Angel Of Death Research Articles

Perception of Musical Similarity Among Contemporary Thematic Materials in Two Instrumentations

Free classification was used to explore similarity relations in contemporary musical materials. Thirty-four subsections from the five themes of The Angel of Death by Roger Reynolds were composed identically for piano (Expt. 1) and chamber orchestra (Expt. 2) in terms of pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Listeners were asked to group together those judged to be musically similar and to describe the similarities between the subsections in each group. Listeners based their classifications on surface similarities related to tempo, rhythmic and melodic texture, pitch register, melodic contour, and articulation. They were to some extent also based on similarity of the mood evoked by the excerpts. This latter factor was more prominent in the verbalizations for the orchestral version. Instrumentation, timbre, and type of timbral change (smooth, disjunctive) also affected classifications in the orchestral version. Perceptual relations among thematic materials within the piece and the interaction of form-bearing dimensions in musical similarity perception are discussed.

Gabriel in the Kitchen, Slicing Onions

Gabriel in the Kitchen, Slicing Onions Ruth Ellen Kocher (bio) For an angel of death, his fingers lumber roughly over hard surfaces as though earth and gravity rob the very nature of grace away from him. The knife is sharp I say, hoping he can slow down, feel his task unfold like a great building of something new. He stares at the food, unable to speak. Cucumber, tomatoes, zucchini, radishes. Each thrown over his shoulder in a haste of disregard, a service to the perfection of genesis. These are God's vegetables I tell him. They are as perfect as the first day when sky wrung out the atmosphere in sheets of light that became sheets of air, water. Earth pushes them through its crumbling skin as though each labor renews our faith. Gabriel ignores me, takes up the task of crying. The onion skins fall around him in thin sheaths powdered by the heel of his sandal, the scrape of his robe. With each slice, I imagine his retort, that gardens are splayed memories of all we've lost, beds of hubris ripening, delusions of creation as though we believe the act itself of reaping gives us strength. The knife falls hard with each cut, allowing the butcher's block to echo back heart's rhythm, a metronome's swing, a clock's pendulum wound down to its final movements. When I shift to see [End Page 948] how the onions streak his face, he turns away. The window holds him speechless. Lilies crawl around the edge of the yard, corkscrew through leaves like green blades guarding them. They trumpet striped orange profiles as July passes, bow as the sun retreats, call insects into their scent. Even to this spectacle, the mouthpiece of God remains silent. Ruth Ellen Kocher Ruth Ellen Kocher, an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, Missouri, is author of three collections of poetry, Desdemona's Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), When the Moon Knows You're Wandering (New Issues, University of Western Michigan, 2002), and One Girl Babylon (New Issues, University of Western Michigan, 2003). Copyright © 2004 Charles H. Rowell

Book Reviews: Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, Angels of Death: Exploring the Euthanasia Underground, Death and Bereavement around the World, Vol. 1: Major Religious Traditions, Grief in School Communities: Effective Support Strategies

Book Reviews: Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief, Angels of Death: Exploring the Euthanasia Underground, Death and Bereavement around the World, Vol. 1: Major Religious Traditions, Grief in School Communities: Effective Support Strategies

EDITORIAL: Angel of Death?

EDITORIAL: Angel of Death?

Killing for the state: the darkest side of American nursing.

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive 'caring' nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals' skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states' death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states' penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.

Angels of death: exploring the euthanasia underground

Public discussion of euthanasia and assisted suicide is growing. In Australia as elsewhere the debate is difficult, contentious and confronting, and hampered by the secrecy that necessarily surrounds illegal practice. Most people simply have no way of knowing how, and how often, medically assisted death actually occurs. Roger Magnusson presents, for the first time, detailed first-hand accounts by doctors, nurses, therapists and other health professionals who have been participants in assisted death. All have been intimately involved in caring for people with AIDS, both in Australia and in California. He places these ambivalent, self-incriminating accounts within the broader context of the right-to-die debate and the challenges of palliative care. The frankness of the health workers and the richness of their collected evidence set this book apart. From within a culture of deception they speak knowingly and movingly of the merciful release of a peaceful death, while acknowledging the reality of 'botched attempts', euthanasia without consent, precipitative euthanasia, lack of accountability and professional distance, and many other disturbing issues. Angels of Death provides a window into the 'euthanasia underground'-a secret part of medicine and nursing that few professionals will publicly acknowledge. It brings a sense of urgency and precision to public debate, and equips us all to think more independently about these crucial issues.

