{"id":10098,"date":"2005-12-26T10:28:15","date_gmt":"2005-12-26T15:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/26\/10098.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:46","slug":"book-report-the-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/12\/26\/book-report-the-cure\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is, as Gentle Readers will be aware, a fan of Young Adult specfic. Well, and it isn’t the Young Adultness—Farah Mendlesohn<\/a>, more or less correctly, uses YA as a derogatory term for the sort of Moral Introduction to Gruppness that you often find in books sold as YA. But often books aimed at a juvenile audience concern themselves with plot and world-creation (hooray!), and are not as annoying as grupp books. So, for whatever it says about YHB, the library more often sees me browsing through the YA specfic shelves than the grupp fiction shelves. Also, those books are lighter, and more portable.\n

Anyway, I have enjoyed a few books that, while aimed at juveniles, are genuinely scary dystopias, so when I heard about The Cure<\/a>, I thought I would give it a try. The gimmick here is that there are two<\/I> dystopias (two! two! two!) for the price of one; the future (year 2407, according to the back of the book) and the past (1348, the Year of the Black Death!). Unfortunately, while the future dystopia is interesting and evocative, it acts only as a frame for the history section, and doesn’t have any real substance. And the history section is a YA historical novel, with all the exoticism, icky romance, and mawkish noble-ancestor worship you might imagine.\n

Sonia Levitin, I suspect, mostly wanted to trick children into reading a book about the plague pogroms, the mid-fourteenth century series of slaughters that wiped out hundreds of ghettos and shtetls, and provides an important historical background to the Holocaust, and to the way Jews reacted to the Holocaust. It’s true that these events have dropped out of our historical narrative, and that by allowing them (and the long history of Judaism in Europe) to drop out of that narrative, we have warped our own telling of its recent events, and warped Christian telling, too. So I have a good deal of sympathy for Ms. Levitin’s goal, there.\n

The other thing that I should talk about, in relation to the book’s portrayal of Anti-Semitism, is that it addresses (in fairly simple form, as one might expect from a juvenile book) the relationship between two different forms of Anti-Semitism. It’s a subject I wound up talking about recently with a young fellow of seventeen or so, and I don’t think I got it right.\n

There are, on the whole, two kinds of racism (to take the matter more generally, as the topic came up in relation to Mark Twain, racism, and use of the word nigger<\/I> in Huck Finn<\/I>): there’s the kind that thinks that Jews are pushy, greedy and vulgar but should have civil rights equal to anybody else’s, and there’s the kind that thinks there shouldn’t be any Jews at all, at least not near real people. Well, and it’s more complicated than that, of course, but I do think that they are very different feelings. And we in this country hardly ever see the second, more vicious kind of racism. Oh, it comes out every now and then, but really, when we talk about racism, we are usually talking about the first kind. And the first kind is problematic, not least because when it comes down to it, the equal civil rights that those racists hold dear often turn out not to be quite as equal as all that. When they inconvenience the racist at all, the civil demands of the Jew (or the black, or the woman, or the Latino, or the Asian, or the queer, or the cripple, or the other-than-me) appear to be special pleading, made because the Jew is so pushy, greedy and vulgar, and not because there is any actual civil rights issue at hand.\n

But often, in our histories, there are times when that kind of racists as slowed down, or even defied the second kind. Many all of the Poles who hid Jews in their attics and barns thought that Jews were pushy, greedy and vulgar. Many Jews who opposed Jim Crow thought that blacks were lazy, ignorant and had natural rhythm. Abraham Lincoln certainly didn’t think that skin color was irrelevant. When the second kind of racism is rife, some of the first kind of racist joins in, and some doesn’t. It’s not predictable, that way. But the thing is that the first kind of racist doesn’t think of himself as racist, particularly when he is against lynchings, against the death camps, against the Trail of Tears, against the Defense of Marriage act.\n

But again, it’s not that simple. People who subscribe to the first kind are likely to validate the second kind. People who subscribe to the first kind may well raise children who become the second kind. The second kind of racist often finds comfort in the first kind, whether that person intends to offer it or not. And, you know, people are not all one, or all the other, or neither. People are complicated. My point in rambling about this, and I think Ms. Levitin’s to some extent, is that it’s easy to think of the first kind of racism as the moral equivalent of the second, which is false, and it’s easy to think of the first as nothing at all like the second, which is false. We don’t need to forgive Mark Twain for his casual racism, but we do need to recognize that he was against lynching. Both are true. Both are relevant. The longstanding non-genocidal Anti-Semitism in Europe was not altogether indistinct from the convulsions of genocidal Anti-Semitism, but not every Anti-Semite wants Jews to die. All that is true, and relevant, and, you know, more complicated than that.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger is, as Gentle Readers will be aware, a fan of Young Adult specfic. Well, and it isn\u2019t the Young Adultness\u2014Farah Mendlesohn, more or less correctly, uses YA as a derogatory term for the sort of Moral Introduction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17640,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10098\/revisions\/17640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}