#sacred woman book

[transientchaos]

ACAB includes Tereesz Machejek

[hoodooboo]

okay, i’ve started reading sacred woman and so far it’s… good? i’m only 30 pages in but i’m enjoying it so far.

i’m at the part where she’s talking about setting up an altar and that shit, idk, it inspired me. i’m finally in my own crib and have the space and privacy for a proper ancestor altar. and now i can’t stop thinking about the ways i can reconnect with my ancestors.

it also confirmed a lot of other more personal things for me that make me excited to see what else she has to say!

[aussie-bookworm]

Shut the fuck up that's not The Duck Cake from Bluey, that's The Duck Cake From The Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.

You will never be her. Have some fucking respect

[scarlettgauthor]

DON’T TEMPT ME, TUMBLR

[Image Description: A screenshot of a previous tumblr post from Scarlett Gale, which contains an advertising image for His Sacred Incantations. At the bottom the “Blaze” option has been circled and highlighted in red.]

[baldgoddese]

[hecatesdelights]

[boricuacherry-blog]

[claire-starsword]

Bloodline of the Sacred Dragons - Chapter 2-6

"Why are you still coming with me?"

"Leaving us behind is just selfish of you. You can't run off doing whatever you want."

"That's not it."

Tyrin had arranged desert vehicles, Sand Rovers, for the team, and Bleu and Karin bickered to no end in front of them. Krin and Karna were with Karin as well.

It was as if she had got a second little sister, and she was also more headstrong than ever.

Bleu absolutely wanted the two sisters and Karna to stay in Manarina. He had perhaps been too naive on that. Had he thought about it just a bit, he would have easily realized that those sisters would never accept being left behind like burdens.

Karna too wanted to come no matter what. She knew already that Gong was not in Manarina, so she had no reason to stay.

"First of all, why even Karna came…"

Bleu changed the focus of his arguments.

"Well, I have no clue where Master went. I can't go after him, so I have to wait. If I follow you, a fellow hero of the Shining Force, we might find him at some point."

"No way it would be that easy!" He shouted, fed up with that.

"Besides, while I can't meet my master, I thought I could get physical training with Karin. Get the basics down before I become a monk," she flexed her skinny arm as she spoke.

"Huh!? What do you mean, what do you see me as?"

"I don't think she meant anything bad…" Krin murmured at her sister's side, who got mad at being seen like a muscular monster.

"Aah, don't get me wrong. I just think Karin is stronger than Sir Bleu."

Karna rushed to correct herself, as she didn't intend to make Karin angry. But it still didn't fix things.

"In spirit, maybe," Bleu nodded with his arms crossed.

"And I'm telling you to take us with you, Bleu!" Karin got back on topic.

They kept getting more heated as time went by, wasted.

"So what now? I'm not waiting any more. I've got no interest at spending the whole night like this. Tyrin, can't we leave them here and go just the three of us?"

Randolf had already lost his patience. Annoyed, he went to talk to the four still quarreling.

"Hey, figure it out already. That's right, Tyrin. You were the one responsible for picking out the team. Do it now, c'mon!"

Tyrin was deeply troubled once Randolf named him all of a sudden. The pressure from everyone's eyes was heavy on him.

"That's… You want me to decide!?" He faltered, and Randolf pressed him on. "So, I think talking here is a waste of time… What if we finish packing up, and discuss things on the move?"

Bleu told him to stop joking around. But it was too late, the girls had already shrewdly loaded the back of the vehicle with their baggage and climbed on.

Bleu resented Tyrin from the bottom of his heart. Once they left Manarina, there would no point in telling the girls to go back.

"Alright, let's go."

By Randolf's order, the staff on the two vehicles began to work. Bleu bitterly got on one of the machines.

With the skilled driving of the Sand Rover's soldiers, the group headed to the northern mountain range under the moonlight.

"They really don't get tired, do they?"

Krin looked to Karna by her side, and she nodded.

Bleu and Karin had got on the second vehicle, and continued to argue since then. They were certainly a bother to Camallia and the soldiers driving there, while Tyrin and Randolf were on the same vehicle as Krin and Karna. Karna quietly prayed for them all to get some peace and rest.

While they worried, Camallia seemed to be enjoying the situation. Resting her arms on the edge of the trunk, she had watched their discussion the whole time.

In the end, those two were merely worried about each other. Thinking that staying together was dangerous, or that going alone was dangerous. That was the only difference between the two's points.

Thinking only of physical power in a battle, Bleu was right. But, would it really be all that was to it? Camallia was confident that, in a direct battle, there was no guarantee Bleu would win against her. Putting aside how much did that even matter… Camallia felt confused and surprised as she recognized the essential difference of the strengths Bleu and Karin stood for.

Her intention had been to keep an eye on Bleu only, but she had begun to see them all as a unit, and secretly berated herself for it. Bleu and Karin, and everyone else there. She felt something would change just from watching over them like this. That hadn't occurred to her from the start. She felt confused at her own change of view, feeling not out of place on a journey she began for very different reasons.

When Karin's voice started to get hoarse, Camallia intervened.

"Sir Bleu, you have lost this time. Lady Karin as well, how about taking some rest?"

As she spoke, she threw some fruit to the two. She had procured them in Manarina, a fruit typical of arid lands called Aquin, with juicy flesh within its hard shell.

Perhaps it could help refresh her throat. Karin accepted it without saying anything. But because the shell was hard, she couldn't break it open. Bleu couldn't stay just watching that, and cut it in half for her. However, his hands couldn't reach the pulp inside. She took the pulpy segments out the shell without issue, and gave one to Bleu.

To Bleu, the fruit was sweet and slightly bitter. He turned his face in Camallia's direction. Locking eyes with the meddling girl, he narrowed his at her.

His blue eyes, taking in the stillness of the night, had a deeper color.

"Geez, next time I wish you helped me out."

He jumped off the trunk. Without his weight, the trunk and the Sand Rover jumped up. Angry as he wanted to go to the driving soldiers in silence, he scowled again. The girls looked at his face, giggling.

"Lady Karin, has Sir Bleu always been like this?" Camallia whispered. Karin asked what she meant.

"I mean if he has always been that kind."

"I'm not too kind."

Bleu answered as he overheard their talk. Karin laughed at that.

"You are, though."

"No, I mean that the dragon races I know are far more ferocious. Since ancient times, they are the ultimate guardians. And yet Sir Bleu is, how do I say… He is, oddly human-like…"

"Yeah, I'm weird," Bleu sulked even more.

"Sure, you might be. Maybe it's because you were raised alongside us humans all this time. But, I don't know any Sacred Dragons except you. If you asked me about them, I can only think of you. So, I don't know."

Camallia didn't seem to agree, but she didn't push further on the subject.

The Sand Rovers continued to ran through the dark night.

Further on, the trees grew thicker, and they were no longer capable of advancing through that terrain.

"From here on, there's no going back."

Randolf got off the vehicle and announced that, while running his eyes through everyone. His face was especially scary when looking at Karna and Krin.

"He's right. From here on we might get into a battle. In particular, Karna would be better off leaving."

Karna was undaunted by Bleu's words.

"It seems everyone is mistaken about me. I'm not that weak. I've fought off thieves alongside my travel partners before. Priests are people who seek trials. Especially someone in training like me, we have to move onwards and face peril. Besides, running away alone while others rise up despite the danger would be unforgivable. Asking me to turn back here is asking me to throw away what makes me a priest. That's a great offense. I'm sure Camallia understands."

As she looked for her approval, Camallia nodded vaguely.

"Still, knowing your limits is another side to wisdom."

Karna's thick eyebrows frowned at Tyrin's words.

"As long as I have faith in people, I'll be fine no matter what happens. And should I die while acting with conviction, it will stand as a holy sacrfice."

"I don't care for doctrines or whatever, but to each their own waste of time. I know that when someone holds on to faith like that, nothing can change their mind. Now, we walk from here on."

Randolf sent off the vehicles back to Manarina, and walked off, leading the group.

He was well used to the path, while the others followed with great effort. With his large body, Bleu had to be careful to not hurt his wings on tree branches. Karin couldn't bear to watch that, and covered his wings with her cloak.

After a while, the forest began to vary in elevation. Randolf seemed to navigate through the ups and downs as he moved forward, and then he stopped.

In front of him, there were fine tree roots covering a spot of elevated ground.

"This is the entrance. Follow me."

He pushed the roots away like a curtain, and headed in. The inside was like a cave.

Krin carried a lantern. There was a stairway heading down further into the narrow path.

"Not fair, you told Tyrin about this but hid it from me all this time," she lamented, staring at the stairs that went too deep to be illuminated by the lantern's faint light. The frustration of not knowing something started bubbling into anger typical of a researcher.

"It's the first time I bring Tyrin here."

Tyrin nodded a couple times at Randolf's words. Randolf didn't even look at his reaction, quickly heading down the stairs instead.

