Yehuda Elberg was a member of the Jewish Underground during the Holocaust.  Captured three times by the Nazis, he saw friends and most of his family brutally murdered.  There is no darker view of the cloth of truth. Yet he retained a keen sense of optimism, and a drive to rebuild his family and his people after the war.

Combine Words

I’ve inherited some of his ability to combine words into a story. Thankfully, my life has been much less eventful than his.  Most of my interesting experiences were by choice, rather than life-or-death situations. Although it was exciting, marching in protest at the Pentagon is not the same as Nazi storm-troopers coming down your street to kill you. Isolating (during Covid) in an apartment with a big-screen TV and high-speed internet is not the same as hiding inside a dark cellar, where making a sound could cost the life of your family.

I want my fiction to be “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth,” like my dad’s.  I want it to be exciting, and get the reader to consider some relevant truth or issue.  For example, as an anthropologist, I learned about transgender shamanism.  It’s nothing like the phenomenon in contemporary popular culture. The transgender shaman in Quantum Cannibals is a complex, conflicted, frightening person, reflecting indigenous shamanism rather than contemporary Western ideology.  Quantum Cannibal’s fictional shaman is an elucidation, rather than a lecture.

The novel The Red Badge of Courage is known for its realistic depictions of the Civil War, even though the author Stephen Crane was born after it ended.  Hans Ruesch never met an Inuk (Eskimo) in his life, but his novel Top of The World is an accurate depiction of traditional Inuit life and culture.  These writers didn’t experience the lives or events they portrayed.  They didn’t have access to Google to do research.  Nonetheless, their fictional portrayals were accurate and their stories moving.

Dangerous Truth

Creative truth can be dangerous when it crosses the floor from literature to journalism. A documentary by a “journalist” won several prestigious American journalism awards. This journalist is a member of a terrorist organization that participated in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Worse than that, the terrorists who participated in the kidnap, rape, and butchering of women and infants were honored for photographs of their barbarism.

In snuff porn films, men actually murder the women they have sex with, and sick viewers get off watching what they believe to be the truth. Some question whether the filmed murders happened, whether they emphasized ‘creative’ rather than ‘truth.’ The barbarism that the Hamas photographers documented was a reality. These were snuff films and photos in their worst sense, and it definitely happened. The creativity was in the mental gymnastics that allowed Western media to ignore the savagery in front of their eyes. The ‘cloth of creative truth’ can be used to enlighten or conceal.

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Too busy to commit to an epic novel?

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Many historical figures were reputed to be great beauties, from Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette. Many historical figures were reputed to be great scholars, from Plato and Aristotle to Adam Smith.  We know more of the latter because knowledge and wisdom are more easily preserved than appearance.

She should be better known

Osnat was brilliant and beautiful. I wrote about her in an earlier post.  Leading scholars and rabbis addressed her as ‘teacher’, ‘master,’ rabbi’, and more.  She was a  poet and a “Rosh Yeshiva,” head of the rabbinical academy. She fell into deep poverty trying to raise funds for the academy.  All her possessions, even clothes were confiscated by debtors.  A would-be rapist claimed her beauty was irresistible.  She fended him off through the use of holy names.

In addition to being a sage, Asenath was also beautiful.  A Gentile was attracted to her, and tried at night to sneak onto her roof, with evil intentions.  She immediately pronounced the names of holy men, which left the Gentile hanging on the beams of the roof, unable to move.  In the morning, lots of people gathered to see, but no one could remove him.  The governor of the town begged her to release the Gentile, but she refused, saying that “…since he came to me with the intention of corrupting my morals, he shall remain hanging in his place.”  The governor swore that if she set him free, the governor would hang him publicly, upon which she released him, “…and he was hanged from a tree to the amazement of all the people in the town.”

She had many accomplishments.  The Jews and Muslims of Kurdistan loved and honored her.  A folk tale describes how Osnat walked from Mosul to Amadiya to save a synagogue from fire.  In one version, the flames are extinguished by a flock of Houris, the beautiful maidens who accompany the Muslim faithful in paradise.  Contemporary Muslim Kurds speak proudly of her, offering her as proof that Kurdistan has been a good place for its Jewish population.

Osnat’s story needs to be better known.  She deserves to be one of the great figures of Jewish culture and lore, along with other great scholars and wonder-workers.  Until recently, she was mostly hidden in academic books and journals.  Online searches, if properly phrased, could pull up some information, one source a duplicate of the other.

