Oct

10

2025

Alisa Solomon (Contributing Writer): When Zalmen arrives in Mandate Palestine at the beginning of Hanan Ayalti’s astonishing 1936 novel, Boom and Chains, he and the other passengers on board a ship from Europe must wait before disembarking. A general strike among Arab workers has brought everything to a halt. “It’s a strike against the British and against the Balfour Declaration,” explains an official from the Jewish Agency. The next day, when the passengers manage to leave, Zalmen grabs a ride to Tel Aviv in a car with five halutzim and three English policemen wielding guns. “How strange,” he thinks to himself. “I came to fight British imperialism together with the Arab masses, and here I am getting protected and escorted from the harbor by armed English soldiers.” Ayalti continues: “He bit his lip and uttered, ‘Nu, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”

The roughly 250 pages that follow show exactly that—and a lot happens. Zalmen labors in a kibbutz among fellow leftists who sink knee-deep in mud to dig canals to drain swamps, sweat and shiver through bouts of malaria, plow scrubby ground into fecund fields to pave new roads, and never stop debating how to bring about the glorious revolution. The book is more atmospheric than plot-driven at first, and Ayalti evokes landscape, insects, and bone-soaking rain in beautiful impressionistic strokes as he brings to life the characters’ erotic yearnings and ideological fervor. A wry, mirthless humor breaks through from time to time. “Spring continued,” Ayalti writes. “Nights of white moons. The kind of nights described in fundraising speeches by the Jewish National Fund.”

The main event is internal: the process of disillusionment. “We’ve always regarded the kibbutz as the exemplar of the new society,” Zalmen tells his comrade, Motke, after a year or two trying to build and live that new society. “It turns out, it is actually the vanguard of expelling Arabs from their work and from their land.” This recognition requires them to take sides, heightening the action—and shining a rare, riveting light on joint Jewish-Arab resistance.

Zalmen reflects a good measure of Ayalti’s own experience. Born in 1910 in the Grodno region, then part of the Russian Empire, the author arrived in Palestine in 1929 as a teenage zealot of the socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair, and soon abandoned Zionism for the nascent Arab-Jewish Communist party. Although he had published his first novel in Hebrew, Ayalti wrote Boom and Chains in Yiddish because, as the translator Adi Mahalel explains in an illuminating introduction, no Hebrew publisher would have touched an anti-Zionist novel. Arrested by the British for his own political activity, Ayalti ended up fleeing Israel for Paris after a short stint in prison. He covered the Spanish Civil War for a Yiddish paper, fled Hitler’s rise, found safety in Uruguay, and eventually settled in New York, where he joined the students protesting at Columbia University in 1968 with his good friend, Hannah Arendt. He died in 1992.

Mahalel notes that Ayalti repudiated Boom and Chains in his later years, citing his change of political allegiances—more because of the book’s pro-Soviet implications, it seems, than because of its critique of Zionism. Either way, one result has been decades of obscurity, even among Yiddish scholars. Mahalel has retrieved this enthralling dissident work at a crucial moment.

Nathan Goldman (senior editor): For those of us who find some relief from the abundant horrors of reality in ones that are merely imagined, the hour is upon us. Since I adored Mike Flanagan’s Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass, I started my spooky season with his equally moody The Haunting of Hill House. The show, inspired by more than adapted from Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name, follows five adult siblings who spent a formative childhood summer in the eponymous mansion, which ended in their mother’s tragic death amid mysterious circumstances. Despite an often overwrought script and sometimes tropey depictions of trauma, its energetic performances, carefully crafted atmosphere, and imaginative scares make it perfect October viewing.

Less familiar—if also less coherent—was Tilman Singer’s recent film Cuckoo. In a promising first venture into scream queendom, Hunter Schafer stars as an American adolescent reeling from her mother’s death who must move to a remote resort in the German Alps to live with her father and stepmother, who’ve designed an expansion for the creepy hotelier. She’s soon unsettled by a pattern of female guests inexplicably vomiting, her stepsister’s sudden onset of seizures, and a strange screeching from the woods that causes time to stutter and loop. Insanity ensues.