After descending for quite a while, the path became level. While covered in soil and moss of many years, it was a bright artificial tunnel.

"It might be a shortcut, but going through a long and dark place like this isn't great."

Karin strained her eyes in the darkness, Karna clinging close to her back. She felt like she had got another little sister. That was some quick attachment.

"Don't worry, there's a ride for us."

Randolf pointed to a door that had suddenly appeared in the way, and pushed it open with both his arms. He went in, gesturing with his head for everyone to follow.

The group went inside after him and winced at how bright it was. They groaned as their eyes struggled to adjust to light again.

Once their vision returned, everyone but Randolf exclaimed in surprise.

The room was as wide as a palace hall. Many black lines spread out from the center, and disappeared into the depths of arched tunnels connected to the walls.

"What is all this?" Krin asked, wiping her fogged glasses.

"Stopping point for an ark, that's all we've learned," Randolf replied bluntly.

"So there are still things like this around, besides the Castle of the Ancients."

Bleu's face was a mix of shock and anxiety and nostalgia, as he walked along the walls of the hall.

There were frames of pitch black pictures decorating them here and there.

"Why is it decorated like this? Or, could it be that the pictures faded out?"

He blew off the dust over the pictures, and moved his face closer to the wall. Right then, what he thought was a dark picture started to shine with a bright light. Startled, Bleu backed away.

"Hey, what are you messing up with there?"

Randolf rushed over.

The brightly shining picture began to fill with mysterious patterns. At the same time, a high pitched and gentle female voice echoed through the hall. No one could make understand the words being said in a strange intonation.

"These patterns repeat through the picture. They are characters."

Krin brought her face closer to the wall, inspecting it with eyes wide open.

"It's painful that we cannot read them."

Krin nodded at Tyrin's words.

Eventually, the characters faded out, and a map was displayed.

"It's a map of this place. Perhaps this is an information board."

"You seem to be familiar with this," Randolf looked suspicious at Camallia.

"It's because there is something similar to this in the land of the Sacred Dragons of Parmecia."

"What? You mean there's a place like this in your homeland? But, our ancestors didn't see anything like what we just saw, no matter how much they searched."

"That is because, perhaps, it recognized Sir Bleu as an authority. This too, might be a place once oversaw by the Sacred Dragons. If that's true, it must obey a Sacred Dragon's orders without question."

"So, with this Sacred Dragon, we might be able to use anything in this place. He could open all the locked tunnels."

Randolf pressed her on. His eyes shined with the light of curiosity and ambition.

"I didn't order it to do anything. It just started working on its own when I touched it."

Confused, Bleu tried to stop the expectations piling up on him all of a sudden.

"You could make it work, so why don't you know how to use it?"

"Bleu's parents didn't have time to teach him. I'm sure that was it." Karin jumped in Bleu's defense.

"So, the Sacred Dragons of this Parmecia land, they should know how to use this, right?"

"Yes, that's likely," Camallia nodded.

"Then, I'm going there. I want to find out all the secrets of this place. With that, I'll be able to use all the sealed tunnels. Maybe I'll even find new mines. I might strike it rich here. Come, let's hurry and board the ark. I expect we'll be able to sleep in the time that thing will take to get to the other side of the mountains."

Randolf hurried them, pointing to a vessel over the lines. This vessel he called an ark looked like a huge upside-down boat. It had no wheels. Karin secretly questioned if it would really move.

The group got inside the ark through a door in the back. The empty insides looked like a cargo hold of sorts.

Randolf used the control panel in the front, and the ark began to gently float, with them inside. And then it sped forward, as if gliding through the black lines.

"Waaaah, awesome, my eyes are spiiining! This was built by your ancestors!?" Karna asked as she watched the flickering lights of the tunnel fly by.

"They didn't built it, I said that they found it. This is a legacy of the gods. I also didn't explore everything inside here. All I did was find mines of precious metals and crystals in the depths of the cavern and the exits on the other side."

"Crystals?"

At Karin's question, Randolf showed a thin crystal shining like the rainbow.

"These are the key to making the old lady's machine work," Krin explained to her sister. "There are many kinds of them, and each affect the machine in a different way. But, only a few are in perfect shape, most have some cracks on them and end up being just pretty rocks."

"All fine by me, I get to sell these rocks to the old lady for a good penny. It's more profit than selling crafts."

He roared with laughter, putting the crystal away.

"The point is, if I find jewels or gold or silver mines, I can live without digging this strange stuff anymore. And if I hit the jackpot with the greatest ore of all, I'll be rich in an instant. I could call back my family who got tired of protecting a bunch of ruins they didn't understand. It'd be a dream to build a dwarf town in this underground too. I'm excited to cross the ocean now!"

Bleu and Karin exchanged looks at that.

"Hey, hey, you just chase wherever the money go, don't you?" Bleu said

"Besides," Tyrin added with a reprimanding tone, "the Sacred Dragons of Parmecia are warring with devils right now."

Bleu wanted to make Randolf give up. They already had to take care of Karna, why did he want to come along too.

"Interesting. That much won't stop me. I don't think getting my hands on these secrets will be easy, I'm no idiot. Dwarves are top-notch warriors. How about that, Sacred Dragon, why not employ me as your protection?"

Everyone blinked when he said that. Offering protection to a Sacred Dragon, the audacity.

"I don't believe Sir Bleu has the need. It's plain to see who's the strongest one," Tyrin chided Randolf.

"No, I'm counting on you."

Everyone but Randolf turned in surprise as Bleu said that. He had changed his mind all of a sudden.

He wouldn't be able to always be at Karin's side. He had to intention of taking her to Parmecia, but he wasn't sure even the journey to Pao would be safe. Should anything happen, he needed someone besides Tyrin to protect the girls.

"Glad to be on board."

Randolf slapped Tyrin on the back with all his strength. The mage coughed helplessly.

"Now, this ark will go on just fine without us doing anything, so you should all go to sleep. Like that girl over there."

Randolf pointed with his chin at Karna, wrapped up like a ball in her cloak. Seems she hadn't got used to the ride and felt sick. Quietly laughing at what a relief that was, Randolf laid down as well.

With no wheels to jostle it, the ark ran silently at high speed through the stripes of light. Except for the queasy Karna, everyone killed time as they pleased until they reached their destination.

Moving away from Tyrin and Krin, who inspected the control panel without rest, Karin sat down with Bleu and Camallia.

"Do the Sacred Dragons of Parmecia live in a place like this?" Bleu asked the foreign girl.

"Are you curious?" Camallia asked back to gauge his reaction.

"I would be lying if I said no. Isn't it strange? The gods could build things like this. Why did the Sacred Dragons, who should be their chosen ones, end up down a road of destruction? Be it in Rune, or in Parmecia…"

"But, aren't you still here?" Karin said, "And the dragons of Parmecia aren't gone yet. The gods were the one who disappeared first."

"Yeah, even the gods were destroyed, so it's not that weird if the Sacred Dragons are too."

Karin had tried to cheer Bleu up, but realized she had done the opposite.

"My problem is, why did it happen," Bleu continued.

"That was because they were cut from the Manual. The Sacred Dragons's lives and the Manual are tied together by an inescapable fate."

"I don't think it's their fate."

Karin objected to Camallia's choice of words.

"It is, the Sacred Dragons of Parmecia receive their Flame of Life through the Power of the Earth."

"Flame of Life?" Bleu echoed a term he was unfamiliar with.

Camallia nodded. "With the secret arts of the Manual, they receive their life force. That was set up by the gods in distant times. Thanks to the gods, as long as they can take the Power of the Earth into their bodies, they are immortal. Because of that, they, no, you became known as the dragons of the gods. Did you not know that?"

Camallia asked, turning to face Bleu.

What was he if he didn't know even that, Bleu asked himself. What was he, after all? And what kind of creature were the Sacred Dragons? He didn't have a clear answer for these questions. Finding the answers was the big challenge in his life.

But, the more he mulled over it, the more differences he realized between Sacred Dragons and humans, between him and Karin. In particular, the more they learned of the physical differences, the harder it was to get past them.

Karin wanted to say something to him. But even someone from Rudo Village like her, so deeply connected with the Sacred Dragons, didn't know any more than him. But unlike Bleu, she was not facing their differences, but focusing on their similarities, with a feeling other than sadness.

"After we retrieve the Manual from the devils, and meet the Sacred Dragons in Parmecia, all might be explained. The knowledge you missed on learning should be there. In the mountain of the Sacred Dragons." She paused. "What I really wish to know is, why are you the only Sacred Dragon left in Rune, you and no one else…"

Bleu found himself captive of Camallia's eyes.

Breathing became slightly harder. He felt as if his soul was melting inside his body.

"Let's go to sleep."

Karin broke the spell. She got in the middle of the two, and tried to push Bleu to lie down.

"You're right, Lady Karin. We should rest as well."

