on Jews and Fantasy Literature
Phyllis Eisenstein, who passed away a few years ago, was the author of half a dozen well-regarded fantasy novels and numerous stories. I have read two of her books: Born to Exile, published in 1978 and comprising linked stories published earlier in the 1970s, and its 1989 sequel, In the Red Lord’s Reach. Both chronicle … Continue reading The Pole Star of Phyllis Eisenstein
I've left this site fallow for a while, as I've been focusing on my poetry and divorce movies and--oh, yeah--my day job. I've got a few fantasy items in the hopper, but let me get back to things now with some were-owls. I recently finished Tad Williams’s epic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, first … Continue reading More Were-Owls in Fantasy
Once upon a time—in 2006 to be exact—the Israeli writer Shimon Adaf published a children’s fantasy titled Ha-lev ha-kavur (The Buried Heart). The book tells the story of two tweens, the boy Emir Mor-Tal and the girl Talia Pinto, who live in the sleepy development town of Mavo Yam in southern Israel. Emir’s terribly ordinary … Continue reading Shimon Adaf’s Postmodern Fantasy, pt. 2
The Israeli writer Shimon Adaf turned 50 this summer. If no longer a wunderkind—in his 20s he had already won recognition for his first books, wrote lyrics for major Israeli rock musicians, co-founded a literary journal, and became an editor at a prominent publishing house—he remains an academic favorite (and university lecturer himself), considered by … Continue reading Shimon Adaf’s Postmodern Fantasy, pt. 1
Three years ago, the Jewish Review of Books published my essay on the work of fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay. I discussed Kay’s early wrestling with the anxious influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, the intriguing ways Kay’s Jewish identity is both revealed and hidden in his novels, and the mode of historical fantasy he … Continue reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s All the Seas of the World
JOAN AIKEN'S THE WHISPERING MOUNTAIN British fantasy’s ruminations on the exile and restoration of the Jews reach a whimsical, latter-day conclusion in Joan Aiken’s children’s novel The Whispering Mountain (1968). Set in a fantastical nineteenth-century Wales, the book is a prequel to Aiken’s series that takes place in an alternate-history Britain in which the Hanovers … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 4
At least one major Victorian fantasy writer, George MacDonald, was at times quite warm toward the Jews, and a landmark of British literary philosemitism, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Nevertheless, among the writers of late Victorian fantastic fiction, negative stereotypes of Jews outweigh positive representations, a trend that continued into the twentieth-century. … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 3: From Late Victorian Fantasy to Tolkien
In my last post I talked about Almamen, the protagonist of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1838 historical romance Leila, or the Seige of Granada. A fiery Jewish nationalist born in the wrong era, Almamen is a gifted political strategist, driven and charismatic. One suspects that there a bit of Benjamin Disraeli in Almamen. The future prime minister … Continue reading Disraeli’s Jewish Fantasy Novel (British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 2)
Tolkien’s dwarves, as has often been pointed out, are based on the Jews. While the band that shows up at the home of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit has roots in northern European sources such as the Poetic Edda, Tolkien also gives Thorin Oakenshield and company a story of exile and a powerful yearning to … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 1
In Diana Wynne Jones’s 1981 children’s fantasy The Homeward Bounders, the 12 year old main character Jamie meets the Wandering Jew. A homeless man with filthy clothes and hair, he appears sprawled out in a city park. “His watery black eyes gleamed with a mad light,” we read, “and his nose stuck out from below … Continue reading Diana Wynne Jones’s The Homeward Bounders and the Wandering Jew in Fantasy Literature
investigations and fantasies 