Joseph ben Samuel Sarfati's «Tratado de Melibea y Calisto»: A Sephardic Jew's Reading of the <i>Celestina</i> in Light of the Medieval Judeo-Spanish Go-between Tradition

The introductory poem that the sixteenth-century Italian Jew, Samuel Ṣarfati, included with his now lost Hebrew translation of Fernando de Rojas' Spanish masterpiece La Celestina , mentions several elements foreign to Rojas work as we know it today. These include the image of the war of lovers, the description of women as the Angels of Death and as the Devil (Azazel), and the identification of sexual desire and religious assimilation. In my opinion these elements show that Ṣarfati had in mind two earlier works from the Judeo-Spanish go-between tradition, Minḥat Yehuda by Judah Ibn Sabbatay and the « Maqāma of Marriage» by Judah al- Harīzī. In both of these Hebrew works we find images similar to those used by Ṣarfati, as well as some strikingly similar formal and linguistic characteristics, all of which suggests that these two works were part of the historical-literary background of Ṣarfati (and, perhaps, Rojas himself).

Battling Ghosts at Ninety-Two

After so many years you would think that my mother’s demons would have been put to rest. But at ninety two she lay in a hospital bed pleading a case to her own supreme being. No, not God, she never called on Him. She went directly to the source of all her troubles. The Malahamuvis, the Angel of Death, and the Konahorra, the Evil Eye! I held her frail hand and listened as she switched languages in an effort to communicate with her archenemies.

Do No Harm

In Part 1, the author illustrated cases where caregivers ended patient's lives with pain medication and where "angels of death" ended the lives of multiple patients. This month, read about what constitutes reckless endangerment and neglect.

Do No Harm

In Part 1, read about the implications involved when caregivers end life with pain medication and when "angels of death" work among them.

Editorial: A Dialogue About Aesthetics

Arthur: ‘I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art.’Andy: ‘I've never been touched by a painting. I don't want to think. The world outside would be easier to live in if we were all machines.’Arthur: ‘He brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.’Andy: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.’Arthur: ‘He was the nearest to a philosophical genius that twentieth century art had brought forth.’Andy: ‘I don't think many people are going to believe in my philosophy because the other ones are better.’Arthur: ‘I want first to explain what makes Empire finally so philosophical a film. Nothing in the film relevantly changes at all, in fact, although since the film was taken over an eight hour stretch, something could have changed irrelevantly. What was left was pure film. In Empire, narrative time and real time are one. The time in and the time of the film are the same. There is, as with Brillo Box and the cartons of Brillo, no interesting perceptual difference between the two. With Empire we become aware of the material properties of the film, of the scratches, the grain, the accidental luminosities, and above all the passing before our eyes of the monotonous band. I think Warhol had an almost mystical attitude to the world: everything in it had equal weight, it was all equally interesting.’Andy: ‘The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's more or less what happened to me.’Arthur: ‘A man sees what looks like an ordinary soap-pad carton in a shop window, and needing to ship some books, asks the shopkeeper if he can have it. The shop turns out to be an art gallery and the shopkeeper a dealer who says: “That is a work of art, just now worth thirty thousand dollars.”’Andy: ‘My work won't last anyway. I was using cheap paint.’Arthur: ‘He turned the world we share into art, and he turned himself into part of that world, and because we are the images we hold in common with everyone else, he became part of us.’Emile (on Andy's behalf): ‘He loved to see other people dying, This is what the Factory was about: Andy was the Angel of Death's Apprentice as these people went through their shabby lives with drugs and weird sex and group sex and mass sex. Andy looked and Andy as voyeur par excellence was the devil, because he got bored just looking.’

