Misanthropy Loves Company

COHEN, LESLIE

Misanthropy Loves Company Signs and Wonders Melvin Jules Bukiet New fork: Picador usa, 1999. 375 pp.. tad-cover S26.00 REVIEWED BY LESLIE COHEN Somewhere between the hysteria of the Y2K bug...

...But Bukiet's nightmarish visions have been seen before...
...And while God remains silent at the scene of unspeakable crimes, Bukiet rages...
...Or is it an act of God...
...The dubious heroes are a gang of 12 unrepentant criminals who have escaped a hellish German prison via an act of serendipity...
...Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, tells the Israeli news agency Arutz-7 that media incitement continues despite the fact that there is a new Israeli government and ongoing peace negotiations...
...Signs and Wonders focuses on the moral decrepitude of modem society, delineating our times in apocalyptic terms...
...One recent issue of the newspaper Al-Ayam included a poem by a 15-year-old girl: "My right hand holds the knife/ My left hand—a machine gun...
...It seems that like his characters, he was carried away by his own fury...
...The book will appeal strongly to those who share Bukiet's conviction that humankind is unredeemable...
...The End," published by Gaza's AHstiklal in December 1994, typifies Palestinian anxiety about the peace process: A stereotypical Jew swallowing Arabs bearing olive branches...
...When they enter Hamburg— depicted as Sodom and Gomorrah revisited—they gain the instant support of the depraved masses, who follow them deeper and deeper into sin...
...MV...
...Signs and Wonders is Bukiet's indictment of the silence of God, the self-serving manipulations of organized religion, and the basic, enduring evil of mankind...
...The novel is set in Germany, with much reference to the Holocaust to highlight the moral failure of our civilization...
...Almost all the governments are totalitarian, and the media "serves as their mouthpiece," writes Stav, director of the nonpartisan Ariel Center for Policy Research...
...However, many readers will be baffled or angered at the author's eschewal of Jewish wisdom...
...Worth a Thousand Words...
...Leslie Cohen, a freelance writer, has been a member of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet since 1980...
...And a bomb in my brain due to the fear...
...Additionally, one wonders why an erudite writer like Bukiet felt the need to elaborate at such length on the sordid details of the sins...
...Bukiet delivers his message with a plethora of references to biblical figures and historical incidents, illustrating mankind's moral disintegration in die 2,000 years following the original Son and his adherents...
...As the transposition of the Jesus story into the 20th century is very familiar to the contemporary reader, any author handling this subject should approach it from an entirely unique angle...
...His book contains more than 150 anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli caricatures from various Arabic print media dating back to the late 1960s...
...Their leader, Ben Alef (a Hebrew play on words, which can be loosely translated as "Number One Son"), is a taciturn miracle worker who bears a strange tattoo...
...tad-cover S26.00 REVIEWED BY LESLIE COHEN Somewhere between the hysteria of the Y2K bug Cassandras and the euphoria of die New Age prophets lies a balanced approach to the new millennium: Bukiet's latest novel tips the scales mightily to the gloom and doom side...
...It is well timed, having arrived at a moment in history when the murder of children by other children concludes a century of atrocities...
...And it's not limited to caricature...
...He and his followers, the "Alefites," briefly roam from town to rural town, wowing the locals with miracles...
...Caricatures in the printed press are one of the most genuine expressions of public sentiment in the Arab world, according to Arieh Stav, author of Peace: The Arabian Caricature—A Study of Anti-Semitic Imagery (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 1999...

Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1


 
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