Word: ahasuerus
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...DEATH OF AHASUERUS (118 pp.)-Pär Lagerkvist-Random House...
This is the apocryphal legend of Ahasuerus. the Wandering Jew condemned by Christ to homeless immortality. If Ahasuerus had not been invented by some unknown storyteller of the Middle Ages, it seems likely that Swedish Author Par Lagerkvist would have reinvented him to embody the mystical dialectic of his own devout skepticism. As a younger man. Lagerkvist-now 70-wrote of himself that he was "a believer without a belief, a religious atheist." Today, after half a century of novels, plays, stories and poems that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1951, Lagerkvist is still obsessed with God, still...
...Curse. In Lagerkvist's The Sibyl, Wandering Jew Ahasuerus also appeared, questioning an old priestess at Delphi about the meaning of the curse upon...
...Ahasuerus is the usual name ascribed to the man who denied Christ a moment's rest on his way to Calvary. According to medieval legend (but not Christian doctrine), Ahasuerus thereupon was denied-under Christ's curse-either death or mercy, and was condemned to walk the face of the earth forever. The man cursed with the burden of perpetual life on earth has haunted enough imaginations to produce scores of folk tales, dramas and novels. He now reappears in Pär Lagerkvist's latest book. Those who know the other works (Barabbas, The Eternal Smile...
...lady with crossed arms before him is his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, who ruled as regent from Louis XI's death in 1483 until Charles came of age. But the scene they are acting is thought to be a Biblical one: the meeting either of King Ahasuerus and Esther or of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Charles' illustrious forebear, the Emperor Charlemagne, is in the small panel at the upper right, labeled "Karlus." In the large lower right-hand panel, the artist has illustrated a popular medieval legend. He shows Emperor Octavian asking the Tiburtine sibyl...