The Rape of Dinah: Human Rights, Civil War in Liberia, and Evil Triumphant

The Rape of Dinah: Human Rights, Civil War in Liberia, and Evil Triumphant Kenneth L. Cain (bio) Now Dinah, daughter to Jacob, went out to visit the daughters of the land. Shechem son of Hamor the Hivite, chief of the land, saw her, and took her and lay with her by force. Jacob heard that Shechem had defiled his daughter Dinah. Hamor came to Jacob and his sons, saying, “my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him in marriage” and offered Jacob landrights in return. Shechem also spoke to Jacob and the sons, “Do me this favor, and I will pay whatever you tell me . . . only give me this maiden for a wife.” Jacob’s sons were indignant and very angry, because he had committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter by force—a thing not to be done. The men thus answered with guile, instructing Hamor and Shechem that the sons of Hivites must be circumcised, only on this condition would they agree. The words pleased Hamor and Shechem who convinced the men of their town that in order to usher in an era of profitable relations with their neighbor Jacob, all men of the town must be circumcised. On the third day, when the Hivites were in pain, Simeon and Levi, two brothers of Dinah, took each his sword, came upon the city unmolested, and slew all the males. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword, took Dinah out of Shechem’s house and went away. The other sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered town, because their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and asses, all that was inside the town and outside, all their wealth, all their children, and their wives, all that was in houses, they took as captives and booty. Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “you have brought trouble on me, making me odious among the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my men are few in number, so that if they unite against me and attack me, I and my house will be destroyed.” But they answered, “Should our sister be treated like a whore?” 1 The Rape of Dinah Genesis, Chapter 34 [End Page 265] The looters, the plunderers, the obsessively ambitious must not be allowed to block the cravings of the vast majority. What wickedness. 2 William Twaddell US Ambassador to Liberia They are writing “Angels of Death.” Look, I am no Angel of Death and I am going to prove it in this town. I am very serious, me, Charles Ghankay Taylor, I will prove that I am no Lord of War and I am no Angel of Death. If you don’t respect this presidency, you’ll respect it or I am going to lock horns with some people here one on one. They think ECOMOG here to support their nonsense and their talks. ECOMOG will not stop me. It’s almost reaching now that we will make sure that different processes; due processes of law maybe, and in some cases, the laws of the jungle to bring things under control in this town. You know Charles Taylor, we will straighten things out. 3 Charles Taylor 5 November 1995 What the journalists have failed to point out is that this time, unlike previous fighting in Monrovia, the civilians have not really suffered. . . . In the past, fighters would rip out people’s intestines and use them to string up roadblocks, or cut off people’s heads. This time there has been none of that. 4 National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) Spokesman J.T. Richardson amidst carnage in Monrovia April, 1996 Right temporarily denied is stronger than evil triumphant. 5 Dr. Martin Luther King I. Introduction Liberia is important in its own right—human beings live and die there. In the immortal words of Primo Levi, as he struggled to make some moral sense out of Auschwitz, “We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular...

The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (review)

