#Sholem Asch

[power-chords]

PAULA VOGEL, the Pulitzer-prize winning dramatist of How I Learned to Drive, has again collaborated with director Rebecca Taichman in Indecent. Taichman, who just won the 2017 Tony for best direction of a play, is billed as “co-creator” of Indecent, having worked with Vogel to devise the play’s highly theatrical presentation. The play is at once a compressed history of a daring Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, written by the Polish novelist Sholem Asch in 1907, and a celebration of the stagecraft that makes theater distinct from film.

[...]

Scandalous in its time, God of Vengeance was nevertheless celebrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow and in other European capitals. On first hearing play, the founding father of Yiddish literature I. L Peretz advised Asch to “burn it.” Peretz and other naysayers were reacting as much to the implicit critique of Jewish life as to the idealistic yet carnal presentation of two young women in thrall to each other. Asch’s depiction of flawed, complex Jews and his willingness to approach lesbianism in his play may well have been the very ingredients that allowed sophisticated theater-goers before the Great War to find God of Vengeance worthy dramatic fare.

[...]

Sitting out World War I in New York, Asch visited Europe after the Great War and was deeply shaken by the depredations visited upon Jewish communities. Back in New York, his devoted wife was alarmed at his increasing depression and his quick temper. An English-language production in Greenwich Village in 1922 was another success, but the play’s move uptown to Broadway encouraged the producer to cut the crucial “rain scene” with its joyous lesbian kissing and embraces, and to shift the lesbian relation to one of female manipulation. The troupe protested this desecration of the text, but Asch yielded to the producer’s reading of the uptown audience. Even with the cuts, however, the entire cast and the producer were indicted for obscenity and found guilty at trial, although the verdict was overturned on appeal.

Living in America, Asch seemingly abandoned his play, refusing future performances of God of Vengeance in the wake of Nazi restrictions on Jewish life. However, Vogel shows a group of desperate Jews, confined to the Lodz ghetto, performing the Asch play under the leadership of the original stage manager, a character here called Lemml. Vogel uses Lemml as a distant echo of Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager in Our Town, a “narrator” who breaks the fourth wall and introduces us to the world of the present drama and the past history of Asch’s play.

[...]

The world in which Asch came of age has almost disappeared by the time we see him in the early 1950s. This is toward the end of Vogel’s play; he is being interviewed by a young Jewish student from Yale. This prompts an embittered Asch to quip—I paraphrase—that it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a Jew to enter the sanctum of Yale.

[sluttycinderella]

when you’d rather have a dead child than a queer child.

The Prince by Abigail Thorn | “Triple Dog Dare” by Lucy Dacus | The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch

[jimmcslims]

So I've been reading the Nazarene by Sholem Asch and it's so good and I'm at page 100 or so and I haven't read in a while and I'm so glad I picked it up.

Our first narrator is a Jewish intellectual in central Europe working as a translator for a raging antisemite who rapidly gets attached to him because he has no other friends. Vim (our antisemite) later announces that he's an ancient Roman soldier who was stationed in Judea during the life of Jesus. He also dramatically breaks up with our Jewish narrator before showing up at his house and making him swear (on the Armor of the High Priest of Jerusalem because that's how Jews work probably) to come to his house everyday to write down his thoughts.

So now the narrator is a 2000 year old crazy antisemite who uses every other line to complain about how many Jews there are in Judea, and that they're upset about the whole imperial occupation thing.

[karamazovim]

Anyway read Sholem Asch’s “Kiddush Hashem” it’ll fuck you up <3

[breha]

i also think that louis just never would have pulled a boy out of a burning building and carried him home to be turned. it really was about both replacing his failed relationship with grace and assuaging his guilt over having pressured young women into sex work. i don't think the redemption of my claudia my redemption really had much to do with vampirism at all

[thesiltverses]

Hello! I found the silt verses about three weeks ago and have listened to it several times since. I have a few things to say.

I absolutely adore that episode about the national grid workers. I think it’s my favorite episode of any podcast I’ve ever listened to. My favorite part of that first episode Paige is in is how she justifies not standing up for Vaughn, that cognitive dissonance that you wrote so well. This episode gives me what I wanted from that episode, the workers all banding together to stop the wasteful sacrifice of one of them. The actor who played the foreman did an incredible job as well. I think that having him discuss which of his workers he would sacrifice was such a significant moment, despite how brief it is. It cuts right to the big question that I took away from the podcast which is, “How much is someone willing to sacrifice in order to maintain their comfort?” And the utter disrespect of Glodditch (apologies for the spelling) refusing to cancel even the radio but asking grid workers to kill themselves for 200kw/h! Top tier episode.