Laughing softly, she undid her sash and started to take off her surcoat. She then took off her long gloves and boots, exposing as much skin as she could. She was glad she was in a safe place where she could relax and sleep like that. Stretching her long legs as she laid down, she turned over her wide cloak and covered herself.

"From tomorrow on we can't waste any time. Let's rest well."

Bleu sprawled himself on the floor.

Karin laid down happily by his side. Bleu curved his long tail, supporting her head like a pillow. And then covered her with his wings like a blanket. Like it was the usual for them.

Camallia rested her head on her hands, and looked on as they slept happily. She continued to stare at them with deep interest until falling asleep.

To next part>

Translation notes:

Karna uses the "-sama" honorific for Bleu, as most people do at this point, honestly. For Karin however, she uses "onee-sama", which is a respectful way to say "sister". Since this is hard to translate, and the narration already points multiple times that the two act like sisters and that Karna is coming off as overly attached, I decided to not translate it as anything and hope the over familiarity of it comes off this way.

As far as I could tell, the "Aquin" fruit is a made up name.

Randolf actually talks about finding "the greatest silver of all" when talking of his ambitions. Since Mithril in-game is specifically called Mithril silver (ミスリル銀), that's likely the ore he's looking for. I wasn't sure if Mithril is commonly called a silver though (I never watched a lord of rings), so I decided to go with ore to be safe.

In fact, let's talk a little about Randolf. In game, he says in HQ that "drinking and fighting is all that is to his life", making him kind of a simple warrior archetype. The novel took some good liberties here making him more work oriented, though it makes sense given how little it had to work with. It's still acknowledging him as a warrior so it's not a big deal.

[kanyniablue]

i finished Death on the Nile and

[5sospenguinqueen]

Bedtime Stories | Daniel Ricciardo x Author! Reader

Summary: For the past six years, you've been dreaming of a future with Daniel. Until one silly little interview shatters every illusion.

Warnings: Swearing. Angst. Baby fever. End of a relationship. Daniel bashing.

Female reader with various faceclaims. Takes place in the 2022 season.

Main Masterlist

next.

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User 2 no, it's not an announcement. her best friend is currently pregnant and she was gushing about looking forward to aunty duties

User 3 omg her and daniel would make the cutest babies though

→ User 4 i bet she can't wait until they have their own mini-me

User 5 imagine our rom-com queen going from writing the cutest but filthiest fiction imaginable to writing about why you should eat your carrots

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22•05•22

User 6 i can't believe this man was talking about being in the height of his career when he's been nothing but a flop since leaving red bull

User 7 the way he's been stringing this poor woman along for 6 years, knowing how badly she wants children, to then decide in a random interview that he's never going to have kids because they would be a 'distraction'

User 8 fans spotted y/n running from the pits once she saw that daniel was safely done with racing

User 9 i fear we may be witnessing the downfall of something we once held sacred

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16•06•22

fallontonight just posted

liked by YourUserName, kellypiquet and others

fallontonight did you know @ YourUser Name was once chased by a kangaroo? find out how in tonight's episode of The Tonight Show 📚🦘

4,477 comments

YourUserName thanks for having me! ✨

User 11 excuse me, ma’am, reassess what

User 12 daniel has been absent from her last 3 posts

→ User 1 not even in the likes or comments

→ User 2 and he didn't even congratulate her on the recent book launch

→ User 3 ya’ll are reaching. he's busy racing. she's busy doing book promo. they still follow each other

User 4 anyone notice she didn't look as happy as she usually does

→ User 5 yes! and i swear she got teary when talking about her life plans 🥺

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YourUserName just posted

liked by maxverstappen1, mclaren and others

YourUserName my happy place 🌊🐚🦀 Aug '22

4,990 comments

User 6 does this mean a new book is coming soon

→ User 7 girl, we’ve just had one. let the woman rest

→ YourUserName sorry, my lovelies but i don’t think i'm in the right headspace to being right a romance novel at this time

→ User 6 confirmation??!?!

→ User 7 we’re children of divorce

→ User 8 honestly fuck those two because i couldn’t have cared less about vroom vroom boys until mother started dating one and now i'm crying in class ‘cause they’re over

landonorris get that bread, queen 🍞

→ YourUserName who let you out of daycare

→ User 9 not y/n and lando interacting like she didn’t break his teammates heart

→ User 10 more like his teammate broke y/n’s heart. let's not make daniel out to be the victim here

kellypiquet p said get writing those children’s books so she can brag about aunty y/n to her friends

→ YourUserName my sweet girl. i saw the cutest dress the other day for her so I’ll pop round soon x

→ User 11 i love their friendship

→ User 12 get this woman a child. She’s too sweet to be stuck in cool aunt mode forever

User 13 anyone notice she didn't do her annual birthday post for daniel?

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04•09•22

User 14 no because the interviewer was so real for that. checo has a few children and he’s currently 2nd best. max is nowhere to be seen on the grid he's that far ahead and he makes sure p is his priority when she’s there so???

→ User 15 and the way he stormed out. i bet PR are sooo happy with him

User 16 nah because mclaren recently announced that they’re not extending his contract so he currently doesn't have his seat and doesn't have his y/n, all because he thought he was better than that

YourUserName posted a new story

danielricciardo posted a new story

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danielricciardo just posted

liked by landonorris, estebanocon and others

danielricciardo yesterday was something. p17 wasn't the result we were expecting, and the media were a challenge but it's always a delight to be in Suzuka. Moving on to the Americas

5,509 comments

User 1 maybe if y/n was there, you wouldn't have done so badly

User 2 maybe if he had a baby waiting in the paddock he would’ve had more incentive to do better

mclaren we’ll get them next time 💪

User 3 letting mclaren and lando down

→ User 4 the real reason he and y/n broke up is because he has no wins. she should move onto lando or something

→ User 5 he’s way too young for her

→ User 4 they'd make a good looking couple tho

(comments have been disabled for this post)

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19•10•22

YourUserName just posted

liked by charles_leclerc, bloomsburypublishing and others

YourUserName thirty, flirty and thriving. please enjoy a small snippet of my 30th birthday, organised by my favourite girl. these are the nice moments before she plies me full of cocktails and i become the sloppiest person in monaco tagged: kellypiquet

kellypiquet any chance to celebrate you 🤍🤍

→ kellypiquet and an even better chance to drink the entire bar and force max to carry us home

→ maxverstappen1 i'm just glad i was able to pull you both out of the sea before you drowned

landonorris can't believe you tried (and failed) to stop us from gatecrashing

→ YourUserName it was an exclusive event, we don't let randos in

→ landonorris i know you're joking but it still hurts my feelings

maxverstappen1 happy birthday, sloppy. you don't look a day over 40

→ YourUserName i'm gonna let that slide but only because i love the bag that kelly told you to buy

User 7 happy birthday to the best author

User 8 happy birthday queen

carlossainz55 happy birthday, y/n 💐

liked by YourUserName

danielricciardo happy birthday x

User 5 kelly and y/n look like the funnest people to hang out with

→ User 6 literally need to know how to become part of their duo

lewishamilton happy birthday, y/n. have a lovely night 💕

liked by YourUserName

mclaren happy birthday to papaya's favourite author (we're still waiting for a racing rom-com that is quite clearly about your favourite f1 team and their super sexy admin) 🥳🥳

liked by YourUserName

This is going to be part of a Baby Fever Angst series with the other drivers. So, multiple drivers are going to have an smau like this.

Max’s Version | Lando’s Version | Lance’s Version

Charles’ Version | Oscar’s Version

I do have Part 2s planned if people want them but also happy to leave it like this :)

[transmascrage]

Video by ErinInTheMorning on TikTok

[Transcript (there's captions on screen but in case you can't turn on audio):

Erin: "File this one away for the transgender history books, whenever they write about our history; today Lindsey Spero, a trans man, stood in front of the Florida Board of Medicine, which was about to vote to medically ban all gender affirming care for trans youth.

He stood there to deliver his testimony, he delivered a little bit of it, but then he took the remainder of his testimony time to stand there and inject his hormone therapy in front of all of them in stunned silence, and then he turned around and raised his fist. Watch this."

Lindsey: "My name is Lindsey Spero, I'm 25 years old, I'm a resident of St. Petersburg, Florida. I'm also transgender.

I am someone who was subjected to treatments that have been questionable, that were mentioned by people like that woman who came up and spoke, I can tell you for a fact that her child is going to grow up hating her.

I'm sure you've heard many stories that sound like mine already, over the last few months my trans siblings and family members have stood before you, put their hearts on full display and vulnerable pleaded with you to listen to our stories and perspectives.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned your actions and our federal government has spoken out against the actions you seek to take regarding the necessary health care for trans youth.

I could stand here and tell you about the times I attempted to end my life because I didn't have access to gender affirming care but I know, I know you don't care. I see you sneering at us while we come here and talk to you.

Instead I'm going to take the rest of my time to demonstrate the sacred and weekly ritual of my shot in front of you, in this body.

