Word: jewishness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today, Harvard has strayed oceans away from its Puritan beginnings, in many respects a good thing. Even this century, you didn't apply to the College if you were black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, even Catholic, poor or from the south. Thankfully anyone who's acquainted at all with today's Harvard knows that there is little truth left in that statement--all are welcome to enter her hallowed gates...
...beyond. Don't believe me? Ask someone from the Catholic Students Association and you'll find out those who fast on Ash Wednesday--the first day of the Lenten period preceding Easter--have usually been able to donate the raw cost of their meals to international hunger relief programs. Jewish students on campus were able to do something similar when fasting during Yom Kippur...
...difficult to read The River Midnight (Scribner; 414 pages; $25), Lilian Nattel's genealogical fantasy of Jewish village life in 19th century Poland, without being reminded of Marc Chagall's romantic paintings: a couple floating over a small town; a midwife holding a newborn; and, of course, the famous green-faced fiddler hovering on a rooftop like a Macy's parade balloon...
...only the saltiest lines but also the feistiest roles. Childless Hanna-Leah, the butcher's wife, is freed from disappointment by an ecstatic vision and demands that her husband share the housework. Faygela, poet-mother of five, travels to Warsaw, where she encounters a circle of secular Jewish intellectuals and renounces Yiddish as "the dialect of garlic." Years later, one of Faygela's daughters converts to the new heresies of Darwin and Marx, and is arrested for distributing radical pamphlets. Another daughter interprets Little Red Riding Hood as a unionist parable: "She goes on strike, and the big, bad boss...
...empathies cushion the obviousness of Nattel's feminist subtext. So does her supple narrative technique, which weds the discipline of scholarship with artistic license. The River Midnight is inspired matchmaking. What a critic wrote after seeing a 1916 Chagall exhibition could be said of Nattel's Blaszka: "That this 'Jewish hole' [Chagall's term for his birthplace], dirty and smelly, with its winding streets, its blind houses and its ugly people, bowed down by poverty, can be thus attired in charm, poetry and beauty...this is what enchants us and surprises us at the same time...