who had favoured the pardon and the exoneration. 

In my three book-length studies of the Affair and the central characters of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, I have tried to show that what happened occurred because of the changes in sensibility that were in progress in western Europe—in the arts, in science, in philosophy, as well as in politics—and that the Affair itself would not have turned out the way it did had not Alfred and his wife been as strong-willed and as intellectually aware of their world as they were.  The Beilis case is important too but its central figure, Mendel, was a more passive victim of events, and the consequences of the false charges against him were swallowed up by subsequent history.  His, unfortunately, was neither the last of the long line of such slanders thrown at the Jews collectively nor the most important, as current anti-Israeli propaganda accuses the whole of the State of Israel and all of the Jewish people of deliberately murdering little children—and of a genocide against the Palestinians. 

The Beilis case, well-known, albeit through a darkened prism, to readers of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer, has a somewhat different trajectory in history.  It begins in 1911 with the discovery of a boy’s corpse near Kiev.  Initial investigations by the local police honed in on a gang of thieves, but quickly there was interference from the Black Hundreds, a nationalist anti-Semitic movement, and various officials obedient to the Czar himself. The case was diverted into a hunt for the Jewish perpetrators of a Blood Libel, the ritual murder of the boy to use his blood in the making of Passover matzoh.  Mendel Beilis, an accountant in a brick works near to the site of the cave where the body was found, was chosen as the scapegoat for the crime, and he was accused not of a simple murder but of a collective action.  Unable to find other conspirators, after almost a year and a half while he was kept in dreadful conditions in prison, the Czarist officials were forced to put Mendel on trial by himself.  Meanwhile, in the big cities of Russia and around Europe, and even in North America, both Jewish and non-Jewish protests against the trumped up charges were held.  When the prosecuting attorneys called other anti-Jewish witnesses to prove the case against Beilis and the reality of the blood libel, the speeches were so preposterous and lacking in any evidence whatsoever, the world laughed.  Nevertheless, the jury made up mostly of simple peasants and small town merchants, listened carefully to both sides.  In the end, they found Beilis innocent of the murder but found that a Jewish ritual killing had taken place by person or persons unknown.  Beilis was freed and then took his family out of Russia and went to settle in what was then known as Palestine, and then eventually moved to New York where he died in 1934, the year before Dreyfus’s own death. 

Though he was acquitted of the charges against him, Beilis was unable to prove that the collective guilt of the Jews was a myth.  In the next few years, the Great War and the Russian Revolution overcame concern for this incident in Czarist history.  Beilis wrote a memoire of his experiences which appeared in Yiddish and that has only recently been translated in English and made available to the public.  To a great extent, had it not been for Malamud’s novel, there would have been little public interest in what happened in Kiev from 1911 to 1913.  The Fixer fictionalizes the case, universalizes it, and changes many of the specific details, from the name and personality of the central character—Yakov Bok is not at all like Mendel Beilis, the sequence of the police investigation and the procedures of the court are very different from the historical evidence. 

These differences have offended the family of Beilis in recent years and they and some scholars interested in the truth have argued strongly for a rectification of the way most people have come to view the episode  Rather than the wringing of hands in despair at what has transpired, with Malamud’s version—and the film made from it in 1968 by director John Frankheimer and starring Alan Bates as Yakov Bok—replacing in many ways the historical life of Mendel Beilis, it might be better to argue that all future editions of the novel contain an introduction or epilogue that sets the record straight, a list of further readings, or even a selection of historical documents to show where and how Malamud transformed the facts into a profound work of fiction.  As remarked at the start, due to the persistence of Mendel’s grandson Jay Beilis, the whole case has not been allowed to fade away behind the shadow of The Fixer.  Today more and more attention is turned on what really happened and why.  Mendel is also receiving the honors he deserves for what he and his family went through.

Norman Simms is the author of Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Academic Studies Press, 2011), In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus (Academic Studies Press, 2013) and Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).  See also Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis by Mendel Beilis, edited by Jay Beilis, with essays by Jeremy Simcha Garber and Mark S. Stein (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011)

Jewish Faces of Jesus in Christian Art

Bernard Starr’s recent essay “Jesus in Jewish Art: The Missing Pieces”(Algemeiner, 18 October 2013) raises many important and interesting questions.  Starr reports that many Jews are worried today that there are too many “missing pieces” in the medieval and Renaissance paintings when the identification of Jesus as a Jew is either left out altogether or misrepresented .  The writer’s questions come in response to an exhibition of Marc Chagall’s works in the Jewish Museum in New York City with the title “Love, War and Exile” ; this show gave the museum an opportunity to display twenty-four other Jewish works, about half showing the Crucifixion.