My medication is life saving, I will use HRT for the rest of my life, your denial of my need for this medication, doesn't make my existence as a trans person any less real.

I will be giving myself my subcutaneous shot in my stomach. If you have a needle phobia, please look away."

Lindsey injects his T-shot in silence, helped by another person who passes him a needle and the testosterone in its vial.

After finishing, he raises his fist and turns around to the audience.

Lindsey: "Tomorrow and forever."

The crowd cheers and a few people get up to clap.

Erin: "That, that is what I'm talking about! Good job Lindsey! This is the kind of resistance that matters!"

End transcript.]

(As a sidenote, it seems that Lindsey identifies as nonbinary, not necessarily (or exclusively, anyways) as a trans man. Some articles identify him as transmasc but all of his socials state nonbinary.)

[twizzie-lairs]

My Darling, My Honey

Alastor X Fem!Reader (Part 7)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

Quick Notes:

You, the reader who is an artist, and had become Alastor's sweetheart, have just died.

Alastor is about to find out.

Part 7:

The sound of a singular gunshot rang clearly in the night that had been so peacefully quiet up until that moment in time.

Alastor, with the engagement ring in his pocket, who had been peacefully reading a novel within the confines of your shared home, nearly ripped his book in half upon hearing the sound of a gunshot in these woods.

The forest around here was part of his private property, anyone who dared to trespass or hunt in his neck of the woods was shot on sight. Many people ignored the plentiful and very obvious warning signs, so it wasn't his fault so many people ended up becoming your and his meals. Everyone else just thought the law didn't apply to them, straight-up criminals. In his eyes, they all deserved it.

Thinking it was just another nuisance, a "tsk" left Alastor's mouth as he grabbed his shotgun and headed into the woods.

After a few minutes of walking, he finally caught sight of the transgressors. Two men that he, unfortunately, recognized right away as the men from the bar who liked to push his buttons by harassing you.

The seething rage pooled in his core, bubbling up into his chest. This was his chance to get rid of those nuisances once and for all.

They would trouble his darling no more.

For him to get into a better position to take the men out, he crouched down and quietly circled around them like a hunter playing with his prey.

After circling around to position himself behind the men, what he wasn't expecting to see was the most nightmarish sight he's ever seen.

His beloved sweetheart, soon to be betrothed, all disheveled and tied up against a blood-splattered tree with a bullet lodged in the middle of their forehead.

Your eyes were lifeless. There was no doubt about it, the love of his life was dead.

Alastor didn't need to even think before pulling the trigger on the men, shooting one after the other, over and over, even after their bodies had hit the ground.

He. Was. Enraged.

By the time Alastor was done with them, they looked like Swiss cheese, barely strung together.

Alastor's breath was heavy, his chest heaving, near hyperventilating, his eyes were enlarged and his mind was focused on one thing. You.

His beautiful love, he couldn't bear to see you in this state.

In his oddly manic and shocked state, he untied you from the tree and took your body back to your shared home in the woods not too far from here.

For a few moments, his rage was replaced by sorrow and mourning as he buried you in the backyard. As fucked up as he was in the head sometimes, he would rather die than think about eating you. You were sacred to him.

As he laid you down into the ground, he embraced you once last time and took the ring out of his pocket. He placed the ring onto your ring finger and kissed the top of your hand, "In life and in death, I am forever yours, as you are forever mine. I love you, dear."

After you were buried, the rage returned like a vicious tsunami. Oh he wasn't done with revenge just yet.

Every single man or woman that ever mistreated you or offended you, was put on his list.

This night was the catalyst that gave birth to the serial killer known as the "Bayou Killer".

Alastor stopped visiting Mimzy's bar since your death, with his sole focus and dedication in life going to hunting down those that had harmed you in life. After all, they deserved it, you were like an angel to him.

But what Alastor didn't stop doing, was broadcasting his radio show. So many of his connections were made because of his show, so it was a valuable resource to keep active, to use to his advantage.

Alastor continued living his life like this until every single name was crossed off his list.

It was then that it was time for his luck to run out.

Right upon the killing the very last person on the list, was Alastor also shot right square in the forehead.

Before his consciousness faded into black, all he could hear was the muffled panic of a stranger who seemed to be apologizing for mistaking him for some sort of animal.

All Alastor could do was chuckle at the irony of the whole situation, the maniacal laughter was the type that only a madman could produce- before everything went dark and he died.

He thought he would never see you again, because surely, his beloved sweetheart would end up in heaven right?

The answer to this would remain a mystery for many decades to come as Alastor descended into Hell and became who is now widely known in Hell as "The Radio Demon".

-> Part 8

[marzipanandminutiae]

Dear marzi, for reasons of trying not to give period characters too modern fetishes in my smut, may I have some recs as to where I may find some of that olde fetish content you've previously seen?

On the Wikipedia page for the "corset controversy," unfortunately!

Historians have been taking obvious tightlacing fetish letters seriously for...way too long. And sometimes still are. Confirmation bias is a hell of a thing. Of course, there's no way to 100% tell which letters are fetish fuel and which are real, but generally any that use particularly heightened language or common erotic tropes- or that seem to fly in the face of evidence from extant garments, unedited videos, stock and advertisements from real corset companies, etc. -are to be viewed with suspicion.

(The same is true for letters used now to claim that nipple piercing was a real Victorian trend- for, indeed, the only source is anonymous magazine letters and many of them fall into the same obvious patterns as the tightlacing letters. One DOES describe the alleged process in detail...but it's basically the same as the process for ear-piercing, a service jewelers did commonly offer back then. Just applied to nipples. So whether it's real or not is still uncertain, but it's highly doubtful that large numbers of Victorian women were running around with nipple piercings given that no extant nipple rings have been found, such piercings are never mentioned in letters or diaries or other more concrete sources, etc.)

Besides that, I've seen glimpses of most modern fetishes in various sources:

the Psychopathia Sexualis, a medical manual of "sexual mental illness" (in heavy quotes because things like homosexuality and gender variance are mentioned under that heading), talks about everything from a fetish for tight boots and gloves on women, to bloodplay (initiated by a woman, actually, who wanted to drink her husband's blood), to force-femming, to some very elaborate femdom scenarios that I hope the sex workers in question were paid well for. Of course, since the cases are anonymous, these are also difficult to confirm- but clearly someone had THOUGHT of them, since they're written into the book.

And I've seen at least some of them in other sources, too, including some of the magazines that published the nipple piercing and tightlacing letters. The Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine was notorious for its letters on tightlacing, tight gloves, spanking, etc.

Photographic porn was definitely a thing almost as soon as photography came into being. A lot of it is pretty vanilla, but I could swear I'd seen piss kink photos (with urine painted in after development) before the blog where they were hosted went defunct

James Joyce's letters to his wife get into farting and scat fetish territory. Yes, really.

Speaking of letters, there was one man living here in Boston who, in the late 19th century, wrote letters to his wife describing erotic dreams of her as a giantess who pissed on him and then ate him. I cannot remember his name and it's going to drive me insane all day, but he was the head of Boston's censorship organization, the Watch and Ward society and these letters were first released by his own children for an unauthorized biography written five years after his death. Guess there was little love lost there.

BDSM is old. Like, really old. Old, to quote the sacred texts, as balls. I'm pretty sure there are sexual flagellation texts going back to the Renaissance, but don't quote me on that.

Basically, Rule 34 can be back-applied, too. If it existed, there was a fetish for it, probably. Of course, things that specifically involve modern technology or properties are out, but beyond that...the sky is the limit

[makingqueerhistory]

"Horace wrote in his Odes that Sappho's work was worthy of sacred admiration; she is not someone who can fade away. Her work is known as some of the best poetry of all time, full of wit and eloquence and inspiring other writers for thousands of years to come.

While she lived when she could love other women, each following era seems to struggle with that idea. Some have worked tirelessly to develop theories around her heterosexuality, trying to find a turn of phrase that could prove something that did not exist. Anything to avoid admitting such influential work was written by a queer woman.

Despite all of this, Sappho has become as much a figurehead as she was a poet. Activist groups are named after her. Books are written about her. Queer people themselves identify with her. She is the proof that homosexuality is not new but as old as legends themselves.

She is also proof that through the fires of religious zealots, the carelessness of academic institutions, the fear, the deeply conditional love, queer people remain on the pages of history."

-Harper-Hugo Darling (Sappho)

[xhoneygirlxx]

Watermelon Sugar

Eddie Munson x Fem Reader

summary: Eddie shows you the eight wonder of the world. his mouth.

warnings: reader and eddie are 18+, established relationship, fluff, Eddie being a munch. nicknames/pet names used (baby, honey, sweetheart, etc.) MINORS DNI 18+ smut: fem oral receiving, blowjobs mentioned, talks of past sexual experiences, praise/body worship, swearing. *Skin Color/Ethnicity not mentioned! not proofread, spelling errors and horrible writing.

if I miss anything plz lmk!

a/n: hello my loves! thank you all for the kind words and reactions on my last couple of posts! as you all know smut is not my forte but I felt the need to write this. am I projecting??? maybe but we’re gonna pretend that i'm not :)

The low hum of Steve Nicks’ voice plays through Eddie’s room, the soundtrack of your makeout session with your boyfriend. Orange glow from the late afternoon sun comes through the window, an angelic glow casting around the frizz of the mentalhead’s hair.

