seckelmann

The author employs a narrative scheme as does the Matrix, the novel Moby Dick. The story cruises through the present and the historic plight of the Jews and intermittingly brings Melville’s Sea-saga with the mad Capt. Ahab, his first mate, Starbuck, and others in the crew: the narrator, Ishmael, his friend, the harpooner, former head-hunter, Queequeg, and Ahab’s guru-confidant, Fedallah, the Parsee mystic who tells Ahab a prophetic riddle that could match the three witches conundrum in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It features twenty mini-bios of Righteous Jews, their contribution to mankind in past and present along with histories of famous Jewish dynasties. There are instances of the author’s personal experiences such as excerpts from journals kept when he toured Israel in 1979 led by Prof. Menahem Mansoor with a group of University of Wisconsin Alumni. Also, he tells of how childhood traumas were compounded from media influences and, in time, cites chilling anti-Semitic expressions while in the US Navy. He, a Christian, lauds his paternal grandfather, though he had died a generation before the author’s birth. He had been a Nothern Civil War veteran, the Fire Chief of Bethlehim, PA and a Jewish Imigrant from Bavaria. It is not enunciated, but Capt. Ahab, his ship, the Pequod, his world, could represent the static mind-set of insane, unconsumated revenge, launching harpoons at this perceived enemy. But on encountering Moby Dick, he is thwarted, scattered, then annihilated. World-wide, Jews are a tiny lot and getting smaller. For Jews, extinction won’t come from disturbing a sea-giant entirely, but from abandoning tradition in favor of ＂Reform＂, PC & ACLU, Absorbtion and Lethargy. On top of all that, in the wings are massive emerging eastern populations with energy and innate abilities that equal or surpass Jews. ＂You shall be left few in numbers, whereas you were as the stars in heaven in multitude＂ (Deut. 28: 62).