My own response to Starr’s essay begins with three problematical assumptions in his argument or that of the people he claims to be speaking for who are troubled by their discovery that usually Christian religious paintings, frescos, statues, manuscript illuminations and whatever else do not fairly represent the historical truth of Jesus as a Second Temple Jew. 

The first assumption, then, is that Jesus and the Christ are the same person, which implies that Jesus was an historical figure whose existence can be attested by evidence outside the hermeneutic circle of Christian religious documents; and then even further, if he were an actual human was born and died in Herodian Israel that he was a Jew.  But we really do not  know what kind of people Jews were at this time before the basic rabbinical documents and institutions came into existence as we know them, neither the Talmudic nor the New Testament literature supposedly dealing with this period being more than religious writings, not historical documents: they are oblique evidence, composed much later and having other purposes than what we now-a-days recognize as accuracy. Historiography, like realistic writings we find in novels, comes much later.  What we know about the people and everyday events of the ancient world cannot provide models for what things looked like.

Figures made by early Christians to represent Jesus, his disciples and others mentioned in the New Testament, have no historical or photographic validity: they are usually adaptations of symbols and types borrowed from classical works and later modified in accordance with ecclesiastical doctrine.  As in the Gospels themselves, the version of Jewish life depicted is vague and inaccurate, if not outright distortions to discredit the old Dead Law of Moses.  It is most likely, in my view, that any attempt at “historicism” follows and does not precede the Pauline view of the Resurrected and Living Christ as the heart of the new religion, and comes only secondarily, with some need for a legal fiction of historical actuality, by the Gospels, perhaps even with John’s quasi-Gnostic fourth gospel coming first, then the two Lucan texts (the third Gospel of signs and the Book of Acts itself), and last Mark and Matthew—in other words, the reverse of the currently accepted order of composition.  The only reason to write about—or later to draw and contemplate images of—the Jews was (a) to show how wrong they were to disbelieve in Christ’s message and so to crucify him, (b) to indicate how all the prefigurative promises of the Old Testament were now fulfilled in the Life, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ, and (c) to claim to be the triumphant new spiritualized chosen people, the New Israel.

The second troublesome assumption in Starr’s essay is that there is and was such a thing as “art” as a special category of cultural knowledge and the representation of history prior to the early nineteenth century, or even, to make things more complicated, that there was a pre-Renaissance distinction between representations of people, places, acts and ideas for secular purposes and those for religious use.  Frankly, the idea that a traditional artist—that is, a skilled craftsman (or woman) working for various official commissions, workshop managers, and civil or ecclesiastical patrons—had the self-conscious awareness or the freedom of expression to create some reflection of his or her own feelings, attitudes and beliefs is almost preposterous.  Whatever that was eccentric, private and heretical would not have lasted very long anyway as all but the most important works would be lost, painted over, or corrected or improved by subsequent generations.  Our notion of art as a supreme manifestation of individual sensibility and a collective reflection of the spirit of the times (the Zeitgeist) just was not there, except perhaps inadvertently. 

By the time anyone was attempting to think or write about Jesus and his family as historical Jews—that is, fairly late in the nineteenth century, with thinkers such as Ernest Renan—there was very little known about what such persons might have looked like, about how they lived and about what they did to be remembered.  At best, the clichés of Orientalism provided a kind of romanticized version of Arabic society and Muslim culture in the Ottoman Empire to model such paintings or sculptures on.  While church decorations—stained glass windows, religious iconic paintings for contemplation and instruction, carvings in wood or stone—were not only carefully monitored for orthodoxy by the Catholic Church (Protestants mostly would avoid such idols and symbols) but also adjusted to current doctrinal needs, especially extra-Scriptural and dreams-visions by ecstatic nuns and hysterical children.  So much anti-Semitism bore down on the consciousness of the clergy and the congregations, the only Jews they could call up in their imaginations would be of those nasty cartoons in the popular or ecclesiastical press that later became the stock-in-trade of the Nazi regime.  To counter this trend, some Jewish artists who emerged in the same period attempted to present a more sentimental and idealized view of old-fashioned life in the Ashkenazi ghettos, shtetl and Jewish neighborhoods of their youth or Sephardi zones in the cities of North Africa and the Middle East they visited on their journeys to view the exotic scenery.  None of this has any historical legitimacy in regard to the question in hand, though it tells us about how some Jews appeared during the nineteenth century.

