Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "judaism"

“Fuck,” said God. …That’s a line from one of the short-stories in Shalom Auslander’s “Beware of God.” I live in the Middle East, so I feel like I hear God saying “Fuck!” almost every day. (If He doesn’t, then He’s not reading the newspapers.) “Beware of God” nails faith and the faithful as only a genius of satire can do. A very angry genius of satire, I ought to point out. As you’ll discover with Auslander’s second book “The Foreskin’s Lament.” It’s a memoir of Auslander’s Orthodox Jewish upbringing in a family as scarred as a lamenting eight-day-old foreskin. Here’s my interview with America’s scourge of religion.

How long did it take you to get published?

Not as long as it took me to write. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer; it wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I realized how badly I wanted to burn the world to the ground, and writing was the most immediate way I could do that. Once I started writing, getting published came soon after.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

No, and I read them all. And what I realized is that no matter what advice might be found inside, there’s an admission in just looking for help that “I can’t do this.” Writing needs to come from a ludicrous sense of self-assurance (combined with a terrifying degree of insecurity).

What’s a typical writing day?

Wake. Ride to my office. Delay. Delay. Delay. Get angry at myself. Write.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

“Foreskin’s Lament” is a memoir of growing up in an emotionally dysfunctional and religiously stifling home. It may or not be great, but it’s honest, and full of rage, which is nice.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Beckett, first sentence of ‘Murphy.’ Taking the most joyful part of the day and bending it, by perception, into something utterly bleak. Mazel tov.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

I research my books a lot, because research is easy and feels constructive while it really just kills time. “Wow,” I can say at the end of the day when I’ve written nothing, “That was a productive day!”

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

A pain? You mean one? No.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Have courage. Write a book that will shake up the world. Writing isn’t war, but at it’s best, it’s a bit like terrorism – take a small, 200-page bomb, plant it in the holiest place you can find, and kaboom. Candide was a bomb. Huck Finn was a bomb. Catch-22 was a bomb.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Mostly good. Translators who think of books as literature upset me, because they won’t translate “cocksucker” as “cocksucker.” They’ll try to soften it, try to “elevate” the book into something weak and mealy. “Cocksucker” is not the same as “homosexual.” Someone who is a motherfucker is a motherfucker, not a “jerk” or a “cad.”

Do you live entirely off your writing?

No. I work part-time for Satan in a Manhattan marketing firm.

How many books did you write before you were published?

One.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Angry Orthodox Jews accosted me, told me I was a heretic and a heathen and was finishing what Hitler started. “Did you read the book?” I asked. “No,” said God’s inexplicably chosen ones. “And we don’t want to.” Sigh.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I have this idea for a book that claims to be the Word of God and that tells the story of how the Earth came to be. But who the fuck is going to believe that?

Israeli Prime Minister ignores Obama and reiterates same policies
by Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post

JERUSALEM — It’s as if Obama never happened.

Less than two weeks ago President Barack Obama laid out his plans for the Middle East in a speech in Cairo. He called for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, among other things.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced that he’d make a key policy address in Tel Aviv. Commentators wracked their brains figuring out how Bibi, the nickname by which the Likud leader is known, would walk the tightrope between his nationalist coalition — which is very supportive of the West Bank settlements and disdains the idea of a Palestinian state — and Obama, who had made it clear that he sees the settlements as Israel’s main contribution to the failure of peace efforts.

But Netanyahu outsmarted them all. No smokescreen, no artful diplospeak, no talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Nothing but old-school Bibi.

The big policy speech turned out to be filled with typical nationalist rhetoric about the settlements. The olive branch held out to the Palestinians was loaded with the kind of conditions Netanyahu surely knows are unacceptable in Ramallah — let alone Gaza.

“We would be prepared to reach agreement as to a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told his audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

He said “Palestinian state,” but he added an adjective that grates rather hard on the Palestinian ear: “demilitarized.” For Netanyahu that’s important because a militarized Palestinian state would, as he sees it, be much as Gaza is today, with the capacity to rain missiles on Tel Aviv and the country’s international airport. It could make a military alliance with Iran, like Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas in Gaza. We’ve all seen how that turned out for Israel.

