It's pretty much a lot of thinking "What, no, stop! Why are you doing that! Think! Be smart! What's wrong with you!" and so forth. "Once Rechele saw two blood-smeared butcher boys skin a goat and let it lie there with eyeballs protruding in amazement and white teeth projecting in a kind of death-smile." It tells the story of a small Polish town (shtetl), Goray, in the 1660s, after the Chmelnicki massacres had wiped out a large portion of the Jews/town population in 1648, and of what happens when the false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, becomes known in the world and the town. The whole thing is very heavy, from the start. There is plenty of depravity of all sorts to go round. Butchering, blood, death, beatings, rape, this is not your light reading for the faint-hearted. One thing it's not, is for the squeamish. I don't really know what to say about it. This is one of those books where you finish it and just kind of sit back and go. "But it is the way of the world that in time everything reverts to what it has been."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |