So here are the three missions of the book:
1. To tell the story of Jewish historical migration. Every Jewish person carries with them the story of what their immigrant ancestors endured, and most can relate to you an astonishing amount of detail about it. And within the story of their grandparents or great-great grandparents is the animating story of all the immigration that happened before it. Historical migration is the Jewish story, and there is no book in the basic corpus of world literature that truly conveys the experience of how and why Jewish historical migration happened. My goal is to write that book.
2. This book needs to convey the potential for an animating hand in Jewish history and historical evolution. There is no good enough explanation for why Jews still exist in 2022. We should have been annihilated at the hands of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Mohammedans, Crusaders, Spaniards, Ukranians, Ottomans, Poles, Russians, and of course, we nearly were at the hands of the Germans. Why are we still here? Is it luck? Is it the Jewish national character? Is it the good deeds of people within our host countries? Or is it God? And if it is God, why does God keep us in the world after all this time, only to make us suffer so?
3. Why me? Why do I, such a black sheep within the Jewish community, feel the compulsion to write all this? The framing story of the whole book will be a simple but highly exaggerated autobiographical narrative told from the point of view of Evan Tucker's nom de plume, AC Charlap. It will not be all that long, but long enough to frame each story. The idea is that in the middle of telling every story, I have a new vision, and the visions are the tales. The stories are literally told from the point of view of mental delusions. But at the same time, the reason for having a kind of exaggerated autobiography in the middle of this is to bring these stories back to earth and ground them in reality. The tone is as life: tragicomic. These will be, basically, in the keys of Bellow, Roth (both Philip and Henry), Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick, Mordecai Richler, and Howard Jacobson. But from a very different kind of person than any of them from a very different generation with very different concerns. When the tenor of Evan's head grows apocalyptic, it would likely be told in imitation of the understated deadpan of Kafka.
Here is what Joseph Campbell (or Dan Harmon) would term the 'monomyth' of our stories. We will use Northrop Frye's terminology to guide us through it:
1. Spring - romance: Somewhere in the world, a not particularly prosperous place has a community of good people who stumble on the secret of improving their communities: hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better. And being so often the most down on their luck people in the world, Jews inevitably come, and find a kind of understanding from people who are simultaneously appalled by their suffering yet find them distasteful, are fascinated by their culture yet terrified it will pollute and pervert their own, and ultimately, realize that these people are improving their lives with astonishing speed, such speed that the natives can't resolve for themselves if these immigrants are entirely human. Here is one of the best half-paragraphs I've ever written: "Everywhere we've gone, we are the barometer of your civilization. We have never been parasites, as antisemites inevitably say, but we have been the yeast that makes your society rise. When we are your honored guests, your civilization prospers, when you do us dishonor, your civilization declines. It's probably not because God is watching over us, it's because a civilization well-disposed to its guests is a civilization that values tolerance and progress and liberty and justice, and is therefore destined to improve."
2. Summer - comedy: This place grows incredibly prosperous, and it may or may not be because of the influence of Jews, or of immigrants generally. Nevertheless, the country/community/society is disproportionately successful, and even within that place, Jews are particularly disproportionate in their success. But this country's native born Jews, whose parents and grandparents dwelt in so much oppression, become very conspicuous in how they display their success, as the newly rich often do. It creates what seems like a golden age in the community, at least in retrospect, but so high is the prosperity that expectations grow of what the future will bring, and inevitably, the better future doesn't come, because it was already there.... So the new generation, who never knew a time without prosperity, rebel against the prevailing expectations of their society, and even the smallest rebellions against the society seem like earthshaking events (think of the sixties and Baby Boomers...). And in this new society, Jews are so conspicuous and eminent that they are both the leading figures in both the rebellion against the community, and the establishment who wants to keep things exactly the way they are. (think of the difference between Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg, or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman). The entire society becomes a kind of debate between Jewish opinions, and nobody sees anything weird about it.
2 1/2. Fall Equinox - Cause of Ekpirosis: The moment of Jewish self-assertion that is the ultimate progenitor of yet another chapter of destruction, seemingly inevitable for Jews in every society in every period. In "Old Europe," that moment was the Dreyfus Trial, when the liberal consensus in Europe asserted that Jews (and therefore everyone else) were permitted equality and fair trial under the law leads in a direct line to the causes of the Shoah less than a half-century later. In the 'Middle Ages', that moment was Jews assuming the role of moneylending forbidden to Christians, which lead directly to blood libels. In the shtetl, that moment was the ability of Jews to own land, which lead to pogroms. In ancient Rome, it was the idea that Jews are allowed self-defense and the same sense of national pride that Rome allowed itself. And yet the paradox of the Jewish condition is that what Jews assert in these periods is, in fact, what should be allowed to all people from all demographics. Jews, in their unwelcome self-assertions, assert sentiments that speak for the underprivileged and nationless which those who have never experienced privilege would never have thought.would be due them, and therefore Jews have functioned as a kind of 'trial balloon' for other nations, and the shock of mass Jewish martyrdom eventually leads to the furthering of rights for everyone else, who eventually take on the privileges Jews have established for themselves. It is only because Jewish history routinely experiences both the height of privilege and the height of humiliation that enables Jews to synthesize their world experience into determining what world requires for to become a more just place, and only through their martyrdom that such justice becomes possible. As Eric Hoffer put it, "Everyone expects Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
3. Fall - tragedy: Just as Jewish success never lasts very long, a country's success never lasts particularly long either, and eventually it collapses (sorry but it's true) in war, or famine, or dictatorship, or anarchy. It seems to happen in every country and every era, I grievously doubt we will be an exception. The reason that happens is that success is a poisoned chalice. It always manages to highlight those ways in which we're all still lacking, and eventually the inadequacies seem larger than the successes, and because the inadequacies seem larger, the inadequacies BECOME larger because nobody has the morale to do the colossally tough work and sacrifice it takes to keep a society functioning properly. And so people turn to explanations for why life isn't better than it is, and these explanations become like an intellectual suit of armor for them that explains the inexplicable. At the time, their newly adapted identities seem to them like revelations which will change the quality of their lives forever; but life is tenaciously mysterious, and no explanation of why life is the way it is solves our problems any more than temporarily. But since Jews are inherently mysterious and ambiguous, both native to their countries and not, they inevitably run into trouble with people whose worldview is animated by totalizing explanations. The problems are inevitably blamed on Jews, who are inevitably the country's most conspicuously successful people, and they suddenly find themselves the most oppressed people in their society, whose fortunes decline as quickly as their parents or grandparents rose to success.
4. Winter - Irony: Having cleared a community of its Jews, the newly cleansed society is supposed to take root in a luminously glorious new golden age. But it never does, because it turned out Jews were not parasites, they were yeast, and without Jews, the bread falls and burns. So depleted has this society become from its obviously misplaced priorities that the misfortune which was supposed only to fall upon Jews falls upon everybody. Here's one of the best full paragraphs I ever wrote: "If we're The Chosen People, it's not because we're a better nation, it's because God chose us for his laboratory. We're an unending scroll through which is inscribed the whole world's history. Every new century and country is a new chapter but the lesson of Jewish history is that everything Jews undergo, the world undergoes next. By enslaving us, Egypt eventually enslaved themselves. By crucifying us, Romans eventually crucified themselves. By massacring us, the Crusaders eventually got massacred. By putting us in a religious torture chamber, the Spanish put themselves in too. By imprisoning us in a ghetto, Russians eventually imprisoned themselves. By burning us, Germans eventually burned too. When Jews are accepted, others get accepted next. When Jews are rejected, others get rejected next. When Jews are killed, you get the point...
5. Spring equinox - rebirth: where Jews go next... A new society, formed out of the flaws of an old society and chastened by watching the older societies, corrects the mistakes of the older society to establish a new model, and the cycle begins anew as this society is built on a new model of communal rights and responsibilities, which inspires the optimism required for hard work, learning, tolerance, justice, freedom, humility, and forgiveness... and they welcome down on their luck immigrants willing to work hard whom they reason will make their society better.... Think of how Rome was built (supposedly) from Trojan refugees. Think of how Byzantium was built out of Rome's conquered nations. Think of how Caliphates were built out of Byzantium's most subjected classes. Think of how America was built from the outcast European emigres.
Here, finally, is the formal structure. I would like to put a hard cut on 90% of the stories at 4500 words. Most will be much much less than that, 50% probably under 2000. And then for the 10% that might be a bit more epic, we can go as high as 7000 maybe 7500, but never more than 7999, and for every 7500er, there has to be twice as many less than 800. The whole thing must move extremely quickly, there is so much material at hand to get through. Furthermore, nearly everything from distant history (say, before 1700) would be written as 'found documents.' Some of them letters between people fragments of epic poems, some of them written as high-handed scholarly documents, some of them minutes of meetings, some of them even written conversations and dialogues whose origin we don't have to specify. There will occasionally be modern academic comments done in a parody of academic obscurantism. The basic source under which this tale is told is by the guidance of Heinrich Graetz's 19th century five volume History of the Jews, which to this day is one of the greatest history books anyone could ever read.
1-3-5-7- etc. Partially Autobiographical Tales - this is a framing device, possibly to be written lastly. It will generally exist as five-hundred to a thousand words between each tale. 90% of them must be less than 1000 words, 50% less than 799, and 10% would go longer but never more than 1899. It is the story of AC Charlap, a man not unlike Evan Tucker, but not the same either.
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2. Tales from the New Land: ?-? - A revisionist rewriting of the Five Books of Moses that takes modern perspectives into account. Often comic, often violent.
4. Bible Stories 1100-135 BC A revisionist rewriting of the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, including comic cameos from the biblical prophets and other historical figures of distant antiquity,
6. Tales of Perversion 135 BC-300 AD - A retelling of the Jewish experience in the Classical Era, sources including Josephus, The New Testament and Gibbon, and then comic tales of the writing of the Mishna and Talmud, mostly consisting of internecine fights between egotistical Rabbis.
8. Tales of Submission 300-1095 Probably beginning with Jews under Byzantium, the writing of the Talmud simultaneous to the origins of the mass adaption of Christianity and the origins of Christian antisemitism. And then tales of Jews in the Islamic Caliphate (Mohammed will not be a character.... we're stretching enough boundaries here), and eventually, the golden era of Islamic Jewish life.
10. Tales of Fanaticism 1095-1492 Beginning with the Crusade massacres and 'dispuatations' (show-debates between priests and Rabbis which priests inevitably won), the development of Kabbalah mysticism that emulates the narrator's visions, ending with the black death and then the mass expulsions throughout Western Europe.
12. Tales of Ghettoization 1492-1648 Beginning with the Spanish expulsion, arrival of Jews in Poland through Greece, life in the Venetian ghetto, ending with the expulsion of Spinoza from the "New Jerusalem" of Amsterdam (technically 1655). Beginning of the Charlap family.
14. Tales from the Old Land 1648-1900 Beginning with the Chmielnicki massacres in Ukraine, the false Messiahdom of Shabbetai Zevi, British old Testament mania, the missing years of the Ba'al Shem Tov, the birth of Hassidism, a sprinkling of folk tales of general shtetl life, the life of Moses Mendelssohn. The birth of Reform Judaism, the growth of the Rothschilds and Lehmanns, the secret Jewish life of Benjamin Disraeli, beginning of emigration of Jews in America. The Charlaps through the generations. Failed Charlap excursions in Warsaw and Odessa.
16. The Greenies 1900-: A large family called the Charlaps forced to leave the Shtetl, spread throughout the world, from whose eyes we experience the Jewish 20th century.
18. Return to the Old New Land 1933-1945: Tales taking Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of European Jewry as its source. The less said for the moment about where this is going, the better.
Supplementary: Interjections from Cain: Cain, an eternal wanderer of the earth, bearing witness to history, a living incarnation of the Jewish condition, telling the ignominy of what really happened at so many places in letters to Abel.
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