To Palestinians, a demilitarized state sounds like no state at all. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu would “wait a thousand years to meet a Palestinian who’d accept his conditions.”

As for Obama’s gripe about settlements, Netanyahu seemed at first to be edging toward a compromise, something so cunning in its apparent straightforwardness that no one would notice he’d refused to comply with the American demands. “We have no intention of founding new settlements,” he said.

Well, that’s not the heart of Obama’s argument. He doesn’t want to be deflected by Israel pulling out of a few remote hilltop outposts. The U.S. wants even existing settlements to stay as they are — not growing by so much as a single brick — until the future of the land on which they stand is decided.

But Netanyahu trotted out the same formula Israel has always used for evading a settlement freeze: so-called natural growth. “We must give mothers and fathers the chance of bringing up their children as is the case anywhere in the world,” he said.

In other words, if children grow up in a settlement, Israel is bound to build a home for them there when they want to have their own place, so they don’t have to move elsewhere to find accommodation.

As if their parents didn’t move to the settlements from somewhere else.

As if Barack Obama didn’t insist there be no “natural growth” in the settlements.

No one expects Netanyahu to go head to head with Obama. The speech wasn’t intended as a gauntlet in the face of the U.S. But the Israeli prime minister is sailing pretty close to the White House wind.

It all played well with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. “It was a Zionist speech from his faith and heart,” said Limor Livnat, a leading Likud hawk. “I’d have preferred he hadn’t said ‘Palestinian state,’ but it was a good speech.”

The country’s rather lackluster opposition recognized that Netanyahu hadn’t given ground to Obama. “The speech was typical Netanyahu,” said Ofer Pines, a legislator from the Labor Party (Labor is part of the coalition, but some of its lawmakers including Pines refused to join the government.) “He said a very small ‘Yes,’ and a very big ‘No.’ He’s really only talking to himself.”

Except he’s not the only one listening. There must surely have been bemusement in Washington, as officials watched the speech, waiting for Netanyahu to adjust his previous positions.

Wait on. The Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he said. Jerusalem, too, “would be the united capital of Israel.” He didn’t even offer to open the checkpoints into Gaza to let in construction material to rebuild the city ruined in the war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of the year.

The most optimistic of assessments — at least among those who oppose Netanyahu — was that the speech was just words. “It’s not what he says, it’s what he does after this that interests me,” said Haim Ramon, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party.

Obama will surely second that.

Her methods may be kosher, but in Israel baker Pnina Konforti faces a bigger commercial obstacle: She's a Messianic Jew.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

GAN YAVNEH, Israel — I always thought that by following kosher laws religious Jews only missed out on certain flavors and debatable delicacies. Turns out that by turning their back on “treyf” they also steer clear of Jesus.

At least that’s the verdict of rabbinates in two Israeli towns who’ve been denying a kosher certificate to a local cafe owner for three years — not because she doesn’t conform to the laws of “kashrut,” but because she’s a “Messianic Jew.”

Pnina Konforti, owner of the two branches of Pnina Pie in Gan Yavneh and Ashdod, this month won a decision in Israel’s Supreme Court forcing the rabbinates of the towns to give her a kosher certificate. Just because she believes in Jesus, the judges said, doesn’t mean she can’t keep kosher. Without the kosher certificate, many religious and traditional Jews refused to frequent the cafes and Konforti’s business was failing.

The case looks set to provoke a battle between the more secular organs of the government and the state rabbinate. It’s also a new point of conflict in the long battle between Israel — particularly its ultra-Orthodox community — and the Christian faith.

The rabbis insist they’re the ones who ought to decide about matters of kashrut and they refuse to allow a Messianic Jew (or a “Jew for Jesus” as they tend to be known in the U.S.) to receive a certificate. Though that sounds extreme, the rabbis aren’t entirely wrong (at least in the archaic terms of kosher law). After all, in Israeli wineries, non-Jews are forbidden from touching certain apparatus for fear of making the wine non-kosher — a prohibition going back to the days when a non-Jew might have used wine for idol worship.