I grew up in the south and went to college in Appalachia. I saw the disparity in technology and “advancement” if that makes sense that poverty brings, and the way you set up the world invokes that feeling in me again. You are an amazing world builder and storyteller.

I really enjoyed the cameos - I’m a big fan of malevolent/devisor, Old gods of Appalachia, and all of Jonny sims work, so hearing familiar voices was an absolute delight. Harlan Guthrie as an acolyte of the snuff gods might have been a bit too on the nose with some of the things that man writes, though… /pos

I’m transmasculine, and something that I really appreciate is how you manage to make a trans man do some objectively awful things, but still manage to make him a complex, full character that I was rooting for very frequently. Brother Faulkner is so, so important to me as a character. Paula Vogel has a play called “Indecent,” which is about the true story of a troupe of I believe German Jewish actors between the years of 1910ish and 1940s putting on a show called “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch, also a Jewish man. “God of Vengeance” has queer themes and received a lot of criticism from the Jewish community for showing Jewish folks in a “bad” light at a time when there was already so much hatred for Jewish people. Brother Faulkner being as complex and, in my opinion, malicious and cutthroat as he is at a time when trans people face so much bigotry, especially legislatively in the United States, brings this conversation about “God of Vengeance” up again for me. I also love how normalized non-binary people are in this world, without question. “Sibling this or that,” the hunter, adjudicator Shrew - big thanks from me for all of this.

All of this to say, I love this podcast. Can you talk more about the rhetorical gods? Is Babble one? What makes them one if they are, or why aren’t they? I’m fascinated by them. Can you talk more about the propaganda gods too?

Thank you so much for the thoughtful and kind words!

I'll check out Indecent, it sounds really interesting and I'm very glad to hear Faulkner works for you as a character. I think the topic of how to include and write queer characters who are capable of terrible things and thoughts (because, after all, these characters are human beings and not tutelary exemplars), within the context of both a rising movement of transphobia right now and centuries-old scapegoating / pathologising portrayals more generally, is a really knotty but a really important one, and I always want to make sure I'm approaching it with care and due responsibility as well as a sense of humility around the limitations of what, as a cis writer, I can actually achieve.

To that end, I don't want to ever take the audience response for granted, but I'm always really grateful to hear that the portrayal is working for a listener!

Propaganda gods: gods whose prayer-marks or ritual verses are fed directly to the enemy, enforcing destructive or sabotaging changes to reality (so rather than sending a destructive saint or angel to rampage over the foe, you might drop pamphlets or send radio messages to the enemy to 'convert' them).

Rhetorical gods: gods whose followers possess reality-warping powers of language itself (which is why 'rhetorical god' is a polite way of saying 'liar's god'). In other words, the paranoia around them comes partly down to the fact that a disciple like Val may appear to be a limitless shaper of new forms, rather than shaped into a limited form of their own, as a result of their worship.

[molecoledigiorni]

Sognare la persona che vorresti essere significa sprecare la persona che sei.

- Sholem Asch

[prodigal-explorer]

i dont exactly consider myself a pro-shipper but i am VERY anti-censorship. i hate all censorship. absolutely nothing in media should be censored whatsoever, the only exception being media that is marketed towards children because it should be up to parents/guardians/trusted adults to decide what media children are ready to consume.

but when it comes to adults? hell no.

“but but but it’s a problematic ship!!! 🥺”

there are problematic romances in real life. there are abusive relationships and sexual assaults in real life. we cope with these things by reading and writing about them and realizing that we are not alone, we are not crazy, we are going through something real. media is meant to connect people, and with the influx of social media, people don’t connect with each other anymore and censoring stories about sensitive topics purely because they’re problematic is severing that connection even more.