For Jewish artists in more recent times to give Jewish faces and rabbinical institutional forms of worship, prayer, study and home-life to pictures of Jesus as a historical person has a clear polemical purpose.  They are sometimes trying to correct what they see as historical errors in the history of art or they are seeking to integrate Jewish motifs and symbols into the tradition that made academic copying the masterpieces of the past proof of one’s belonging to the club of European art, as Chaim Potok shows in his Asher Lev novels.  When Chagal inserts a tallit-wearing Jesus into his canvases or takes up the challenge of providing windows and panels for Christian buildings—churches, chapels , hospitals—it was an assertion that the whole of the Jewish people have and are suffering in the same way as Jesus did.  But Chagal never claimed archaeological accuracy: he was drawing from his memory of pre-World War One Vitebsk and the people he knew in late nineteenth-century Czarist Russia.  All these efforts have their own aesthetic and polemical dimension. 

I can see good reasons to be angry that some churches in Europe still keep on display pictures and statues of the Blind Synagogue, the Sow-worshipping Rabbis or the Ritual Murder of non-existent little local boys—as they are now historical evidence of anti-Semitism, I wouldn’t destroy them but keep them in backrooms for scholarly study. They should not be in the public areas where they reinforce popular prejudices.  I am not upset by the failure of fourteenth or sixteenth century artists to match our own politically-correct ideas of who and what a historical Jesus might have looked like when he worked as an apprentice carpenter for his father Joseph or said in his bar-mitzva speech or wandered Galilee with his faithful followers.  Christian iconography is what it is, and it is up to the Christians, of whatever denomination, to use or not use it as they will.  When such masterpieces of Dutch or Italian art which were made in the tradition of Christian iconography are displayed in public museums and private galleries, they are now treasured for something other than the real persons, places, things or events they once purported to represent and provided a way of focusing the congregant’s attention.  We now look at them in terms of style, composition, color, brush-stroke and indications of personal genius (whatever that is).  It is nice to know that Rembrandt used some of his Jewish neighbors as models or that someone else visited a local synagogue in Paris or Berlin in the nineteenth century and sketched what he or she saw for use in a later painting.  But none of this, as I said above, provides proof either that Jesus ever lived or that he was a Jew or, if he were a Jew, what kind of early first-century CE Jew he was.  Frankly, I would be much happier if no one thought of Jesus as a Jew.  We have enough trouble as it is.

Urban Drama, Part 15

Birth Pangs of a New Era in the World

At about the same time in the first half of the fifteenth century that this play was being produced in northern England as part of the Corpus Christi Day festivities, the great surge forward in thought, the refinement of artistic sensibilities and the development of self-consciousness about man’s place in the universe was taking place in Italy : the Renaissance.  The stirrings of the Reformation were starting to be felt in the cities and towns of Central Europe, especially in German-speaking areas, and would soon begin to converge with the new techniques of critical reading and critical thinking in order to effect a split in the mentalities that would set loose violent forces for centuries to come.  The northern parts of England, including the borders with Scotland, were not deaf to the sounds of such changes, nor immune to the ideas thus generated.  The shepherds on the moors show in their disgruntlement with the exploitation of their southern lords an awareness of something new about to be born into the world.  Their distrust of Mak who comes from across the border with the nation of Scotland is mixed in with these suspicions of awkward and dangerous metamorphoses, not just in the instability of cross-border raids and wars, but in a clash of sensibilities—the sheep-stealer brings on a sense of emotional and spiritual insecurity. 

The other three shepherds having lay down to sleep, Mak draws a magic circle around them and recites a spell to keep them unconscious while he goes about his mission of stealing sheep.  The incantation, to be sure, is a mishmosh of Christian formulae and folkoric rigmarole.  To a certain degree, he is very much what the others have accused him of being—an outsider and a thieving wretch ; and in so doing, inadvertently on his part, he is also a prefiguration of the way in which Christ comes into the world « like a thief in the night » to bring salvation, or, put another way, to cheat the devil of his due by stealing from him the souls of innocent men and women whose Original Sin dooms them to perdition without any means of absolving their guilt.  In this unconscious parody of Jesus himself, Mak enacts the part of an anti-Christ or, on a smaller scale, of the typical Jew in the context of Christian anti-Semitism.