It started as an innocent day, hanging out together in a comfortable silence in his room. Him doodling in his notebook and you flipping through one of his old comic books. Somewhere along the way a featherlight touch turned into shared giggles, sitting in his lap turned into a chaste kiss, and it ended up with him in between your parted knees, kissing like his life depended on it.

A curtain of curls block out the skylight, tender lips on yours like melted honey, and big hands roaming down the expanse of your body. When Eddie moves away from your mouth, he takes the oxygen from your lungs with him and you whimper at the loss.

"Gonna let me have a taste of you, pretty girl?" Big doe eyes shine down to you, way too eager and excited. Your stomach twists into knots, the training you put yourself through in case of this moment, has all been for nothing. What do you say to the man that hovers over you with so much love in his eyes?

"How about I suck you off instead, hmm?" You try to come off as sensual but instead you sound scared.

It's an offer that you've made so many times over the short course of your relationship with Eddie. This was your first real relationship besides the eight grade love affair you had with Simon Willard. That only lasted a week.

You weren't anywhere near a virgin, that so called sacred part of yourself is now in the possession of a random boy you met on vacation before your senior year. Hookups weren't uncommon to you but what was uncommon to you was the affection you received during the sex.

People you've hooked up with never really cared to get you nice and ready the way Eddie does, prepping you with two or more fingers, working you open so that it doesn't hurt going in. Guys didn't care if you got off or not, they were just looking for a hole to fill and someone who wouldn't get clingy.

You had guy friends, including Eddie before you started dating, and you heard the horror stories they had of going down on a girl. It was never in mean spirit, although the discussion should've stayed in the bedroom, but it still scared you shitless. How one girl didn't properly take care of herself, causing the smell to be rancid. This girl didn't wipe the right way, leaving scraps of toilet paper down there. And the one that really settled itself into your brain, was how good or bad a girl tasted.

Of course you, and all of your guy friends, knew that girls didn't taste like ice cream, or strawberries, or candy. It was made up, another bullshit beauty standard for woman to worry about.

You had paid attention to the way guys would ask you if you wanted it done. The way they would sigh and roll their eyes like it was the biggest task of their lives. You would end up telling them that you're more of a giver than receiver, and that you just weren't interested in that whole thing. When they would release a breath of relief you would fill with shame, almost like you were the one who requested it to be done and had been turned down. The embarrassment of rejection you didn't even ask for.

So when you and Eddie first had sex as boyfriend and girlfriend, you made it your mission to never let that horrid question come from his mouth. You always made sure to offer him head first, and if it looked like he was about to ask, you'd simply tell him you couldn't wait anymore.

Now here you are, under him, ready and willing to take him in your mouth, and he's gotten the question out before you could beat him to the punch.

"Ya know I will never say no to that, sweetheart. But-"

Uh oh. That's the word that comes before a life or death sentence. It's hanging heavy over you, the once comfortable silence is now killing you. Squeezing all of the air out of your body, limbs going numb with the loss of circulation, all the while your ears ring like an explosion has gone off.

"I want to return the favor." It's so sincere when he says it and it makes you want to cry. A boyish smile taking over his mouth, deep dimples appearing on the fat of his cheeks.

You must look like you've seen a ghost because the pretty smile that was written on his face is now taken over by worry.

"I mean, I don't have to. It's just- I feel like," Eddie's a panicked mess, backing his face further away from your own. The small bubble of love that the two of you created has now been popped with your own doubts and fears.

"I don't want to make you uncomfortable, I just thought I could make you feel good s'all." The confident man that you know all too well is now reduced to a fumbling and anxious person. His fingers work at the chunky silver ring on his finger, twisting and twisting and twisting it around.

"You just always, I don't know. It just always seems like you never ask for head and I just wanted to offer it to you, I guess."

The whiskey eyes that never left your gaze won't even look at you anymore. Focusing on that damn ring that goes faster and faster the longer you wait to respond. You want to run and hide. Dig a deep hole and never come out. Your lovely boyfriend who's done nothing but treat you like the queen of the goddamn universe, now thinks he's made you uncomfortable.

Embarrassment rushes through your veins, throat closing with the grip of shame making it harder to breathe. Tears prick your eyes, hot and heavy, ready to fall at the drop of a dime. You feel so guilty for not just telling him the truth, for not saying all the concerns that you had. Even before you started dating Eddie always confided in you, telling you the deepest secrets that kept him up at night and you couldn't even tell him this one thing.

"I'm embarrassed." It comes out in a sniffle, lip wobbling beneath the teeth that hold it down, trying to make it go away.

"I'm just embarrassed I won't be good. That I'll be another conversation for you and the boys to drink to. Will I taste good? Do I smell weird? Does it look pretty? All of these questions circle my brain and I'm so fucking scared that you won't like me anymore." It comes out like word vomit, so fast and uneven in tone that you're not sure if it even made sense.

You don't have time to think it over anyway, Eddie's too quick putting his hands on your cheeks, gently making you look up at him. The same kind eyes that you always see meet yours. Thumbs gentle swipe the fat tears off of your face, his cold hands extinguish the flames of your skin.

"Honey, I promise you I would never, ever do some dumb shit like that. What the guys and I talk about is irrelevant, half the time they don't even know what they're talking about. I felt the same way when you wanted to suck me off the first time, every single question you ask yourself is what I ask myself." Eddie's eyes are searching yours, looking and waiting to see the dread leave your head.

"Like I said before, I would never want you to be uncomfortable but if you're okay with it, I'd really," He places a gentle kiss on your forehead, "really," he continues to place more delicate kisses around your face, "really love to make you feel so fucking good."

When he's done, he looks back down to you with a dopey smile, he's low and hazy drunk off of you. A smile tugs on your own lips, so warm and fuzzy off of him. You know he means it and you feel sad that you even questioned him. Childish laughter rings out between the two of you when he pinches your sides, tickling out the stiffness in your body.

When the laughter dies down, he asks you again by cocking his eyebrow up in question. Nodding your head, you give him a confident yes, something you didn't feel the first time he asked.

Moving down your body, trails of kisses are left on your skin, mapping out his journey to your center. When he reaches the hem of your pants, he looks up to you once more waiting for a reply. Encouraging him to go further, his chilled fingers douses the warmth radiating off of you.

Leaving you only in your polka dot designed panties, Eddie teases you by running his fingers up and down your thighs.

"I gotta say bub, I love the pink dots. Top notch fashion if I don't say so myself." Eddie jokes and it makes you giggle. Swatting lightly at him, he returns the laughter.

"I'm not lying, I swear! If only you know what you do to me." As much of a joker Eddie is, he was never one to joke about your beauty. He found everything you did, said, and wore so fucking breathtaking and flawless, he'd probably get hard from the sight of you in a Tin Man costume.

"If you, at any time, want me to stop just tell me. I won't get mad, just let me know, okay?" Eyebrows scrunched with seriousness, Eddie makes sure to be loud and clear with his instructions.

"I promise, Eds." You say and he takes that as the green light.

Eddie's index finger teases your cloth slit, running up and down so slowly it feels like torture. When you lift your hips looking for more friction he snorts lightly.

"Patience, my love." His fingers continue to dance over your panties, running back to the top of the band and pulling them down in a swift motion.

When the cool air hits your wet seat, you whimper slightly at the feeling. Eddie has seen your pussy multiple times, but when he spreads it with his fingers, you can't help but feel shy, closing your legs around his arm.

"Don't go shy on me, baby. I just wanna see the prettiest picture I've ever seen." His eyes are still trained on the glistening of your sex, glimmering like bright pools of water.

It feels like an hour of no movement from Eddie before he goes to change his position between your legs. Shuffling back on his knees, he picks your thighs up to place on his shoulders as he lays on his stomach.

Still having doubts, you lean up on your elbows, watching your boyfriend to see what his reaction is. To your surprise, he looks like a kid in a candy store, awe and wonder swimming around in the big brown pools of his eyes.

When an obscene sniff rings through the air, you can't help but cringe a little. Waiting for him to look repulsed, you're again astonished when all your met with is a feral look.

Very tentatively, he runs his flat tongue from your hole to the top of your clit. Moaning deeply, he moves his gave up to you. A smirk breaks out on his features, so devilishly and mischievously.

"Oh baby, you have no fucking clue how good you taste." There is no questioning in his cadence. It's smug and cocky and it makes you shiver with need.