Konforti’s point — which the Supreme Court accepted — is that she isn’t a non-Jew. She just happens to have decided during a stay in Ohio that the world’s most famous Jew, Jesus — or as she, an Israeli, calls him, “Yeshu” — is her savior.

The fear of Christian proselytizers or, even worse, Jews for Jesus is a common one among Israelis in general, and it has a long history that reaches back to a Europe where Jews were often persecuted or forced to convert to Christianity.

In that sense the court decision marks a rare gesture of conciliation by the organs of the Israeli state toward those who profess to be Christians.

It hasn’t always been that way.

In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court denied citizenship to a Polish priest who had been born a Jew and converted to Christianity while hiding in a monastery to escape the Holocaust. Oswald Rufeisen, known as Brother Daniel, qualified for immigration under Israel’s “Law of Return” because he was born a Jew, but the court refused to accept a man who no longer called himself a Jew. (Eventually Rufeisen gained residence and died in a Haifa monastery a decade ago.)

Neither is pettiness a bar to paranoia. In my largely secular neighborhood of Jerusalem a few years ago, a tiny kiosk serving coffee in a small park was driven out of business because locals whispered that the owner was a Messianic Jew.

The lesson of such cases is that two thousand years of persecution at the hands of the church isn’t quickly forgotten, even by those who’ve never faced so much as a single anti-Semitic slur.

It’s a lesson only some in the Roman Catholic Church seem to have learned. Pope John Paul II won over many Israelis during his papacy with his visit to an Italian synagogue and talk of reconciliation during a 2000 visit to the Holy Land.

But the current pope, Benedict XVI, appeared cold and, to most Israelis, pro-Palestinian when he visited this spring. Many newspaper commentators complained that a former member of the Hitler Youth representing a faith with a history of persecuting Jews ought to have been less academic in his public addresses and more contrite toward Israel.

To understand the depth of fear among the ultra-Orthodox, consider the leaflets posted in Gan Yavneh warning residents against Konforti’s cafe: “Beware! Missionaries! What is hiding behind the Cafe-Bakery?” (In a community where television and radio are often not allowed, having been deemed negative modern influences, leaflets posted on walls are the favored way to pass information around among ultra-Orthodox Israelis.)

The answer, according to the leaflets: “Jews who sold their soul, betrayed their nation, and converted to Christianity.”

The leaflets advised citizens not to enter the cafe or “she will try to ensnare you in her Christian religion.”

Must be pretty good pie, you’re thinking.

I came across Pnina Pie in January when I visited Gan Yavneh during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Missiles from Gaza landed several times on this small town, which is home to an air force base and several thousand Tel Aviv commuters.

I concluded an interview with the town’s mayor by asking him where I could get a decent lunch. He directed me to Pnina Pie, where a young Russian immigrant served me excellent bourekas, flaky pastry triangles filled with potato and cheese.

Unaware of the lack of a kosher certificate at the establishment, I bought a strawberry pie and served it to some guests that night. It happens all four of these friends were observant Jews.

At least they were observant Jews. Maybe by now they believe in Jesus.

After all, it really was very good pie.

A few years ago I was at a literary conference near Tel Aviv. I found an eclectic mix of writers on the panel with me. I’m a crime writer. You wouldn’t expect me to be paired with a writer of poetry who takes his inspiration from the stories of the Bible. But as Yakov Azriel read his poetry, I sat beside him feeling that no contemporary poems had ever touched me as deeply. They’re full of the knowledge of the Bible the Brooklyn-born poet garnered during his studies at Israeli yeshivas and his four decades living here. There’s something else though: they bring to life the hills and desert around Jerusalem. To an outsider, it can often seem strange that so many people are attached to a place that’s stark and rather ugly and certainly not a nurturing environment for sustaining human life. With Yakov’s poems I think you’ll find a sense of what the place means. Here’s his interview, followed by a wonderful poem from his newest book.

