“Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy”, by Joe Gross

 

384 pages, Touchstone, ISBN-13: 978-0671883867

Shylock, the villainous Jewish usurer of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, has elicited sharply divergent responses, as Joe Gross reveals in Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, an invaluable, entertaining study of the legend of the rapacious Jew. Shylock has come down to us as any number of things: to Heinrich Heine, German poet, journalist, essayist and literary critic, The Merchant of Venice was a grand analogy between the conflict of Hellenism (represented by Portia) and Hebraism (represented by Shylock); to John Ruskin, English art critic, patron, draughtsman, artist, social thinker and philanthropist, Shylock was the personification of rapacious capitalism that had to be resisted through the power of mercy; to Theodor Reik, Austrian psychoanalyst and a pioneer of lay analysis, Shylock was an oral-aggressive personality and his demand for a pound of flesh a symbolic circumcision of Antonio (well, what else would you expect from a Freudian?); to Ernst Lubitsch, German-American film director, producer, writer and actor, Shylock was a way in which to attack the Nazis in satirical fashion in To Be or Not to Be, from 1942; to C. S. Lewis, British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer and Christian apologist, Merchant was a fairy tale, while to Frank Kermode, British literary critic, Merchant was an allegory; and to M. C. Bradbrook, British literary scholar and authority on Shakespeare, thought that there were Shylocks as well as martyrs in the concentration camps and seemed to recommend forcible baptism for Jews who were criminals. Damn.

(And don’t even get me started on what Alexander Pushkin, Karl Marx, Henry James, Ellen Terry, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce or T. S. Eliot had to say about the guy).

Shylock is more than a study of a definitive character from a literary masterpiece; it is also a study of historic antisemitism and of changing attitudes towards the same in the centuries since Shakespeare wrote it. As Gross makes us see, it is important to understand that Shakespeare’s Jew was not the sympathetic character that our modern interpretations make him out to be (indeed, Shakespeare was writing about a prototypical, villainous, usurious Jew). But, being Shakespeare, he couldn’t help but write with insight and imagination, and simply to make Shylock a run-of-the-mill stock villain would not be nearly as good theater as if he were human too, with feelings that an audience could share (I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?...If you prick us, do we not bleed?). Those actors who showed Shylock’s humanity as well as his villainy, and who portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock, may often, Mr. Gross says, “have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave him their opening”.

The antisemitism of the 16^th Century was not the antisemitism of today; then, it was a matter of belief and not blood or genetics (thanks, Nazis); thus Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is accepted by the Christians at Belmont because she has converted and dissociated herself from her father, while Antonio is perfectly willing to let Shylock keep half his property on certain conditions, one of which is that he will convert to Christianity. This is not the antisemitism of the 20^th Century that machine-gunned Jews and threw them in pits, or herded Jewish men, women and children to the gas chambers. It is hardly possible to read The Merchant of Venice today without thinking of the abominations to which antisemitism, or any variety of racism, leads. Shakespeare’s play, and other works of literature in which Jews were vilified, ranging from novels and detective stories to the poems of T. S. Eliot, contributed to antisemitism and made it socially acceptable (and lest we think we modern Americans are immune to such junk, I need only say the names Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to dissuade you of that). After the Holocaust one can hardly play The Merchant of Venice straight.

“Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home, 1986 to 1990”, by George F. Will

 

 429 pages, Free Press, ISBN-13: 978-0029344354

All hail the Barnes & Noble overstock shelves, for it is where I built so much of my library with practically-new books that I picked up for a penance…like, for instance, Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home, 1986 to 1990, George Will’s fourth collection of columns that does much to clarify the times: Glasnost, Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush Sr., the Bork nomination, education, drugs, science, the Election of 1988, the fall of the Berlin Wall and baseball (always baseball with this guy). As this still-incomplete list shows, Will had no shortage of consequential topics to write about during this time, the foremost among them being the event that provided the title of this volume: the sudden collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, the event most of us thought we’d never live to see. Will informs, educates and makes valid points, sometimes even criticizing allies (and praising opponents), refusing to twist facts, invent statistics or slander the faith and patriotism of those that dissent. Thinking people will both agree and disagree with Will, depending on the column. Still, you can learn something from his crisply informative writing.

“The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives”, by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson

 

 180 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393039146

There’s just no getting away from this son of a bitch, is there? Ah, well, here we go again: with The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives, Ada Petrova and Peter Watson were the first writers to investigate and write a book based on the then-opened Soviet archives and the “Operation Myth” files (but not the final dossier, file no. 462a, put together for Stalin and now known as “The Hitler Book”). They were the first to state in detail how the remains of Hitler, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family were disposed of by the KGB after years of speculation; they even have a chapter claiming to know who the leak was in the Berlin Bunker and go so far as to identify that person (although their conclusion may or may not be correct). The Death of Hitler was the first to show the photos of the remains of Hitler’s so-called skull (however, we now know the skull fragment is that of an unknown female).

Okay, so that was the good news. Now, then…Although The Death of Hitler is impressively packaged and appears authoritative, it’s anything but. Petrova and Watson appear to be pop historians who specialize in fiction and their weaknesses show throughout, as there is almost no basic understanding of Hitler, his life, his personality or his place in the proper historical context. The author’s arguments are poorly stated, disjointed, repetitive and not particularly convincing, and overall there’s a rushed, let’s-get-this-one-together-fast-and-have-a-vodka feel to the book. Essentially, what we’ve got going here is a refresher course on what happened in the Bunker during Hitler’s last several days. Interesting enough, but the billing on the dust jacket far exceeds what’s delivered between the covers.