Repeating his motions from before, you mewl at the feeling, lifting your hips again. The chuckle that comes from Eddie vibrates off of you, make you move you squirm. Reaching his strong hands around your thighs, he holds you in place with his firm grip.

When the wet muscle breaches your needy hole, you fall back onto the bed moaning out in pleasure. He works your open with it, flicking it in and out efficiently.

Pulling out of you, he moves up to your bundle of nerves. Starting slowly, he circles around once or twice, before working it in figure eights.

You melt into the bed like a popsicle on a hot summers day. There's not a single thought in your head other than the feeling of his mouth. You're a livewire come to life, so sensitive and lost in the haze of pleasure.

You think this is the precipice of ecstasy but then one of his thick fingers enter you and his mouth sucks hard on your pulsing clit.

It feels like fireworks on the fourth of July, bright and explosive, big loud bangs ringing out into the night sky. It's like the feeling of going down the big drop on a rollercoaster, tingling deep in your belly and a rush of adrenaline pumping through your veins. It's like winning first place, heartwarming and shocking all at the same time.

You feel all these things at the same time, every single one of them caused by the actions of your boyfriends mouth. It's overwhelming and so fucking delicious but you can't say anything than cry out in bliss.

Letting go of your clit with a pop, Eddie's head pokes up at you like an excited puppy. "S'it feel good baby?" You want to answer, you really do but the way he sneaks a second finger into you and crooks them at the perfect angle makes you lose all motor skills.

"Awe, honey" he coos mockingly, "Is it that good?"

"S'good Eds, so good." You're a blubbering, crying mess. So hooked on the feeling of him, hooking on the feeling of how he made you feel.

He doesn't say anything else, too busy pushing his face back between your legs. His motions go faster, fingers hitting that sweet spot inside of you that he only managed to find, his mouth switching between motions, driving you closer to the edge as he does.

The string in your belly is pulling tighter and tighter, barley hanging together by a thread. You're a thrashing, sweaty mess on his bed, gripping the pillow underneath your head that your knuckles will probably be stuck in that position. You don't care, not when he's moving his head back and forth, slurping up your wetness like a handmade milkshake.

It's filthy, down right dirty the way it sounds. The noises that carry out into his room echo so loud the neighbors could probably hear. The squelch of your wetness being pounded into by his hand, the way he's drinking you up like a dehydrated plant, the moans that escape out of your parted lips.

"Eddie, please. FUCK, please." You're blathering at him, not even sure at what you're asking for.

Separating himself from you again, he continues working his fingers deep into you.

"You wanna cum, pretty girl? S'that it? Wanna cum all over my fingers?" You moan louder in response, clenching around him harder as you do.

"Go ahead, be a good good and cum for me. Come on, honey. Cum for me." That's all you need to hear before you're hurtling off the edge of your release.

You release with a silent cry, all the air being punched right out of you. Your body feels weightless, like you were thrown up into the clouds and not being able to come down.

Your whole body shakes, tears streaming down your face, all while your hole pulses and quivers around Eddie's fingers. A gush of wetness coats his fingers, a big puddle under your ass, leaving another stain on his bed seats.

He watches in awe as you hit your peak, how your back arches off of the bed and how you look so fucking perfect like this. The shy girl that never got experience this kind joy, now swims in the ocean of euphoria of the climax. He feels so lucky to witness this, to be the first and last person to ever see you this vulnerable.

Eddie wishes he could paint this moment, make a portrait of the way your kiss bitten lips form the perfect O, make the brushstrokes of your hair and some of it sticks to your sweaty face. You're so beautiful and he doesn't know how blessed to be yours.

When you float back down to earth, to the springy mattress of Eddie's, you take a moment to catch your breath. When he removes his fingers from you, you weakly hiss from movement and he offers a quiet sorry.

Moving back up to his knees, he hovers over you and smiles brightly down at you. Smiling weakly back at you, he uses the hand that's not supporting his weight to place it on your jaw. His thumb brushes back and forth and you melt right into it.

"How was that?" Pink tints his cheeks, grinning ear to ear.

You chuckle weakly, shaking your head in disbelief.

"I think I went to outer space for a second there."

A booming laugh leaves his chest and it makes you smile even harder. Your heart feels so full and so happy. You're so in love with him and it makes you delirious. You want to see him like this for the rest of your life, big smiles and even big laughter, so pretty and delicate only for you.

"Well I'm glad you enjoyed yourself there, space cadet." Leaning down to press his lips to yours, your soak in the feeling of it. When he moves away you pout at him, and he bops you on the nose with his finger.

"I was thinkin' I could return the favor, big boy." You whisper seductively.

"Oh baby, that sounds wonderful but-," He makes eye contact with you, "I need to be in you like yesterday because that, right there was the hottest thing I've ever witness."

"I happen to be a romantic. So I shall wait until my fair maiden is okay to resume our activities." Closing his eyes with pride, he places a hand on his heart.

Hiding your face with your hands, you bust out laughing at his little antics and when you peek between his fingers you see his teeth flashing back at you. Removing your hands from your face, you tuck a loose tendril behind his ear.

"You're a dork, but that sounds good to me."

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Thank you all for reading! I loves you all and hope you enjoyed!!!

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[etz-ashashiyot]

Chapter 4: Executed Jews

By Dara Horn, excerpted from People Love Dead Jews

ALA ZUSKIN PERELMAN AND I HAD BEEN IN TOUCH ONLINE before I finally met her in person, and I still cannot quite believe she exists. Years ago, I wrote a novel about Marc Chagall and the Yiddish-language artists whom he once knew in Russia, all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviet regime. While researching the novel, I found myself sucked into the bizarre story of these people's exploitation and destruction: how the Soviet Union first welcomed these artists as exemplars of universal human ideals, then used them for its own purposes, and finally executed them. I named my main character after the executed Yiddish actor Benjamin Zuskin, a comic performer known for playing fools. After the book came out, I heard from Ala in an email written in halting English: "I am Benjamin Zuskin's daughter." That winter I was speaking at a literary conference in Israel, where Ala lived, and she and I arranged to meet. It was like meeting a character from a book.

My hosts had generously put me up with other writers in a beautiful stone house in Jerusalem. We were there during Hanukkah, the celebration of Jewish independence. On the first night of the holiday, I walked to Jerusalem's Old City and watched as people lit enormous Hanukkah torches at the Western Wall. I thought of my home in New Jersey, where in school growing up I sang fake English Hanukkah songs created by American music education companies at school Christmas concerts, with lyrics describing Hanukkah as being about "joy and peace and love." Joy and peace and love describe Hanukkah, a commemoration of an underdog military victory over a powerful empire, about as well as they describe the Fourth of July. I remembered challenging a chorus teacher about one such song, and being told that I was a poor sport for disliking joy and peace and love. (Imagine a "Christmas song" with lyrics celebrating Christmas, the holiday of freedom. Doesn't everyone like freedom? What pedant would reject such a song?) I sang those words in front of hundreds of people to satisfy my neighbors that my tradition was universal — meaning, just like theirs. The night before meeting Ala, I walked back to the house through the dense stone streets of the Old City's Jewish Quarter, where every home had a glass case by its door, displaying the holiday's oil lamps. It was strange to see those hundreds of glowing lights. They were like a shining announcement that this night of celebration was shared by all these strangers around me, that it was universal. The experience was so unfamiliar that I didn't know what to make of it.

The next morning, Ala knocked on the door of the stone house and sat down in its living room, with its view of the Old City. She was a small dark-haired woman whose perfect posture showed a firmness that belied her age. She looked at me and said in Hebrew, "I feel as if you knew my father, like you understood what he went through. How did you know?"

The answer to that question goes back several thousand years.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The teenage boys who participated in competitive athletics in the gymnasium in Jerusalem 2,200 years ago had their circumcisions reversed, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to play. In the Hellenistic empire that had conquered Judea, sports were sacred, the entry point to being a person who mattered, the ultimate height of cool — and sports, of course, were always played in the nude. As one can imagine, ancient genital surgery of this nature was excruciating and potentially fatal. But the boys did not want to miss out.

I learned this fun fact in seventh grade, from a Hebrew school teacher who was instructing me and my pubescent classmates about the Hanukkah story — about how Hellenistic tyranny gained a foothold in ancient Judea with the help of Jews who wanted to fit in. This teacher seemed overly jazzed to talk about penises with a bunch of adolescents, and I suspected he'd made the whole thing up. At home, I decided to fact-check. I pulled a dusty old book off my parents' shelf, Volume One of Heinrich Graetz's opus History of the Jews.

In nineteenth-century academic prose, Graetz explained how the leaders of Judea demonstrated their loyalty to the occupying Hellenistic empire by building a gymnasium and recruiting teenage athletes — only to discover that "in uncovering their bodies they could immediately be recognized as Judeans. But were they to take part in the Olympian games, and expose themselves to the mockery of Greek scoffers? Even this difficulty they evaded by undergoing a painful operation, so as to disguise the fact that they were Judeans." Their Zeus-worshipping overlords were not fooled. Within a few years, the regime outlawed not only circumcision but all of Jewish religious practice, and put to death anyone who didn't comply.