A children’s book

In 2021 Sigal Samuel, an Iraqi Jewish author published a children’s book Osnat and Her Dove.  Well-written and beautifully illustrated, this book brings Osnat to life.  In doing so, it reveals an important aspect of Jewish heritage, and of women’s accomplishments.  If you have children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews between the ages of four and eight, this is a good book to read with them.  It’s a great way to introduce them to this oft-ignored facet of women in history, and Jewish culture.

Quantum Cannibals is a fantasy novel.  Its violence makes it appropriate for an adult audience.  Osnat and Her Dove is a gentle children’s story. Both honor the historical Osnat Barzani.  I recommend you read them.

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One of the timelines in my novel Quantum Cannibals is set in a post-modern city where everything is relative, and almost all behavior is acceptable.  The police act primarily as psychologists, with the right to summarily execute people.  It’s a society where intolerance is a capital crime, where the unthinkable became normal.  Is that where we’re headed?

Our non-fictional world

Divorce used to be considered evil in non-fictional America, to be used only as a last resort.  Today fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.  Fifty years ago it was less than one percent.  The unthinkable became normal.

As a corollary, twenty-five percent of American children live in single-parent households.  Sixty years ago it was nine percent.  There is a clear connection between doing poorly in school and living with only one parent.

The common term for men who dressed as or pretended to be women used to be “perverts.”  Now RuPaul has his own mainstream television series.  If you don’t praise “trans rights,” you get canceled. The unthinkable became normal.

Armed robbery, drug dealing, or theft usually lead to serious criminal charges and jail time.  Alvin Bragg, the new District Attorney for Manhattan has announced it won’t seek jail time for anything short of murder or deadly assault.  If this trend catches on like the “defund the police” movement did, theft and violence won’t be high-risk projects.  Look at the crime rate in just about any major U.S. city.  The unthinkable became normal.

Although adults having sex with children was common in some ancient civilizations, it is mostly taboo in contemporary western society.  Mostly? A reputable psychologist placed foster children with pedophiles for thirty years, all with German government approval.  The beat poet Allen Ginsberg promoted the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).  An academic press published a scholarly book promoting intergenerational sex.

From criminal to conventional

Homosexuality used to be a serious crime.  Armed robbery, carjackings, assault used to be serious.  Single motherhood, divorce, were frowned upon.  Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world.  Women were property, considered too dumb to vote.  Murdering Jews and other lower forms of human life wasn’t a crime… As the poet-pederast Allen Ginsberg said:

I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

Progress

We’ve gotten better at some things.  Although Kinsey’s fake research played a large part in contemporary acceptance of homosexuality, it doesn’t invalidate the change in attitudes.  But how far do we take it?  If a lesbian is sexually harassed by a trans “woman” she considers a man, is the lesbian being intolerant?

What about NAMBLA?  Are we going to be cool with man-boy love?

In the 1960’s civil rights activists were murdered by racists, sometimes by authorities.  We remember and eulogize them.  Now when the authorities kill violent criminals, we lionize the criminals.

Some old boundaries deserve to be smashed.  But that doesn’t mean all boundaries, whether ethical, legal or physical have to go.  A world in which everything once unthinkable became normal, would not be livable.

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The old man looked at the scar and froze.  “Yossele?” he said to the soldier.

“Huh?  Who’s Yossele?”

Tears streamed down the old man’s face, but not from fright.  “You are, my son.”

“What are you talking about?”  The soldier was confused.  “I’m Grigory.”

“Yossele, when you were a little boy, you loved to watch the Shabbat candles.  One day you went too close and burned yourself. Look at the shape of your scar.  I can never forget it.  Do you remember?”

“It was so long ago.  I don’t really—”

“Yes, you were eight years old when the Khapers (“catchers”) took you away to be a soldier.  Your mother and I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.  Do you remember anything?”

“When I was first taken away I was beaten for being a…  I don’t remember what.”

“A Jew, my son.  The Czar wants us to be Christian, he wants us to be regular Russians.  He took you into the army, my child because he didn’t want you to be a Jew.”

