by James A. Clapp

 

The Moneylender : A Novel of the Inner Life of Shakespear’s Shylock
by Sebastian Gerard

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Since 16th century in England, when Shakespeare first conjured him, Shylock, the moneylender in The Merchant of Venice, has been a magnet for vilification of Jews by theatre audiences the world over. Little is known of this character, fashioned from and carrying forward the prevailing an Elizabethan age antisemitic stereotypes who speaks only seventy-nine lines in the entire play.
 
Shylock’s lines reinforce the stigmatism and mistreatment of what were regarded as Christ-killers and greedy moneylenders so villainous in manner that he would demand a pound of debtor’s flesh in payment.
 
Such is the dilemma for Jewish theater director David Adler-Sterne, commissioned to direct Merchant in San Diego, but who sees Shylock as much victim as villain. It is a dilemma of casting and direction that motivates him to visit Venice, and the Ghetto that likely would have been where are any actual16th century Jewish moneylender would have lived.
 
Interspersed with Adler-Sterne’s quest for inspiration from the atmospherics of the Ghetto is the story of real moneylender Shalukeh in the late 1500s, who was brutalized and humiliated by Venetian Christians. Much of Shalukeh’s story and the sources of his hatred of Christians is recounted in a secret chronicle that he begins after his maltreatment by his debtors.
 
Shalukeh’s manuscript, the biography of a Portuguese crypto-Jewish refugee, has remained secreted in a Ghetto synagogue for over 500 years, but is fortuitously discovered during a renovation project just days before Adler-Sterne is to return to America, and a person who could have been, the model or inspiration for Shakespeare’s Shylock is tantalizingly revealed.
 
The Moneylender is a story of religious persecution, lies, deceit, deception, torture, murder, and vengeance that extends from antiquity to the present day and has been transmitted in historical facts and by a stereotypical character and famous work of fiction. But all fiction has its origins in reality.
 
 

 

CON-MANDER-IN-CHIEF
by Ned O’Hearn

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I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016, but I was willing to offer the benefit of the doubt, hoping that once sworn in he’d magically start acting with a dignity befitting the office. That anticipation, more like delusion, had totally dissipated by 2019 when I started writing Trump-related satires as a form of personal therapy, following an age-old tradition that pompous people in power invite ridicule. Here was man all about himself and power – a fragile, self-consumed, dangerously ambitious egotist with no moral compass. Estranged from truth, he instinctively fictionalizes fact, benefiting from a mind unburdened by social conscience or troubled by deep thought. These satires, in the form of stories, plays, screenplays, fables, soliloquies and songs, were written over the past five years, many inspired by hilarious verbal miscues, nationally embarrassing moments and international blunders reflecting behaviors of a man who refuses to read or take advice, is woefully ignorant of history, and is envious of foreign dictators. While exaggeration and comedy permeate many of the 36 entries – these are satires after all – the messages are serious.