Sometime after that, the Maccabees showed up. That's the part of the story we usually hear.

Those ancient Jewish teenagers were on my mind that Hanukkah when Ala came to tell me about her father's terrifying life, because I sensed that something profound united them — something that doesn't match what we're usually taught about what bigotry looks or feels like. It doesn't involve "intolerance" or "persecution," at least not at first. Instead, it looks like the Jews themselves are choosing to reject their own traditions. It is a form of weaponized shame.

Two distinct patterns of antisemitism can be identified by the Jewish holidays that celebrate triumphs over them: Purim and Hanukkah. In the Purim version of antisemitism, exemplified by the Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical Book of Esther, the goal is openly stated and unambiguous: Kill all the Jews. In the Hanukkah version of antisemitism, whose appearances range from the Spanish Inquisition to the Soviet regime, the goal is still to eliminate Jewish civilization. But in the Hanukkah version, this goal could theoretically be accomplished simply by destroying Jewish civilization, while leaving the warm, de-Jewed bodies of its former practitioners intact.

For this reason, the Hanukkah version of antisemitism often employs Jews as its agents. It requires not dead Jews but cool Jews: those willing to give up whatever specific aspect of Jewish civilization is currently uncool. Of course, Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening — and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism's success. These "converted" Jews are used to demonstrate the good intentions of the regime — which of course isn't antisemitic but merely requires that its Jews publicly flush thousands of years of Jewish civilization down the toilet in exchange for the worthy prize of not being treated like dirt, or not being murdered. For a few years. Maybe.

I wish I could tell the story of Ala's father concisely, compellingly, the way everyone prefers to hear about dead Jews. I regret to say that Benjamin Zuskin wasn't minding his own business and then randomly stuffed into a gas chamber, that his thirteen-year-old daughter did not sit in a closet writing an uplifting diary about the inherent goodness of humanity, that he did not leave behind sad-but-beautiful aphorisms pondering the absence of God while conveniently letting his fellow humans off the hook. He didn't even get crucified for his beliefs. Instead, he and his fellow Soviet Jewish artists — extraordinarily intelligent, creative, talented, and empathetic adults — were played for fools, falling into a slow-motion psychological horror story brimming with suspense and twisted self-blame. They were lured into a long game of appeasing and accommodating, giving up one inch after another of who they were in order to win that grand prize of being allowed to live.

Spoiler alert: they lost.

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I was in graduate school studying Yiddish literature, itself a rich vein of discussion about such impossible choices, when I became interested in Soviet Jewish artists like Ala's father. As I dug through library collections of early-twentieth-century Yiddish works, I came across a startling number of poetry books illustrated by Marc Chagall. I wondered if Chagall had known these Yiddish writers whose works he illustrated, and it turned out that he had. One of Chagall's first jobs as a young man was as an art teacher at a Jewish orphanage near Moscow, built for children orphaned by Russia's 1919-1920 civil war pogroms. This orphanage had a rather renowned faculty, populated by famous Yiddish writers who trained these traumatized children in the healing art of creativity.

It all sounded very lovely, until I noticed something else. That Chagall's art did not rely on a Jewish language — that it had, to use that insidious phrase, "universal appeal" — allowed him a chance to succeed as an artist in the West. The rest of the faculty, like Chagall, had also spent years in western Europe before the Russian revolution, but they chose to return to Russia because of the Soviet Union's policy of endorsing Yiddish as a "national Soviet language." In the 1920s and 30s, the USSR offered unprecedented material support to Yiddish culture, paying for Yiddish-language schools, theaters, publishing houses, and more, to the extent that there were Yiddish literary critics who were salaried by the Soviet government. This support led the major Yiddish novelist Dovid Bergelson to publish his landmark 1926 essay "Three Centers," about New York, Warsaw, and Moscow as centers of Yiddish-speaking culture, asking which city offered Yiddish writers the brightest prospects. His unequivocal answer was Moscow, a choice that brought him back to Russia the following year, where many other Jewish artists joined him.

But Soviet support for Jewish culture was part of a larger plan to brainwash and coerce national minorities into submitting to the Soviet regime — and for Jews, it came at a very specific price. From the beginning, the regime eliminated anything that celebrated Jewish "nationality" that didn't suit its needs. Jews were awesome, provided they weren't practicing Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism. The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not antisemitic, merely anti-Zionist. (In the process of not being antisemitic and merely being anti-Zionist, the regime managed to persecute, imprison, torture, and murder thousands of Jews.) What's left of Jewish culture once you surgically remove religious practice, traditional texts, Hebrew, and Zionism? In the Soviet Empire, one answer was Yiddish, but Yiddish was also suspect for its supposedly backwards elements. Nearly 15 percent of its words came directly from biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, so Soviet Yiddish schools and publishers, under the guise of "simplifying" spelling, implemented a new and quite literally antisemitic spelling system that eliminated those words' Near Eastern roots. Another answer was "folklore" — music, visual art, theater, and other creative work reflecting Jewish life — but of course most of that cultural material was also deeply rooted in biblical and rabbinic sources, or reflected common religious practices like Jewish holidays and customs, so that was treacherous too.

No, what the regime required were Yiddish stories that showed how horrible traditional Jewish practice was, stories in which happy, enlightened Yiddish-speaking heroes rejected both religion and Zionism (which, aside from its modern political form, is also a fundamental feature of ancient Jewish texts and prayers traditionally recited at least three times daily). This de-Jewing process is clear from the repertoire of the government-sponsored Moscow State Yiddish Theater, which could only present or adapt Yiddish plays that denounced traditional Judaism as backward, bourgeois, corrupt, or even more explicitly — as in the many productions involving ghosts or graveyard scenes — as dead. As its actors would be, soon enough.

The Soviet Union's destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with the Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions — categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or "purged." This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves.

The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yeveksiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC's roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala's father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater's leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all the others — Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future — were executed by firing squad on August 1952.

Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too "nationalist" (read: Jewish), today's long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being "nationalist" enough — that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin's Secret Pogrom, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC "trial," Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following:

As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naive idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.

This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy — even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim — was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.

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Ala was almost thirteen years old when her father was arrested and until that moment she was immersed in the Soviet Yiddish artistic scene. Her mother was also an actor in the Moscow State Yiddish Theater; her family lived in the same building as the murdered theater director Solomon Mikhoels, and moved in the same circles as other Jewish actors and writers. After seeing her parents perform countless times, Ala had a front-row seat to the destruction of their world. She attended Mikhoel's state funeral, heard about the arrest of the brilliant Yiddish author Der Nister from an actor friend who witnessed it from her apartment across the hall, and was present when secret police ransacked her home in conjunction with her father's arrest. In her biography, The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, she provides for her readers what she gave me that morning in Jerusalem: an emotional recounting, with the benefit of hindsight, of what it was really like to live through the Soviet Jewish nightmare.

It's as close as we can get, anyway. Her father Benjamin Zuskin's own thoughts on the topic are available only from state interrogations extracted under unknown tortures. (One typical interrogation document from his three and a half years in the notorious Lubyanka Prison announces that the day's interrogation lasted four hours, but the transcript is only half a page long — leaving to the imagination how the interrogator and interrogatee may have spent their time together. Suffice it to say that another JAC detainee didn't make it to trial alive.) His years in prison began when he was arrested in December of 1948 in a Moscow hospital room, where he was being treated for chronic insomnia brought on by the murder of his boss and career-long acting partner, Mikhoels; the secret police strapped him to a gurney and carted him to prison in his hospital gown while he was still sedated.

But in order to truly appreciate the loss here, one needs to know what was lost — to return to the world of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, the author of Benjamin Zuskin's first role on the Yiddish stage, in a play fittingly titled It's a Lie!

Benjamin Zuskin's path to the Yiddish theater and later to the Soviet firing squad began in a shtetl comparable to those immortalized in Sholem Aleichem's work. Zuskin, a child from a traditional family who was exposed to theater only through traveling Yiddish troupes and clowning relatives, experienced that world's destruction: his native Lithuanian shtetl, Ponievezh, was among the many Jewish towns forcibly evacuated during the First World War, catapulting him and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish refugees into modernity. He landed in Penza, a city with professional Russian theater and Yiddish amateur troupes. In 1920, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater opened, and by 1921, Zuskin was starring alongside Mikhoels, the theater's leading light.

In the one acting class I have ever attended, I learned only one thing: acting isn't about pretending to be someone you aren't, but rather about emotional communication. Zuskin, who not only starred in most productions but also taught in the theater's acting school, embodied the concept. His very first audition was a one-man sketch he created, consisting of nothing more than a bumbling old tailor threading a needle — without words, costumes, or props. It became so popular that he performed it to entranced crowds for years. This physical artistry animated his every role. As one critic wrote, "Even the slightest breeze and he is already air-bound."