This past October (2021) I hosted (on behalf of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and Indigenous Bridges) a webinar From Turtle Island to Zion: Native American /Jewish/ Israel Ties Today.  The Native American participants touched upon the Residential School system, designed to isolate indigenous children from their heritage.  Just as the Czar didn’t want Yossele to be a Jew, the American and Canadian governments didn’t want Cree, Sioux or Navajo children to live as Indians.  The horrendous conditions at many of the residential schools only became a public concern in recent years.

Finding Yossele

I read the Yossele story many years ago, but never thought about it much.  Ira Robinson, a Jewish Studies professor contacted me after the webinar.  He said the Indian Residential Schools reminded him very much of the Cantonist system of Russia.  I looked it up, and found Yossele and his father.  Jewish boys from the age of eight, were taken to serve in the Russian army for twenty-five years.  Rather than save the child, it amounted to a literal death sentence for many of them.  Boys too young to fight (under eighteen) were taken from their homes and families and brought up in the interior of Russia until they were old enough to join a regiment.

“They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten… Not even a brush full of black paint could put such horror on canvas. Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats, with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes, bore witness to fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean were going to their graves” (A. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 1 (1968), 219–20), cited in https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cantonists.

The conscripts were needed to fight wars, but this was not the only purpose of the Cantonist system.  Czar Nicholas considered the army to be best residential school in Russia, so Jews were conscripted at twice the rate of Christians.  The children were forced to violate the Sabbath, eat non-kosher food, and forbidden to speak their language.  They were tortured until they agreed to convert, at which point their names were changed, and they were considered to be children of non-Jewish sponsors.  It was a policy of “kill the Jew, save the child.”

It didn’t matter if it killed the child

“The last awful scene connected with that system of recruiting children took place at Orel, when one winter’s night more than a hundred little boys were taken to town on sledges, but on taking them out they were found to be frozen to death, like poultry carried to market.”   –From: The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, January 1863

The Residential School system developed in Canada about fifty years after the Russian Cantonist program.  It had a similar agenda: to de-culture and integrate an alien population.  Some schools were near the native communities.  Many were boarding schools that tore families apart, transporting young children halfway across the country.

The pedagogical methods were not particularly effective in promoting literacy or teaching simple arithmetic, but that didn’t really matter.  The goal of the schools was not what they could put into the student, but rather what they could remove: a culture, a way of life.  Speaking your native tongue, even to your fellow students was a serious offense.  My friend Robert recalled the heavy stick hitting his back; punishment for speaking Cree.

Another friend’s grandfather had a mousetrap closed on his tongue for the same offense.   In a scenario more appropriate to a prison rather than a school, there were small manacles attached to the walls, to keep the students from running.  Often children were shackled to their beds.  Many had their faces rubbed in urine and excrement.

Students had to work on the schools’ farms, but the only vegetables given them were animal fodder.  They got one egg a year from the farm’s chickens.  Covered in lice, weak from malnutrition and the cold, it’s no wonder that in the early twentieth century, a quarter of the previously healthy children died in the schools.  It’s estimated that of the children who were sent home because of their illnesses, half to three quarters passed away after being released.  It was an odd way to save the child.

Sexual abuse was rampant.  Some contemporary religious institutions are infamous for their treatment of people they were responsible for.  In the Residential Schools, more so.  My colleague Amos described how the teenage boys were lined up after their shower so the missionary’s sister could inspect them.  It’s estimated that at some schools upwards of seventy percent of students faced some form of sexual abuse.  Rarely were any of the perpetrators punished.

Reasons

The Czar had his reasons to implement the Cantonist conscription program.  He primarily wanted to make the Jews into non-Jews (Christians), force them, ostensibly for their own benefit, to modernize.  One of the leading Hassidic rabbis had supported the Czar against Napoleon because he didn’t want Jews to be free to modernize.  So instead the Czar ripped tens of thousands of Jewish children from their homes in order to ‘modernize’ them.  His policy was to kill the Jew, save the child.

The governments of Canada and the U.S. had their reasons for implementing the Residential School programs.  They wanted to make the Native Americans into non-natives (Christians), force them, ostensibly for their own benefit, to modernize.  Government officials felt that way of life of many communities (eg. the fur trade) was no longer economically viable and would lead to starvation.  But by the time students were eighteen years old, most students had reached no higher than grade five.  This gave them little economic advantage in exchange for the torture, abuse, and death they suffered.  The policy of kill the Indian, save the child very often killed the Indian and the child.

