Word: mosaic
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Several hundred yards to the west, the excavators have begun to expose a Late Roman bath with bright, tapestry-like mosaics. The bath's heating system once conducted hot air under the floors and within the walls. The mosaic floor, carefully consolidated and lifted by a Turkish expert with the Harvard-Cornell expedition, will be placed on public view in the Museum at Manisa...
...other non-fiction in this Mosaic is a sort of modern midrash of Jacob, by Arthur Gold. One of the lovely things about this kind of playing with Biblical myths is that, after the game's over, the Bible still remains. In this case, Jacob emerges intact after Mr. Gold's wise use of him to represent the dual spirit of the Jews: "Jacob," the grasping, shrewd Jew folk-hero, and "Israel," the man who wrestles with God. I suppose Gold is right, but I always thought Jacob had more of the former in him--particularly the way his troubles...
...Mosaic's fiction this time is pretty weak. "Adoshem," a short story by Leonard Tushnet, could have been very funny; part whimsy, part science fiction, it is the story of a Kabalist Rabbi in Brooklyn who, searching for God's name, plays around with the magic number e=mc squared until he is struck by lightning. It isn't funny, because Tushnet patronizes the old Rabbi he has created and has a sentimental realist's way of describing things in too much detail. Better written is Daniel Eigerman's "Cirrhosis to Benefit by Gala," another short story; this...
...Mosaic is fun to read, because it presents a cultural point of view. I suspect that Jews who come to Harvard are unlike members of other American minority cultures in that they often rediscover the value of their heritage here. I'm not talking now about a belief in God (an embarrassing topic at Harvard); I'm simply concerned with cultural identity. For other groups--like Catholics--Harvard is still an engine of mindless assimilation, cutting people off from their past...
...Harvard--theist or atheist--possesses cultural references in a community where most people have none. Witness Mosaic...