Zuskin specialized in playing figures like the Fool in King Lear — as his daughter puts it in her book, characters who "are supposed to make you laugh, but they have an additional dimension, and they arouse poignant reflections about the cruelty of the world." Discussing his favorite roles, Zuskin once explained that "my heart is captivated particularly by the image of the person who is derided and humiliated, but who loves life, even though he encounters obstacles placed before him through no fault of his own."

The first half of Ala's book seems to recount only triumphs. The theater's repertoire in its early years was largely adopted from classic Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Moykher Seforim. The book's title is drawn from Zuskin's most famous role: Senderl, the Sancho Panza figure in Mendele's Don Quixote-inspired work, Travels of Benjamin the Third, about a pair of shtetl idiots who set out for the Land of Israel and wind up walking around the block. These productions were artistically inventive, brilliantly acted, and played to packed houses both at home and on tour. Travels of Benjamin the Third, in a 1928 review typical of the play's reception, was lauded by the New York Times as "one of the most originally conceived and beautifully executed evenings in the modern theater."

One of the theater's landmark productions, I. L. Peretz's surrealist masterpiece At Night in the Old Marketplace, was first performed in 1925. The play, set in a graveyard, is a kind of carnival for the graveyard's gathered ghosts. Those who come back from the dead are misfits like drunks and prostitutes, and also specific figures from shtetl life - yeshiva idlers, synagogue beadles, and the like. Leading them all is a badkhn, or wedding jester — divided in this production into two mirror-characters played by Mikhoels and Zuskin — whose repeated chorus among the living corpses is "The dead will rise!" "Within this play there was something hidden, something with an ungraspable depth," Ala writes, and then relates how after a performance in Vienna, one theatergoer came backstage to tell the director that "the play had shaken him as something that went beyond all imagination." The theatergoer was Sigmund Freud.

As Ala traces the theater's trajectory toward doom, it becomes obvious why this performance so affected Freud. The production was a zombie story about the horrifying possibility of something supposedly dead (here, Jewish civilization) coming back to life. The play was written a generation earlier as a Romantic work, but in the Moscow production, it became a means of denigrating traditional Jewish life without mourning it. That fantasy of a culture's death as something compelling and even desirable is not merely reminiscent of Freud's death drive, but also reveals the self-destructive bargain implicit in the entire Soviet-sponsored Jewish enterprise. In her book, Ala beautifully captures this tension as she explains the badkhn's role: "He sends a double message: he denies the very existence of the vanishing shadow world, and simultaneously he mocks it, as if it really does exist."

This double message was at the heart of Benjamin Zuskin's work as a comic Soviet Yiddish actor, a position that required him to mock the traditional Jewish life he came from while also pretending that his art could exist without it. "The chance to make fun of the shtetl which has become a thing of the past charmed me," he claimed early on, but later, according to his daughter, he began to privately express misgivings. The theater's decision to stage King Lear as a way of elevating itself disturbed him, suggesting as it did that the Yiddish repertoire was inferior. His own integrity came from his deep devotion to yiddishkayt, a sense of essential and enduring Jewishness, no matter how stripped-down that identity had become. "With the sharp sense of belonging to everything Jewish, he was tormented by the theater forsaking its expression of this belonging," his daughter writes. Even so, "no, he could not allow himself to oppose the Soviet regime even in his thoughts, the regime that gave him his own theater, but 'the heart and the wit do not meet.'"

In Ala's memory, her father differed from his director, partner, and occasional rival, Mikhoels, in his complete disinterest in politics. Mikhoels was a public figure as well as performer, and his leadership of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, while no more voluntary than any public act in a totalitarian state, was a role he played with gusto, traveling to America in 1943 and speaking to thousands of American Jews to raise money for the Red Army in their battle against the Nazis. Zuskin, on the other hand, was on the JAC roster, but seems to have continued playing the fool. According to both his daughter and his trial testimony, his role in the JAC was almost identical to his role on a Moscow municipal council, limited to playing chess in the back of the room during meetings.

In Jerusalem, Ala told me that her father was "a pure soul." "He had no interest in politics, only in his art," she said, describing his acting style as both classic and contemporary, praised by critics for its timeless qualities that are still evident today in his film work. But his talent was the most nuanced and sophisticated thing about him. Offstage, he was, as she put it in Hebrew, a "tam" — a biblical term sometimes translated as fool or simpleton, but which really means an innocent. (It is the first adjective used to describe the title character in the Book of Job.) It is true that in trial transcripts, Zuskin comes out looking better than many of his co-defendants by playing dumb instead of pointing fingers. But was this ignorance, or a wise acceptance of the futility of trying to save his skin? As King Lear's Fool put it, "They'll have me whipp'd for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipp'd for holding my peace." Reflecting on her father's role as a fool named Pinia in a popular film, Ala writes in her book, "When I imagine the moment when my father heard his death sentence, I see Pinia in close-up . . . his shoulders slumped, despair in his appearance. I hear the tone that cannot be imitated in his last line in the film — and perhaps also the last line in his life? — 'I don't understand anything.'"

Yet it is clear that Zuskin deeply understood how impossible his situation was. In one of the book's more disturbing moments, Ala describes him rehearsing for one of his landmark roles, that of the comic actor Hotsmakh in Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, a work whose subject is the Yiddish theater. He had played the role before, but this production was going up in the wake of Mikhoel's murder. Zuskin was already among the hunted, and he knew it. As Ala writes:

One morning — already after the murder of Mikhoels — I saw my father pacing the room and memorizing the words of Hotsmakh's role. Suddenly, in a gesture revealing a hopeless anguish, Father actually threw himself at me, hugged me, pressed me to his heart, and together with me, continued to pace the room and to memorize the words of the role. That evening I saw the performance . . . "The doctors say that I need rest, air, and the sea . . . For what . . . without the theater?" [Hotsmakh asks], he winds the scarf around his neck — as though it were a noose. For my father, I think those words of Hotsmakh were like the motif of the role and — I think — of his own life.

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Describing the charges levied against Zuskin and his peers is a degrading exercise, for doing so makes it seem as though these charges are worth considering. They are not. It is at this point that Hanukkah antisemitism transformed, as it inevitably does, into Purim antisemitism. Here Ala offers what hundreds of pages of state archives can't, describing the impending horror of the noose around one's neck.

Her father stopped sleeping, began receiving anonymous threats, and saw that he was being watched. No conversation was safe. When a visitor from Poland waited near his apartment building to give him news of his older daughter Tamara (who was then living in Warsaw), Zuskin instructed the man to walk behind him while speaking to him and then to switch directions, so as to avoid notice. When the man asked Zuskin what he wanted to tell his daughter, Zuskin "approached the guest so closely that there was no space between them, and whispered in Yiddish, 'Tell her that the ground is burning beneath my feet.'" It is true that no one can know what Zuskin or any of the other defendants really believed about the Soviet system they served. It is also true — and far more devastating — that their beliefs were utterly irrelevant.

Ala and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan after her father's arrest, and learned of his execution only when they were allowed to return to Moscow in 1955. By then, he had already been dead for three years.

In Jerusalem that morning, Ala told me, in a sudden private moment of anger and candor, that the Soviet Union's treatment of the Jews was worse than Nazi Germany's. I tried to argue, but she shut me up. Obviously the Nazi atrocities against Jews were incomparable, a fact Ala later acknowledged in a calmer mood. But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation - and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever, paid for it.

"They never had a Nuremberg," Ala told me that day, with a quiet fury. "They never acknowledged the evil of what they did. The Nazis were open about what they were doing, but the Soviets pretended. They lured the Jews in, they baited them with support and recognition, they used them, they tricked them, and then they killed them. It was a trap. And no one knows about it, even now. People know about the Holocaust, but not this. Even here in Israel, people don't know. How did you know?"

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That evening I went out to the Old City again, to watch the torches being lit at the Western Wall for the second night of Hanukkah. I walked once more through the Jewish Quarter, where the oil lamps, now each bearing one additional flame, were displayed outside every home, following the tradition to publicize the Hanukkah miracle — not merely the legendary long-lasting oil, but the miracle of military and spiritual victory over a coercive empire, the freedom to be uncool, the freedom not to pretend. Somewhere nearby, deep underground, lay the ruins of the gymnasium where de-circumcised Jewish boys once performed naked before approving crowds, stripped of their integrity and left with their private pain. I thought of Benjamin Zuskin performing as the dead wedding jester, proclaiming, "The dead will rise!" and then performing again in a "superior" play, as King Lear's Fool. I thought of the ground burning beneath his feet. I thought of his daughter, Ala, now an old woman, walking through Jerusalem.

I am not a sentimental person. As I returned to the stone house that night, along the streets lit by oil lamps, I was surprised to find myself crying.