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Her short fiction has appeared in Polar Borealis, On Spec, Strangers Among Us, Postscripts to Darkness, Neo-Opsis, Stories of the Deluge, and Sword & Sorceress X.  You can check out her website or visit her Amazon page.

The last collection of short stories I published was in 2008. It’s an eclectic mix which I entitled And the Angels Sang, named for the lead story. To my delight, it’s met with quite a bit of positive reaction from both readers and reviewers.

In the ensuing years, I’ve crafted a number of other short stories in between operating a publishing house and all the demands of being an administrator in our other business, one which pays the bills. A lot has happened during that time: our son married his life-buddy, three major surgeries, a failed attempt at elder care, renovating this old stone house which was built c1847, and as I write this, into the second year of a global pandemic.

And somewhere in all that still writing, still exploring ideas and what-ifs. I do have to admit a reluctance to writing short fiction. The literary form seems so restrictive to me, perhaps more having to do with the fact I have too much to say and want to make an epic out of everything. But short story writing is good discipline.

Spanning the boundaries

Having said that, I’m giving you 10 short works of fiction in this collection, spanning the boundaries of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, magic realism and absurd fantastica. Apparently, I don’t much like writing in just one genre, either. Creative fences drive me batshit crazy, although I do very much appreciate fences around this sanctuary we are privileged to call home. But there is a theme to this collection, a common thread I think you will find through all the stories. What it is, I will leave up to you to decipher, and thus we will have a silent communication.

I’ve arranged the stories in some loose graduation of dark to light, and again have chosen to use the lead story as the title for the collection. But the title Dreams of the Moon is more, because as a child, and then an adolescent, I firmly believed if I arranged myself just so in the bed, so that when the moon shone in my window, something wonderful would happen. It never did. But I still felt compelled to answer the call of that pale, eerie light.

And then there were all the moonlight walks in the deep of the night which took place well into adulthood. Wonderful moments. Moments I remember with clarity and wonder, whether moonlight so bright on a winter’s night that the trees by the river cast indigo shadows across the snow, or a brace of geese rising up and across that silver face. And as with all things, there is the dark side of the moon: a sleepless night fraught with sorrow and a desperate attempt to rescue someone I dearly loved.

All of these moments influence and underscore what I write. It’s there in these 10 stories. Darkness and light. Wonder and sorrow. The ambiguity, sometimes, of reflected light. Dreams of the Moon.

The ninth story in the collection, Fall Arrest, was the result of the convergence of two quite unrelated occurrences. One was a call for stories around the theme of Alice in Wonderland. The other was frustration with the bureaucracy of the Worker’s Safety Insurance Board. It was kind of like that moment when chocolate hit peanut butter, or salt spilled into caramel. What if Alice ended up being a safety training instructor in Wonderland? What if she had to teach a remedial class on fall arrest training? And what if that class was for one important and specific character seemingly doomed to fall?

Alas, the story never made the cut for the anthology. And it would seem I just never got around to sending it elsewhere because of closed submissions, and life’s demands, and, and, and. So, here it is in my latest collection, in all it’s ridiculous glory.

Well, at the risk of being coy, you’ll have to read the story in order to find out how all of that resolves itself.

Dreams of the Moon is available in trade paperback and ebook, either directly through my website or through your favourite online bookseller wherever you live in the world. It’s also available through elibrary services globally.

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It’s the five thousand, seven hundred and eighty second birthday of that fourteen-billion-year-old ball of rock and water we call home (see Happy Quantum New Year for the math).  The day is relevant to all humans, not just the Jews.  After a year like 5781, everyone should take it seriously.

It’s not just that the COVID pandemic is so intractable.  There’s also the inability of many to have a calm discussion about it.  “Follow the science,” but science isn’t on a single path.  At times, we have to rely on common sense, a resource that’s been sorely lacking this past year.

Now let’s take Afghanistan.  Oh, wait, it’s already been taken by the Taliban.  They’re now in possession of billions of dollars worth of abandoned high-tech weapons developed by western nations such as Britain, the US and Israel.  The Taliban aren’t our friends, and we can be sure that this technology will soon be in the hands of our enemies, such as Iran and China.

Choose Life

It’s an accepted principle in Judaism that our fate for the coming year is written in a book on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year.  But just before the holiday, we have a Bible reading that says “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose life.”  Rabbi Ronnie Hasson cites the medieval sage Maimonides that the verse teaches that “anything that a person wants to do, he has the ability to do…” and God will not interfere.  We must take responsibility for all that happens to us.  God rewards and punishes precisely because we have free will… Our success is due to many factors including the effort we put in, the decisions we make, the opportunities we capture, etc. We can’t blame God for our failures if we haven’t made the appropriate choices.