“but but but it’s pedophilia! 🥺”

i am a victim of pedophilia. i know many people who are also victims. again, if we don’t tell these stories, then there will be kids who have nothing to connect to who think that what they’re going through is normal or that it’s something only they will understand. it doesn’t normalize anything. if you read about pedophilia and your first thought is “okay great, now i can be a pedo because i read about pedophilia!” then it’s not the story or the author’s fault. it’s the pedo’s fault because they’ve always been a pedo. they were just looking for something to twist into justifying their actions.

and also the example i just described is something that absolutely NEVER happens. it’s something that antis made up so they could spread their censorship bullshit.

we should read stuff we disagree with. we should read stuff that is disgusting and messy and horrible if we want to. because those are all stories about the human experience. and if we censor one thing, what’s to stop people from censoring everything?

do you antis know about the wales padlock act? in america in the 1920’s until i believe the 50’s or 60’s, there was a LAW that stated that people could be ARRESTED if the media they created had any form of “obscenity” in it including nudity, pedophilia, and oh, you know what else? homosexuality. transgender characters. in fact, a play called god of vengeance by sholem asch was forcibly closed down and all actors and producers were arrested for “obscenity” because it described a beautiful and loving homosexual relationship between two young women.

do you see now? do you get why censorship sucks? you can’t just have some censorship. anybody can view anything as obscenity. bigots will turn ANYTHING into obscenity and lump it in with all the “problematic” stuff y’all want to censor. lgbtq+, interracial romance, etc. it could all be lumped in there and censored too.

i would rather have a few stories in the world that i disagree with or a few stories that make me uncomfortable than absolutely no stories that depict the human experience in a raw, unfiltered, uncensored way because when you censor art, it immediately severs all human connection that could have been formed from it.

so yeah. antis get the fuck off my page unless you want to change. i hate you and all the censorship bullshit you stand for.

[straightplayshowdown]

Indecent: The story of Sholem Asch’s controversial play, The God of Vengeance, and the passionate artists who risked everything to bring it to the stage. The story—about the daughter of a brothel owner who falls in love with one of her father’s prostitutes—was polarizing even at its first readings, with many of Asch’s fellows arising him to burn it. Nevertheless, it achieved great success on the stages of Europe and in the Yiddish theatre scene of downtown New York City. But when an English-translation was attempted on Broadway, the play—featuring the first kiss between women on a Broadway stage—proved too scandalous for the general public, and the entire cast was arrested and charged with obscenity. 

Arcadia: The show takes place in a single room on the Coverly estate in two separate times: the Regency period and the present. 1809 finds a household in transition, where an Arcadian English garden landscape is being uprooted to make way for picturesque Gothic gardens, complete with hermitage. Meanwhile, brilliant thirteen-year-old Lady Thomasina proposes a startling scientific theory that is only starting to be figured out more than 200 years later. In the present day, we find two competing scholars researching the world of the estate in the Regency Era.

Propaganda under the cut!

Indecent:

Best, most emotionally resonant play I have ever seen performed. It recounts the controversy surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, which was produced on Broadway in 1923, and for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted on the grounds of obscenity. In God of Vengeance, the brothel owner's daughter falls in love with the female prostitute. Vogel's play goes far beyond recounting the censorship. It's a complex story that follows the show's playwright and performers and how their relationship to the material changes from the plays original run, to the Broadway censorship, to the Holocaust. It focuses on the need for hope and love.

A troupe of ghosts rise to keep alive the story of author Scholem Asch's most controversy play. In three languages & innumerable roles (including a turn by Katarina Lenk in the 2017 Broadway production) the lovers in God of Vengeance preserve for the stages of eternity one rain-soaked & sacred night. Meanwhile Asch, once a passionate defender of the plays love story against intracommunal accusations of fueling antisemitism and well, indecency...he gets quieter as Lemml becomes the stage manager of a story whose ending he will always forget. The play that convinced me that I could & would read Yiddish theater.

A breathtaking play about art, censorship, and Jewish lesbians, by THE Jewish lesbian. "He’s crafted a play that shrouds us in a deep, deep fog of human depravity: then like a lighthouse, those two girls. That’s a beacon I will remember."

Arcadia: 

it's the COOLEST. it's an exploration of entropy and how time scrambles popular perception and desire derails supposedly perfect plans and how knowledge makes its way through the years as sources get lost. 

it's about math and also lord byron is a character and there's a turtle

This is his best play (and pretty accessible for Stoppard). It’s an exploration of humanities vs. science, chaos theory, the interpretation of history, and also a love story. 

This is such a beautiful play about academia and how we do research and understand the past. And it's about love and friendship and biases and egos and so much more. 

THOMASINA: Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

[itchy-9884]

Not the power to remember, but the power to forget is a necessary condition for our existence.

– Sholem Asch

[chicago-geniza]

Passports before biometric data collection are so funny. The three options for Height were "tall," "short," and "average." Stefania is "average" and I have no idea what this means to the Polish passport office circa 1939. I have several photos of her standing next to other people for comparison, so I can reckon an approximate guess, but don't know for certain how tall any of them were either. She's like half a head shorter than Sholem Asch

[rainbowfic]

Today's prompt list is: Quill Grey

Theme: Writing 1. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. - E.L. Doctorow 2. I try to leave out the parts that people skip. - Elmore Leonard 3. If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison 4. The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. - Norbet Platt 5. It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. - Vita Sackville-West 6. I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. - James Michener 7. The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. - Isaac Bashevis Singer 8. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. - William Wordsworth 9. The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there... clamoring to become visible. - Vladimir Nabakov 10. Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies. - Terri Guillemets 11. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. - James Michener 12. Writing is my time machine, takes me to the precise time and place I belong. - Jeb Dickerson 13. Words - so innocent and powerless as they are... how potent for good and evil they become. - Nathaniel Hawthorne 14. All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients. - Ralph Waldo Emerson 15. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. - Flannery O'Connor 16. God composes, why shouldn't we? - Terri Guillemets 17. A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one. - Baltasar Gracián 18. Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. - Sholem Asch 19. If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. - Lord Byron 20. Writing is a struggle against silence. - Carlos Fuentes

If you used all the prompts, you can take a banner for your hard work

RainbowFic is an original fiction (and more) community on Dreamwidth. The pinned post has more information.

[jimmcslims]

Just had an experience that probably sums up my flavor of OCD pretty well. So I was trying to sleep (as I do) and I started getting pretty close to tears because my stomach hurt slightly, the Tiktok sound "How the hell do you spell shofur?" "Chauffeur" "Oh look fancy pants rich McGee over here, fuck you" started playing on loop. And then Sholem Asch, author of hit play "The God of Vengeance" and everyone's favorite trilogy of Jesus books started narrating the experience of being in Sheol when Jesus arrives to get people out. Anyways, I got very convinced I solved Christianity (Jesus had to die because God dying and entering the Grave was the only way for God to then exit the grave creating a path for everyone else to do it) while "fancy pants rich McGee" played on loop on my head. So I started fully crying and coming up with prayers, while again *Shofuuur" was sounding off in my occipital lobe.

Also I accidentally added a poll and don't know how to remove it

[doitinanotherlanguage]

January 2023: 1900s (+ pre-1900s)

It’s January 1st, which means that I’m kicking off my 2023 reading challenge, Reading Through the Decades! You can read more about the challenge on my previous post. Basically, it’s a year-long reading challenge where we read books (and explore other media) from the 1900s to the 2020s, decade-by-decade.

In January, we’re starting off with the 1900s (1900-1909). I’m also looking at things from the late 1800s and just generally around the turn of the century.

Here are my recommendations for January (all I’ve greatly enjoyed previously!):

📺 Granada Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994) 📖 The Turn of the Screw (1898), Henry James 🎬 Colette (2018), dir. Wash Westmoreland 📖 Три сестры (1901; Three Sisters), Anton Chekhov 📖 A Room with a View (1908), E.M. Forster 📖 Le Fantôme de l'Opéra (1909-1910; The Phantom of the Opera), Gaston Leroux

And here is what I myself am planning to spend time with this month:

📖 The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927), by Arthur Conan Doyle 🎬 Journal d'une femme de chambre (2015; Diary of a Chambermaid), dir. Benoît Jacquot 🎬 Miss Marx (2020), dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli 📖 Gloriana; or, The Revolution of 1900 (1890), Florence Dixie 🎬 Tesla (2020), dir. Michael Almereyda 📖 Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad 🎬 Сере́бряные коньки́ (2020; Silver Skates), dir. Michael Lockshin 📺 The Nevers (2021-) 📺 Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018) 📖 Imre: A Memorandum (1906), Edward Prime-Stevenson 📖 ‏גאט פון נקמה (1907; The God of Vengeance), Sholem Asch 📖 The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster 📖 Рассказ о семи повешенных (1908; The Seven Who Were Hanged), Leonid Andreyev 📖 Emily of New Moon series (1923-1927), L.M. Montgomery (the series is set in the late 1800s/early 1900s)

[wordsintheattic]

“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.”

—Sholem Asch