??? COHPAnATIST women in Maghreb culture, the representations ofgender roles in women's narrative , or the "triple bind" that women are subjected to in developing countries (race, class, and gender). In this study she aims at "correcting the image of women in masculine writings" (60). The faults ofNagy-Zekmi's book have less to do with her work in particular and more with the limits ofpostcolonial criticism in general. In other words, her study, as I see it, is paradigmatic ofpostcolonial scholarship. For instance, NagyZekmi assumes a priori that "decolonization becomes contestatory ofdomination in all its forms, whether these are ideological or discursive" (5). Following in the wake ofSpivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she often returns to the idea that all subjects in postcolonial contexts have been silenced by neo-colonialism or imperialism . Here, as when she deals with women—"feminine" writing or writing by women—Nagy-Zekmi treats postcolonial subjects or women en masse, while vacillating about issues ofsocial class and race. As a result, the categories she uses are stretched too far and the potentially interesting sociohistorical and literary material is thin (5-15). The author seems to recognize this on occasion, only then to deny that social class is important among "postcolonial" subjects. Nagy-Zekmi does address the issue of class difference in her discussion, where she cites the cases ofVictoria Ocampo, the upper-class Argentine writer, and Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the Bolivian worker/writer; but she then undermines the discussion by claiming that all classes are affected if their members are women from postcolonial nations (35-36). Consequently she favors abstractions over specific social and historical conditions. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tells us that intellectuals are very skilled at veiling their own habitus, and Nagy-Zekmi is no exception. Despite her attempt to cast her study in sociohistorical terms, the author, like poststructuralists and postcolonialists , regards writing as a "subversive" act (33). Nagy-Zekmi must be referring to "postcolonial" intellectuals living in exile in the United States or Europe, since they are the subjects ofher analysis. For to claim that writers at work in the postcolonial world are subversive or resisting under the shadow ofdeath, as postcolonialists do, is misguided. As Ahmad affirms in his essay on postcolonialism, in "Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Arab world, millions ofpeople write and generally conduct the business of life in English or French," so writing from this regional context does not automatically constitute a subversive act (2). Needless to say, neither do postcolonial university professors in the United States or Europe face the angel ofdeath nor the scythe ofcensureship, so why state otherwise? I hasten to return to the point that Nagy-Zekmi is not responsible for these abstractions in her interesting book on North African and Latin American narrative; the "theoretical" model ofpostcolonialism, created in the US academy, is. Would we not be better offusing concrete biographical, historical, and political materials to bolster our analyses ofliterature in either region? Greg DawesNorth Carolina State University CARYL EMERSON. The FirstHundred Years ofMikhailBakhtin. Princeton : Princeton UP, 1998. xvi + 287 pp. Bakhtin has become a highly contested commodity on the American critical scene. Once his influence went beyond the semiotic boundaries established by his French Vol 23 (1999): 193 BOOK NOTES champions, a diverse group of Anglo-American scholars, readers, and thinkers launched a seemingly endless exposition and application of his "key concepts." This popularity fits into the larger structural pattern that, to extend a phrase of Michael Holquist's, I will call "Russia is always being discovered." Every discovery ofRussia, it seems, forges the ignorance over which the next discovery will triumph . This principle applies to Russians just as much as to their well-meaning Western colleagues: how many times have Russians claimed to have anticipated some achievement ofthe West, or even to have discovered it first? How many times have Western intellectuals looked to Russian culture for the "real" alternative to the West? By introducing an American audience to various stages ofRussian reception ofBakhtin's oeuvre, The First Hundred Years ofMichael Bakhtin attempts to break this vicious circle ofdiscovery and deception, whose effects in this case seem especially disorienting. Emerson's introduction offers a broad, but helpful and informative overview ofthe...

Moses and the Angel of Death

Moses and the Angel of Death

Gettysburg: Display Window for Popular Memory

Gettysburg's streets rocked with din of artillery on February 26, 1884. Added to clamor of bells and cheering crowds fluttering red, white, and blue, booming signaled festivity rather than conflagration. Into town irrevocably changed by war in steamed bedecked locomotive Jay bearing a beaming Cooke himself. Financed in part by Cooke, inaugural of & Harrisburg Railroad opened to improved connections with northern, eastern, and western population centers. The Harrisburg Patriot termed celebratory cannonading nearly as important to town as that which occurred twenty-one years ago, and railroad another victory for Gettysburg that brings historic battlefield within reach of thousands who want to visit it. Appropriately, locomotive stopped outside of town for a brief ceremony that included driving two golden spikes, one inscribed 1863 and other 1883. But spikes represented more than just corporate gimmickry exploiting historical memory, and even more than a new era in apotheosis of Gettysburg. Rather, they symbolized ongoing metamorphosis of angel of death into an avatar of commercial celebration.' Although railroad opened to new clients and attractions, it served as only one of many enterprises that transformed into a commodity. No project of twentieth-century avarice, production and exchange of in America's cultural marketplace began immediately after battle. Since Civil War Centennial a succession of struggles, each labeled by media the second battle of Gettysburg, have pitted preservationists against developers. The issues usually limn secular forces of commerce as beast of Apocalypse threatening to desecrate sacred ground. Similarly, an axiom in histories of post-Civil War is that patriotic preservationists founded shrine while later promotion by commercial forces tainted holy for venal purposes.' Perhaps part of contemporary self-castigation, this romanticized perspective overlooks grip of market forces on American life before Civil War. The morality play view of good versus evil might enhance site's sacred value, but it ignores complex web of market transactions that created and continue to shape shrine. It baits late-twentieth century mind with profaning intrusions, but does not consider subtle ways market penetrated all areas of American life in nineteenth century. In his book Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, Edward T. Linenthal points to amount of cultural labor such as rituals, monument building, and panegyrics involved in forging and maintaining a shrine out of a battle site such as Gettysburg.' What needs to be given its due is prodigious market activity that entwined with venerative gestures at to produce a popular American shrine. It was no coincidence that icon grew apace with America's shift from a producer to a consumer nation. As we shall see, a variety of purveyors in decades surrounding turn of century marketed for a commercial society characterized by display, spectacle, images, and commercial leisure. In vernacular of merchandising, became a display window for popular memory, presenting American past in a manner appealing to Victorian consumers. Although consumer capitalism finally triumphed around turn of twentieth century, it had been making strides for decades. Even at time of battle, marketplace provided main arena for cultural production and consumption. The middle class rising from turmoil of industrialization provided a ready market for cultural commodities available from transportation, printing, and other technological improvements. Full of aspiration and intensely self-conscious, middle class simultaneously turned inward toward family and outward to a world accessible through commercial venues of print, images, and travel. …