The Canadian government chose to allow Chinese scientists (later expelled) to work at the virology lab in Winnipeg.  The Americans chose to fund the Wuhan lab.  Should we say the pandemic is God’s will, or the result of horrible human choices?  When our own weaponry is used against us, whether in acts of terrorism or acts of war, is it God’s will, or people’s (leaders’) stupidity that’s the cause?

5781 is over.  What will we choose in the year 5782?

I wish you a healthy year, I wish you a happy year.  I wish that you make the appropriate decisions, and choose life.

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“So when you hear someone say something at one point and then two or three months later, if you stick with what you said at the original time when you had one-fifth of the data that you have now, I think that would be inappropriate.”

COVID is something new.  People panicked as it mutated into a global pandemic, not knowing what it is or how to respond.

Difficult questions

• Did COVID come from the lab or wet market in Wuhan?

  

• Was it deliberately enhanced by the Chinese government to make it more deadly?
• Did Xi Jinping (Chinese leader) deliberately spread the virus throughout the world?
• Is it Satan’s, Tam’s, Trump’s, Trudeau’s, Fauci’s, or the World Health Organization’s fault?
• Does closing borders help prevent the spread?
• Are lockdowns effective?
• Do medical grade masks help?
• Do dollar store grade masks help?
• Are the vaccines deadly, effective, or somewhere in between?
• Do ventilators help or harm patients?
• Is hydroxychloroquine a helpful treatment or a placebo?

So many questions.  So many deaths, so much suffering.  Not just from the illness, but from the disruption it caused.  So many people lost their livelihoods, so many other diseases went undiagnosed, untreated.

There are answers to all these questions.  The virus originated somewhere.  The ventilators had an effect.  Masks do something, but we don’t know where or how much.  We may never know.  The questions stand.

The Talmud, a book of Jewish law and tradition consists mostly of records of discussions between rabbis.  Sometimes they agree with each other, sometimes not.  The rabbis challenge each other with difficult questions.  There are many they cannot resolve, so they declare “Taiku.”  It’s an Aramaic word saying the questions stand unanswered.   It’s also popularly explained as an acronym for a declaration that Elijah the Prophet will answer all questions with the advent of the Messiah.  A declaration of “Taiku” is not an admission of failure.

The man Taiku

Taiku is also the name of a character in Quantum Cannibals.  As the chief of a thriving Bronze-Age village Taiku has to build roads, stop bandits,

calm ethnic hostility, and protect refugees, all the while facing an unfathomable foe that threatens to destroy his world.  He has many decisions, many questions, but his best source of answers has been murdered.

The invader follows its own version of the real 1999 People’s Liberation Army (China) military treatise “Unrestricted Warfare.” The authors of this

frightening work stress that there is no distinction between war and peace, and that all means should be used to defeat the enemy.

Taiku knows how to deal with most of the issues he faces, but on too many there is no clear answer.  The questions stand.

There are few clear answers regarding COVID, its origins or how to deal with it.  So much of what was assumed to be true at its outset has been proven false, and vice versa.  Politicians have to make informed guesses, relying on experts who for the most part, are also making informed guesses.  One says “left,” the other says “right.”  The questions stand, but the leaders cannot stand still; they are obliged to act.  In hindsight we know who to call brilliant, who to condemn for his foolishness.

We’re hopefully approaching the end of the COVID pandemic.  Would it have come quicker if our leaders had acted differently?  That’s another question that will stand.

Does Taiku get the answers he needs to save his world?  Read Quantum Cannibals to find out.

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Aarluk doesn’t physically change.  In fact, as prelude to adopting Osnat, he uses his male body to rape her.  It’s not easy for a man to completely shed his masculinity.

Conflicting Rights

Abigail Shrier agrees about the problem of transformation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed :

“…in contests of strength and speed, the athletic chasm between the sexes, which opens at puberty, is both permanent and unbridgeable. Once male puberty is complete, testosterone suppression doesn’t undo the biological advantages men possess: larger hearts, lungs and bones, greater bone density, more-oxygenated blood, more fast-twitch muscle fiber and vastly greater muscle mass.”

