My father was a Yiddish literary star, writing short stories, essays, and novels. He lectured in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, and more. He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford University. Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel said he was “the novelist of the Warsaw Ghetto,” whose book “Ship of the Hunted” was “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth.”
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.