How long did it take you to get published?
It took a few years of submitting my first manuscript of poetry to different publishers until my first book of poetry was published.

What’s a typical writing day?
I make a living by working as a teacher, so during the daytime I do not have the opportunity to write. I usually try to write in the evenings and at night (especially at night); I try to write one new poem a week.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
My latest book is entitled Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus, and it was published in June by Time Being Books (a literary press specializing in poetry). Like my two previous books of poetry (Threads From A Coat Of Many Colors: Poems On Genesis and In The Shadow Of A Burning Bush: Poems On Exodus, each poem in the book begins with a Biblical verse and the book is structured as a running commentary, starting with chapter 1, verse 1 and ending with the last Biblical chapter.

This book was challenging for several reasons. My first book focused on the different characters in Genesis, and I especially tried to focus on the gaps in the Biblical narrative (for example, who was Abraham's mother?) or to give a voice to figures who are silent in the Biblical text (such as Dinah, or Joseph's wife Asenat). In the poems on Exodus, the many events in the Biblical narrative itself (the enslavement in Egypt, the Ten Plagues, Passover, the splitting of the Red Sea, etc.) readily lent themselves to poetry.

In contrast, the Book of Leviticus is considered to be "drier," without the drama and large cast of characters of the first two books of the Bible. One device I used in order to grapple with this difficulty was a conscious effort to fuse the English literary tradition with the Jewish-Hebrew heritage. For example, the first chapters of Leviticus deal with sacrifices; I decided to write a Petrarchan sonnet for each sacrifice, a sonnet that is a prayer, modeled after the "Holy Sonnets" of John Donne. In the end, one book reviewer felt that this book was the most powerful of my three published books (eventually, we will be publishing five volumes of poetry, one for each of the Five Books of Moses).

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I write poetry in all forms: mainly free verse (like most 21st century poets), but also formal, metric poems — sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, ballads, etc. Each poem has a life of its own, and it is the poet's duty to help each poem find its own voice. Just as a sculptor has to liberate the statue that is hidden in a block of marble, so the poet has to liberate the poem hidden on the empty page and grant it breath.

As I said, all my poems are based on the Bible. The Biblical verse is like an iceberg, with 90 % of its meaning under the surface; my job is to try to get under the surface.
T.S. Eliot said that there is little good religious poetry being written today because the religious poet tends to write what he thinks he ought to feel instead of what he really feels. All good poetry must be sincere. So part of my task as a poet is to be sincere, as much as possible.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
This is a very difficult question to answer! One sentence that really resonates for me in English literature is when Hamlet describes his father to Horatio in Act I, Scene II, and tells him that "He was a man." What a wonderful example of praise, love and understatement in four simple words.

In Biblical literature, one sentence that that I find very powerful occurs right after the scene in which the prophet Nathan tells King David the parable of the poor man's lamb (First Samuel, Chapter 12) and King David, incensed, says that this man deserves to die; after Nathan exclaims, "You are the man," David does not argue but admits, "I have sinned."

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Again this is very difficult to answer, but I think that Dicken's description in Little Dorrit of the banquet scene in Rome in which Mr. Dorrit relives the past he has been trying so hard to conceal, and calls out loud to Amy, speaking about the turnkey and his imprisonment in the Marshalsea prison — this is certainly one of them.

How much research is involved in each of your books?
I have been "researching" my books all my life.

Where do you get your ideas?
This is a very good question. Often in the middle of the night an idea comes; I have to write it down, and the following evening, I work on it.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
No, I do not think that it stems from a childhood pain. Why do I write? Ask me why I breathe. The great German poet Rilke said that no one should write poetry unless he would have to die if it were denied him to write. Perhaps this is too strong (for me at least) but I cannot imagine a life for myself without writing.

What’s your experience with being translated?
I have translated several of my poems into Hebrew. However, you could perhaps claim that all of poetry is a kind of translation of dream language into waking language.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
To write it in Yiddish.