Readers with no stomach for on-screen horror may still appreciate the podcast I’ve been bingeing, Too Scary; Didn’t Watch. The premise is simple: One host recaps recent releases or genre classics for the other two—who are, as they say in the intro, “too scared to watch scary movies”—with ample interjections and digressions. For someone interested in seeing the films themselves, it works well as a chat show with a lightly spooky flavor rather than a substitute for watching, and I’ve been using it to relive movies I enjoyed earlier this year like Weapons, Final Destination: Bloodlines, and Late Night with the Devil. But for anyone for whom that’s still too much (or anyone with small children) I’d heartily recommend Raahat Kaduji’s I’m Not Scary, which my kids picked up from a free books table at the farmer’s market last weekend. It’s the adorable tale of a bat who hopes to convince his fellow woodland critters that he’s not the monster his shadow suggests; he’s just a little guy who loves to bake. Autumnal, cozy, and totally fright-free.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I don’t, as a rule, read history or fiction for the lessons they can teach us about today, but reading Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, I frequently felt chills of recognition running up and down my spine. M is a tetralogy of novels about Mussolini, beginning in 1919 with the founding of the fascist movement and continuing on until Il Duce’s death in 1945. Only the first volume is available in English, but polyglots like me can read the remaining volumes in Italian, or volume two in French.

Scurati is a competent though not a great writer, but in his hands the mere recounting of Mussolini’s life and deeds is a compulsive read. Scurati doesn’t dwell on Mussolini’s political beginnings as one of the most radical of Italy’s socialists, a phase that covered his first decades and ended when he became a militant supporter of Italy’s entry into World War I. Mussolini’s betrayal of everyone and everything in his life is a constant theme of M. True beliefs are seldom taken on, or are cast aside with ease. Fascism was not an ideology; it was a punch in the face.

Betrayal existed in every sphere of Mussolini’s life. He cheated both on his wife and on his primary and most important mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was Jewish. He cast aside friends and allies—anyone who got in his way or was no longer of use to him.

And yet, Scurati shows that Mussolini—despite the fanatical anti-leftism of his fascism, the beatings and murders of socialists and Communists, the burning down of left-wing meeting halls, the constant reign of terror—was haunted by his socialist past. Among the few people to whom he was loyal was Nicola Bombacci, a Communist Mussolini befriended in his youth when both were socialist teachers and who, after being expelled from the Italian Communist Party, was the foremost left-fascist, insisting on fascism’s socialist nature. Bombacci was among the four people other than the Duce himself who were killed by partisans and left hanging on Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

Scurati presents an unvarnished portrait of Mussolini, a man moved by ego, animal needs, and a sick desire for power and for national and personal aggrandizement. Reading his insane diatribes, his boastful style, and his constant belittling of others certainly struck a familiar chord.

The first volume builds to a conclusion that is undeniably a warning to us. It recounts what should have been the end of Mussolini’s career, the murder of the reformist socialist politician Giacomo Matteoti in 1924. Despite his moderate politics, Matteotti was a ferocious foe of fascist rule. While other politicians and intellectuals like Pirandello and Benedetto Croce were lining up behind Mussolini, Matteotti was speaking and writing scathing attacks on Il Duce. Mussolini and his fascist squads finally had enough of him, and he was kidnapped in broad daylight and murdered behind the closed curtains of the getaway car.

It was obvious who was behind his disappearance and murder, and Mussolini looked to be doomed. But cowardly opposition politicians did little, and the king stood by and didn’t remove Mussolini from office. His back seemingly to the wall, Mussolini stood in the chamber of deputies and, knowing he had the support of a significant segment of the public and that politicians lacked backbone, said “Well, then, gentlemen, I declare here, before this assembly and before the people of Italy, that I and I alone assume the political and moral responsibility for everything that has happened…If fascism has been a band of criminals, I am the leader of the criminal band.” Like the man who claimed he could shoot someone on the corner of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he read his country well, and was in power for over 20 more years. We already have a wannabe Mussolini in our present. Is there a Matteotti in our future?