Angelology and the Supernal Worlds in the Aramaic Targums To the Prophets

AbstractOur goal was to try and examine the degree to which the different Targums to the books of the Prophets-Targum Jonathan and the Toseftot Targum-do or do not represent a unified attitude to angels and the angelic world. There is no doubt that both TJ and the TTs take the existence of angels for granted; but it is equally clear that TJ adopts a more cautious, reserved, approach than the TTs. Indeed, the TTs are intensely curious about the supernal world. Despite the fact that they derive from a variety of sources and differ quite widely in their language and function, it is undeniable that fifteen of them display such an interest. Moreover, these fifteen instances constitute a representative sample of the different sources and are therefore adequate to indicate a trend shared by the Toseftot Targum as a whole.69 Moreover, I would say that the difference is not one of quantity alone, but also of substance-not only is the number of references larger, but their content is quite different. Unlike TJ to Prophets, the TTs furnish us with the names of no less than seven angels: Uriel, Gabriel, Metatron, Michael, Samael, Penuel and the Angel of Death. The number of groups or categories of angels mentioned in the TTs is also greater. While TJ mentions only such groups as "angels of fire," "angels of trembling," "heavenly angels" and "angels of wind," the TTs refer to still other groups: "cruel angels," "angels of wrath," "angels of peace" and "angels of fear" (in addition to those mentioned in TJ, which also appear in TTs). And such expressions as "his attendants" (smšwhy) or "officers" (srky¸) also occur in the TTs but not in TJ.

The Specifically Egyptian Context of a Coptic Arabic Text: Chapter Nine of the Kitab Al-Idah of Sawirus Ibn Al-Muqaffac"

AbstractThe catechetical compilation Kitab al-Idah ("The Book of the Elucudation") of the tenth-century Coptic bishop and theologian Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa' is one of the most frequently copied theological texts of the Arabic-speaking Coptic Church. While its first eight chapters deal with the principal doctrines and practices of the faith, Chapter Nine-omitted from the most recent printed edition of the work-must be understood against the backdrop of the flourishing speculation about supernatural beings and the afterlife that has long characterised Egyptian religion, including Coptic Christianity. In this chapter Sawirus responds to a homily, attributed to Theophilus of Alexandria, on the Angel of Death: the reason for his being granted authority over humankind, and the day of his feast. With considerable passion, Sawirus refutes this homily with arguments drawn from common sense, science, scripture and theology; for him, the cult of the Angel of Death is nothing but a ruse of Satan. However, Sawirus does not simply dismiss Egyptian Christian concern about the realm of supernatural beings. Instead, he attempts to absorb this realm more completely into the world of the Bible by summarizing or redescribing the Bible's central story as that of Christ's deception of and victory over Satan and his demonic host. While this narrative is rooted in ancient soteriological tradition, Sawirus' rendering is fresh and entertaining. The popularity of the Kitab al-Idah suggests that many generations of Egyptian Christians found it not merely entertaining, but genuinely elucidating.

In the wake of Allitt.

Beverley Allitt will haunt the good name of nursing for a long time to come. The 24-year old nurse, convicted of the murder of four children; and of attempting to murder three others, and harming six more, has given the profession more column inches in the newspapers than years of high quality care could ever do. The tabloids' 'Angel of Death' has entered the annals of nursing history.