And now, some poetry: from Beads for the Messiah's Bride: Poems on Leviticus (Time Being Books, 2009)

THE SCAPEGOAT
“And Aaron shall place both his hands on the head of the scapegoat and confess upon it all the sins of the Children of Israel and all their crimes, whatever their transgressions; they will be put on the head of the scapegoat, which will be sent off to the desert in the hands of the executioner.” (Leviticus 16:21)

Bright crimson ribbons tied between his horns,
A clanking, clinking bell around his neck,
His back bedecked with ornaments of silk —
Why did the priest place hands upon my head,
Then trembling shout a list of sins and crimes?
I bet I know: they want to crown me king,
A wise and noble king who never dies.

An orchestra of Levites play their flutes,
Their golden harps, their ten-stringed lutes, their drums,
Their silver trumpets as he is taken out —
Why I alone am sent to Azazel?
And who or what the hell is ‘Azazel’?
I bet I know: they think I am an angel,
A pure, immortal angel full of grace.

Out of the Temple precinct packed with crowds,
And out the narrow lanes of Jerusalem,
And out Damascus Gate, toward desert cliffs —
Why am I brought here to this mountain peak?
Why rip the crimson ribbons from my horns?
I bet I know: they wish to worship me,
I bet I —

By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — Donald Bostrom, a freelance Swedish journalist who wrote an article this summer accusing Israeli officials of trading in Palestinian organs, came to Israel late last month to defend his piece at a conference on the media.

Neither Bostrom, who needed a bodyguard because of the stir his article has caused, nor the media came out looking good.

At the conference in the southern Israeli town of Dimona, the 55-year-old Swede argued that he did what any reporter would do in airing the suspicions of Palestinian families whose sons’ cadavers were returned to them post-autopsy. It’s up to Israel, he said, to investigate the claims cited in his article, specifying that he had no proof that the organ trade went on.

“If you’re a journalist, you always interview, you ask questions, and get answers,” he told the conference.

True, but journalists generally make further investigations to verify if the answers they got were based on anything but speculation. In Bostrom’s case, he appears to have put two and two together and got five, linking the dead Palestinians with an organ-stealing scandal at Israel’s forensic institute and the arrests of several New York Jews last summer who were accused of organ trading.

“It is absolutely bad journalism, and it’s influenced by anti-Semitic opinions,” said Dina Porat, head of Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism. “Without checking his facts, he perpetuates the historical attitudes toward Jews — that they will do any nasty deed.”

He isn’t the only one. The media (not only newspapers in Israel and abroad, but also bloggers of ill-defined association and international television stations broadcast over the internet) misread Bostrom’s article, perhaps deliberately, so as to suggest that he wrote something far worse — namely that the Israeli army killed Palestinians deliberately to harvest their organs. Both pro-Israeli and anti-Israeli media have cited that nonexistent element of Bostrom’s article as evidence to back their particular animus over the case.

The reason Bostrom’s accusations have created such a stir isn’t just that they’re a lot more speculative than would pass muster at most American news organizations. It’s that, on the one hand, they seem to Israelis to confirm the anti-Semitism of the international media, while also appearing to justify the virulent anti-Israeli sentiment that has spilled across the internet since Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza at the turn of the year.

Israeli government minister Silvan Shalom refused to attend the Dimona conference (and cancelled its public funding) because of Bostrom’s presence, saying he was “a person who created a blood libel against the State of Israel and its soldiers,” referring to anti-Semitic accusations over the centuries that Jews used the blood of gentile children for sacred rites.

Meanwhile, an Iranian website picked up the ball and ran with it, reporting that the scandal wasn’t limited to Palestinians, but alleged that Algerian children were “falling prey to Jewish organ harvest.”

The spread of such stories isn’t merely a political problem for Israel. It justifies people’s historical hatred for Jews and, in turn, causes anti-Semitic attacks, said Tel Aviv University’s Porat. The university’s annual reports on anti-Semitism show the number of violent attacks on Jews around the world rising steadily — to 651 last year, from 78 in 1989.