Shortly after October 7th, I led a group of Jewish Currents readers in a text study about mourning. At one point, we read about the custom of burying a murder victim as found, without the traditional rituals of bathing or shrouding the body, in order “to raise up anger and to wreak vengeance,” as the 16th-century Eastern European commentator Rabbi David HaLevi Segal puts it. As I hoped, we discussed the desire to do evil in return, which was of course the order of the day. While most of us debated whether the violence solicited was human or divine, the cartoonist Eli Valley made the provocative suggestion that God was the object of the fury, as if the practice anticipated Elie Wiesel’s post-Holocaust play, The Trial of God, in which the victims of the Khmelnytsky massacre arraign the Deity.

The Rabbis had the same thought about the world’s very first murder, which occurs in this week’s parshah, Breishit. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai compares Cain and Abel to two gladiators wrestling before a king who can stop the fight when he pleases, but chooses not to intervene. As the loser is dying, he howls, “Who will plead my case before the king?” Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai likens these desperate last words to Abel’s posthumous plea; when God confronts Cain, he says, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” This midrash is shocking, not least to its author, who prefaces his parable, “The matter is hard for the one who says it, impossible for the mouth to make it explicit.” Ironically, Abel’s blood pleads for justice from the authority who oversaw his murder—indeed, the analogy implies, from someone who valued his life less than the spectacle of his death. It is as if God said to Cain, as a later midrash indeed suggests, “your brother’s blood is crying out about me from the ground.” (The difference between “to” and “about” here is merely vocalic.) Proving that not only moderns can interrogate the ways of God to man, this midrash outstrips even Wiesel, who piously imagines a trial scene, replete with evidence, moral claims, and reasoned judgments. For Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, only suckers mistake our world for a courtroom. It is instead a coliseum, in which the sole verdict is the emperor’s pollice verso, his capriciously turned thumb delivering or withholding mercy.

Atheism is in the air in the legends surrounding Cain: A fanciful, late-antique Aramaic translation has him proclaiming, “there is no judge and no judgment” before killing his brother, in what became the slogan of Jewish disbelief. Yet I doubt Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai was preaching godlessness, which would make his long career as a conscientious legalist and pious exegete a very strange, elaborate bit. So what was he teaching? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that in Breishit, Cain gets an oddly light sentence. Although biblical laws uniformly prescribe execution for intentional homicide, Cain lives on, and is even divinely protected from human retribution (“whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance”); although cursed to wander the earth, he promptly settles (in the absurdly named “land of Wander,” as if his exile were merely lexical), builds a city, and starts a family. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is explaining this non-punishment as God’s acceptance of complicity. The king refuses to make the gladiator the scapegoat for the evils of the coliseum.

Such guilt-ridden mercy reminds me of an idea taught by my ancestor, the 18th-century Hasidic Rebbe Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who assured his followers that when human beings are judged on the high holidays, we can be sure of an acquittal, because, after all, it was God, not us, who created the evil impulse. Remarkably, the Berditchever is casting himself, and all humanity, as Cain, repeating an argument the midrash assigns to the murderer pleading his case before God. After weeks of chest-beating and grovelling, such cynical optimism can feel refreshing. But the Berditchever Rebbe’s leniency implies a stringent catch. For, of course, we too can find ourselves in the position of the judge within rotten, unjust structures. (I think of this point, for instance, when I grade papers written by working-class students poorly educated in an underfunded school system—and of course, a good many politicians who crow about punitive “law and order” could profitably reflect on it as well.)

Who knows if there is divine justice or not, whether our cosmos is a courtroom or a coliseum? We may be certain, however, that our capitalist imperium is the latter, and we might thus learn from Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai’s God to pardon those trespasses in which we ourselves are implicated.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book, Fictions of God, will be published in November 2025.