Identification of the skeletal remains of josef mengele by DNA analysis

There has been considerable controversy over the identity of the skeletal remains exhumed in Brazil in 1985 and believed to be those of Dr Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’. Bone DNA analysis was therefore conducted in an attempt to provide independent evidence of identity. Trace amounts of highly degraded human DNA were successfully extracted from the shaft of the femur. Despite the presence of a potent inhibitor of DNA amplification, microsatellite alleles could be reproducibly amplified from the femur DNA. Comparison of the femur DNA with DNA from Josef Mengele's son and wife revealed a bone genotype across 10 different loci fully compatible with paternity of Mengele's son. Less than 1 in 1800 Caucasian individuals unrelated to Mengele's son would by chance show full paternal inclusion. DNA analysis therefore provides very strong independent evidence that the remains exhumed from Brazil are indeed those of Josef Mengele.

Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (review)

Vol. 10, No. 3 Spring 1992 BOOK REVIEWS 127 Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, by Steve Stern. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990. 256 pp. $19.95. The old Jewish neighborhood of Memphis, known as "the Pinch," provides the setting for most of the stories in Steve Stern's marvelous collection of short fiction, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven and Other Stories (penguin, 1986). These tales do not describe growing up Jewish in the South, but instead rework such Judaic myths and motifs as the thirty-six righteous men and the angel of death. The last story in the collection, however, is an American ghost story. A reclusive, minimalist writer is blocked on a novel about a reclusive, minimalist writer, but is jolted out of sterility by an encounter with a "ghost writer," who teaches him to revel in his artistic imagination rather than restrain it. Stern's character finally allows his protagonist to glimpse "a neighborhood on top of a river bluff ... full of cunning old world Jews." It is the Pinch transmuted by the magic of Stern's own bravura prose: "From their wagons and stands they were peddling prayer shawls and siddurs, goofer dust and mojo hands.... Their tzaddiks pulIed rabbits from under their yarmelkes and gutted them. on the spot ..." (p. 248). In this neighborhood, and adjacent Black ghettos, Harry Kaplan, the bookish adolescent hero of Stern's latest work, discovers the pungent mysteries of adult sexuality and the unfathomable otherness of Blacks. He also learns what it means to harbor racial prejudice, to be betrayed, and to betray others. As in many a Jewish immigrant bildungsroman, the narrator/protagonist comes of age in a lunatic family, this one comprising a nagging mother, a hapless father, a duplicitous uncle, a senile grandfather, and, before she dies, a comicalIy odoriferous grandmother. But the book's vitality depends not on yet another caricatured Jewish clan, but on Stern's dazzling use of language, his eye for wild similes, and his detailed inventories of the mad worlds he invents. Stern contrives a number of opportunities for verbal acrobatics, beginning with a flood which turns the central city into a labyrinth of lagoons. Wandering out of his father's pawn shop, the adventurous but terrified Harry first explores this transformed world on a makeshift raft steered, by two brothers, Black Huck Finns to his Jewish Tom Sawyer: 128 SHOFAR When we'd sailed past those islanded storefronts, out beyond the quicksilver reach of the reflections, I noticed a change in the air. The mild breeze, brackish with the stench of the renegade river, was laced now with the keener odor of barbecued treyf. (p. 64) Harry's Virgilian guides, Lucifer and Michael, live in their aunt's brothel and run errands of a petty criminal nature, and Stern catalogs this underworld with a zestful, sometimes exhausting prose that matches Harry's wide-eyed wonder: What I'd been prepared to see, I saw: a cavern of topaz light inhabited by languid mermaids. . .. There was a neon clock, an enamel Dixie Peach calendar on a water-stained wall, and a ponrait of a gimlet-eyed Jesus with a rich golden tan. (p. 106) Lucifer is cagey, streetwise, and voluble, while Michael, a virtual mute, devours books procured by Harry from his cousin Naomi. When the sight of a white beauty queen catapults Michael into a trance, Stern renders his nonstop ravings by commingling local idiom withscraps from the Bible, Greek mythology, and assorted literary classics: "She got to be mine! ... Her am the one and only puredee supreme, the realest gospel dove. Done made up by a opostle on a bootleg still, then sprankle her on a cypress knee which it is whittle into a honey gal by sweet Jesus hisself. How we meet up is I strum 01 Prospero's starvation box, or do I bust me a jack bottle fresh off a bottle bush, and out she pop." (p. 188) Harry hopes to end the trance by bringing Naomi to Michael's bedside dressed up as the beauty queen, but instead has some gawky sexual grappling with her atop their grandmother's coffin. When Michael dies, Harry feels guilty for...