Bostrom argues that he was posing a question that the Israeli government needs to address. But in these internet days speculative musings are soon converted into concrete fact in the minds of many people around the world, whether they concern Barack Obama’s birthplace or Israel’s misdeeds.

Bostrom’s article appeared in Aftonbladet, a left-of-center tabloid, last summer, having previously been turned down by Dagens Nyheter, another Swedish newspaper. Under the headline “Our sons are plundered of their organs,” Bostrom wrote a story similar to one which had appeared previously in a book he wrote in 2000 (the book was reprinted five times in Sweden).

To summarize, Bostrom says that in 1992 U.N. personnel suggested he investigate the return of bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops, after autopsies that were often against the will of the family. Bostrom says he witnessed the return of one such body to a village in the northern West Bank. He saw a long autopsy scar on the torso.

The dead youth’s family, he said, told him, “We are sure they took our son’s organs.”

Israel has, indeed, investigated the taking of organs against the will of families of the deceased by Prof. Yehuda Hiss, who was director of the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine. The probe began after the heart of a Scottish tourist who died in Israel was discovered to be missing. Hiss was found to have taken organs or body parts from 125 corpses, including Israeli soldiers, and providing them to universities and medical institutions for research purposes.

Hiss was forced to step down as director of the institute in 2005 as a result of these investigations, though he retains his post as Israel’s chief pathologist.

With the Hiss case in the background, Bostrom made the leap to the arrest of several dozens of men in New York and New Jersey in July. The group, which included five rabbis, were accused of money laundering, public corruption and organ trafficking.

It’s this unverified link in Bostrom’s article that suggests anti-Semitism, according to Porat. “If someone told him Palestinians were trading organs, he’d have checked it upside down,” she says. “But with Israel he doesn’t need to check. Israel has become a symbol for evil and any accusation against it is somehow believed on its face.”

The Middle East tends to thrive on conspiracy theories. Perhaps Bostrom just caught a little of that bug. Certainly his article flirts with the fringes of journalistic ethics. (In a television interview posted on the internet, he says “it’s not up to me to have any evidence” to back up his story. That, he says, is a role that should be taken up by an Israeli inquiry.)

Maybe Bostrom’s having second thoughts about the effect of his article. He was reported to have cancelled plans to attend an anti-Israel conference in Beirut.

In any case, each of the stories he linked is, individually, bad enough. Autopsies without family consent, Hiss’s illicit trade, the shady U.S. rabbis. Bostrom’s willingness to link them made his story controversial and irresponsible.

On my book tours I often venture to places few others visit. There are book festivals in tiny provincial towns. Readings at bookshops in small rural villages. This week I spoke in a German town that many Germans are convinced doesn’t even exist.

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist."

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Historical novels vie with crime and romance novels for the titles of most derided and most widely read literature. They've had a bad rap ever since the 19th century, when the swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas looked pretty wooden next to Dickens, and cartoonish in comparison to the depth of Victor Hugo or George Eliot. There have always been marvelous exceptions, such as Mary Renault's amazing novels of ancient Greece, but for much of the last century, historical fiction was seen as pure escapism, barely distinguishable from bodice-ripping romance.

Since the publication of "The Name of the Rose," in 1980, the genre has gained gradual legitimacy. Much snobbishness still abounds, however, over the commercial success of historical fiction and the perceived tendency of genre writers to simplify bygone eras. Still, though Umberto Eco's book has sold 10 million copies, it undoubtedly takes some brains to appreciate it, and no one could accuse Eco of writing simplistic books. Literary highbrows came down to mix with the hoi polloi long enough to award last year's Man Booker Prize, the most notable British book award, to Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," a wonderful evocation not just of Tudor England but of the contrast between a steely self-made man and a bunch of spoiled, weak upper-class brats. The legitimacy of the genre progresses this year with the deification in both the United Kingdom and the United States of David Mitchell, whose novel about Japan in 1799, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," is a candidate for the Booker and who, even before this latest work, has routinely been referred to as a genius by reviewers.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.