Martina Navratilova was named the greatest female tennis player in the world for thirty years.  She came out of the closet in 1981 (before it was trendy) but recently has come under heavy criticism for violating the official progressive narrative.  She said that transgender ‘women’ taking part in female athletics “is insane and it’s cheating… It would not be fair.”  How long till she’s silenced by social media?

President Biden seems to disagree.  One of his first Executive Orders was to force schools to allow transgender women to compete with biological women in athletic competitions.  While some see this as a great advance for respect and dignity, others claim that it erases women from sports. Girls competing against people with male bodies will inevitably lose in many sports (and maybe scholarships that go with them).  In some activities (such as wrestling), biological females will inevitably suffer real injuries at the hands of transformed persons.

Transformed Person Shamanism

Aarluk, the fictional transvestite shaman is based on a real phenomenon.  Among some Aboriginal Siberian peoples (and elsewhere in the world), the spirits would order a young man to wear women’s clothes.

“He loses masculine strength, fleetness of foot in the race, endurance in wrestling, and acquires instead the helplessness of a woman. Even his psychical character changes. The transformed person loses his brute courage and fighting spirit, and becomes shy of strangers, even fond of small-talk and of nursing small children.”

Everyone in his village is too frightened by his physical and shamanic power to challenge Aarluk’s gender identity.  Nevertheless he turns out to be a good mother, protecting, teaching, nurturing Osnat.  It takes time, but eventually his daughter (an accomplished scientist) chooses to love and appreciate Aarluk.

What’s Your Equipment?

Is Aarluk a man or a woman?  Is a six-foot, two hundred pound athlete with X & Y chromosomes and male genitals a man or a woman?  Would a one-hundred twenty-pound person with ovaries want to enter a physical competition with such a transformed person?  Would she want to share a locker room with a person with male equipment?  The actress Keira Knightly recently said she would only do sex scenes with a female movie director.  Would she feel comfortable, for example, with a transformed person like Dr. Richard/Rachel Levine, a respected pediatrician and high government official?  It’s never simple.

It’s not simple even with the brute Aarluk:

“Osnat looked at the person who had raped her when they first met. Now the overwhelming feeling she had for Aarluk was – well, she didn’t know what it was. There was no word, no concept that encompassed gratitude, deep affection, revulsion and terror. It wasn’t love, it wasn’t hatred, nor was it somewhere between those feelings. But it was absolutely what she felt.”

If someone sees themselves differently, as a transformed person, to what extent are other people obliged to accept that vision?  Are we allowed our own view?

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Contemporary studies find that beauty is an advantage.  Beautiful people are typically treated better by others, aren’t insulted by passing sages.  For women, researchers found that enhancing a woman’s attractiveness boosted people’s perceptions of her competence, likability and trustworthiness.  Of course concepts of beauty may vary, from Rubenesque fleshy appearance popular from the 15^th century, to the emaciated Twiggy look of the 1960’s.  Powdered wigs, blonde hair, green hair, no hair… the variation is endless.

Physical beauty or ugliness is rarely an issue in Judaism; wisdom and knowledge take priority.  In Proverbs we are told that a woman’s charm is deceptive, her beauty vain.  The same woman, though, is praised for her wisdom.

The novel Quantum Cannibals was inspired by a woman from history; both wise and beautiful.  I introduced her:

Asenath accepted her beauty and wisdom as a gift. The former, she ignored; the latter, she nurtured and fed. She didn’t feel arrogant about either. “Tanayt” wasn’t a name, but a title her people had bestowed on her. It was reserved only for the greatest sages, for the most able of leaders, and hadn’t been given to anyone in hundreds of years. Certainly not to a woman…  Such beauty, people reasoned, could only be a result of divine favor.

This description applies as much to the historical (16^th c.) Asenath Barzani as it does to my fictional adaptation.    She was head of the Jewish religious academy in Mosul, Kurdistan, and was admired by both the Muslim as well as Jewish population.  Although she was a legitimate female rabbi, her title “Tanayt” was a much higher designation.

I took my Asenath out of ancient Kurdistan.  I kept her as a scholar, but placed her in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.  I also set her in the arctic, where she was an exiled inventor, quantum biologist and warrior.  It may sound confusing, but if you read the book you’ll understand.

The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said “never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.”  The historical Asenath Barzani was the personification of that idea in her beauty and wisdom; in her life.

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