When he brings the stolen lamb to his own house on the other side of the platea, he hands it over to his wife Gyll (guile).  Uxor, as she is called in the stage directions, thus also plays a part in the mock drama of the Nativity scene on Christmas Eve, since she will present herself as the mother of the little horned boy child, the stolen sheep, or, in other words, the Virgin Mary to the Lamb of God.  Like Eve to Adam, Gyll shows herself as the clever spouse in the couple, the inventor of the ruse to disguise the sheep as a newborn child. 

Leaving his wife to elaborate the necessary disguises and script the game they will soon play, Mak returns to the sleeping three shepherds.  As the first shepherd awakens, he makes a speech full of more than malaprops and misperceptions : he establishes the grounds on which the real Nativity Scene will be manifest, these fragments of discourse waiting only for the correct voicing and the completion of the iconic syntax :

Resurrexit a mortruis !/ Hauen hald my hand.

Iudas carnas dominus !/ I may not well stand :

My foytt slepys, by Ihesus ;/ and I water fastand.

I thoght that we layd vs/ full nere Yngland.

The little joke about dreaming that he and his fellows had been transported to England creates sufficient ironic displacement to tickle the fancy of the audience of northern English townsfolk and countrymen : the trick of geographical confusion, like that of inverted time—the then of the first Christmas and the now of Corpus Christi Day in the Christian England—suggests strongly that the playwright and his crew of performers, along with the original audience, were all quite aware of the multiple and flexible nature of the festival stage they acted on. 

What they don’t speak of explicitly or hint at obliquely enough for the joke to work for everyone involved is the Jewishness of the time and place—and perhaps of the action and themes—where the fictional here and now of the pageant play they present.  As each of the three shepherds rouses himself from his night’s sleep, they feel physically doped, mentally confused, and spiritually full of suspicions about the transformation in the construction of the world as they know it.  In addition to the first shepherd’s remarks cited above, the second says, 

A ye !

Lord, what I haue slept weyll,

As fresh as an eylll,

As lyght I me feyll

As leyde on a tre.

What seems like a refreshing sleep seems to make him light-headed and to feel like a slippery eel.  Then the third shepherd complains of how « my [body] qwakys,/My hert i sis outt of my skyn » and he feels headachy.  They are unaware that Mak has cast a spell over them.  But this drowsiness and disorientation also mark them out as part of a world going through its preparations for the coming of the Messiah. 

While they then discover that one of their flock is missing and decide they must follow Mak home to check out whether or not he has taken it there, all this farcical behavior and talking in twisted discourse of longing for the Christian savior to arrive, as though they had been and still remain partly in an ecstatic dream.  More than them, however, Mak attempts to bluff his way out of the situation he knows will prove difficult for him to explain if they find the lamb at his house, he conjures up for them a supposed dream he had, a premonition that his wife Gyll passed through labor pains and delivered herself of a new son, one « to mend oure flok. »  The more he prevaricates and tries to exonerate himself, the more he becomes twisted into the fabric of the false tale, and thus sets himself up to be the butt of the comical punishment that will be inevitable when his criminal act is exposed.  Foolish as he is, of course, he is more aware of what is happening than his three companions on the moor, and very conscious too of his alienation from their domestic and pastoral hopes and aspirations, thus indicting himself as the Jewish other whose messianic dreams are as empty as they are vain. 

The inevitability of the Christian incarnation at this date on the eve of Christmas and its spiritual reality manifest in the Nativity pageant wagon always visible on the platea, institutionalized in the church structure to which this open space forms the courtyard, and the memorial of an event long since happened in history evident in the festive celebration of the holiday that has drawn the spectators to Wakfield, all this confirms the Jewish exclusion from the benefits of the salvation offered in the Eucharistic miracle celebrated by the whole Mystery Cycle—and yet a celebration whose joyful reality rests on the comic role of Mak, his wife Gyll and their parodied son, the little day-star child with the horns of a ram.  What the three shepherds long to see so much can only be glimpsed first in the almost meaningless fragments of their speech and then secondly in the humorous illusion of Mak and Gyll’s joke : only after that will the angel announce the real nativity and lead them to the creche across the acting place—and even then only through the physical punishment of Mak.