Product Description
Originally, based on a dream the book was intended to be a homage to James Joyce, an author rediscovered after EminemsRevenge read Alan Nadel's Invisible Criticism. In the end the book pays homage to the forward thinking teacher who inspired him to read both Joyce and D.H. Lawrence and look outside the box of conventional thinking. This teacher built on a foundation created from information about Judaism shared with an inquisitive pre-adolescent EminemsRevenge by his next door neighbor, a rabbi cop, in the Rockaway peninsula of NYC.
CONTROVERSY
In the spring of 2003, EminemsRevenge's cousin, Howard Delapenha, who was battling cancer, gave him a laptop to finish his Work in Progress. Knowing that his book would be controversial because of the scope of the subjects it covered...Black-on-Black racism, anti-Semitism, and the dehumanization of the working class...EminemsRevenge joined a blogging community originating out of San Francisco to test the waters for his writing style, which was literary but street. One of the major problems he ran into was his free usage of the dreaded politically incorrect "N" word... all posts using the word were deleted... and the message was lost in translation! While Jew Girl has the rap and be-bop rhythms of Public Enemy, the in-your-face Cop Killer lyricism of Ice-T is always evident in EminemsRevenge's writings, and white America shudders every time they are confronted with an angry Black male!
The San Francisco-based blogging community banned EminemsRevenge when he parodied Marshall Mather's song about taking a girl out into the woods and locking her in the trunk as he taunted one of their top members in the "mature" section during her two week vacation. Then he discovered Xanga.com and came up with the name EminemsRevenge...a name that would be banned from various blogging sites over the next two years because of his uniquely Black radicalism.
SYNOPSIS
Jew Girl could have easily been called A Tale of Two Messiahs. The characters move through one day leaden by the decisions of past days.
Reuven Kalisz is a pre-adolescent boy whose mother is dying of cancer. His mother once dated a goy from the office, Jonah Valjean, who took her to see a play about golems. Although he did not like his mother's boyfriend at the time, the story about golems fascinated him. Reuven asked his mother every detail about the play. He supplemented what she told him about the subject by asking his next-door neighbor, Ian Odamench, a holocaust survivor, to tell him everything he knew about the subject.
When neo-nazis desecrated his grandfather's grave, Reuven decided to go to Harlem and seek his mother's ex-boyfriend for assistance with creating a golem. Reuven believes Jonah Valjean has supernatural powers because his mother was recalled to life after receiving a Valentine's Day card from Jonah.
Jonah Valjean is meanwhile living a less than charmed life! There's a "contract" on him in Harlem since the neighborhood crack dealers thought he snitched on them, so Jonah is now living in a rooming house in South Ozone Park. One of the tenants is an ex-convict who is a closet homosexual, and he wants to kill Valjean simply because Jonah brings out his homosexual yearnings.
The book follows the path of Jonah and Reuven as they face their hopes and fears sharing a common bond: Eileen Kalisz, who is obviously dying as she faces cancer for the third time in her life, and each hopes for a miracle that only the other is capable of performing.
LANGUAGE AND STYLE
Der Geist der stets verneint is a constant refrain in the book. It's a phrase that Mephistopheles uttered in Goethe's Faust---the spirit that ever denies.
IT describes the latent feeling in NYC after that fateful Tuesday morn in September...and the semantic wordplay of Jew Girl reminds one of Joyce's Finnegans Wake since you have to employ Hebrew, Latin, German, French and Yiddish to even approximate the despairing hope of New Yorkers in a post-apocalyptic city.
Mensch is a Yiddish term for a man who is more than a man...and if you dissect the name Ian Odamench you will see not only a bastardization of the Yiddish mensch, but also the Hebrew name for YHWH---Adonai---and you get the feeling that he is a man of God. Jonah is a book in the bible about a reluctant prophet, and Valjean is the Victor Hugo protagonist hounded in Les Miserables, so any belief that there is superfluous usage of "exotic" language just for the sake of being intellectual should be dispelled with these revelations.
Jew Girl IS like a Public Enemy rap opera that dispels the myth that Nigroes only think in 4/4 time and write in nursery rhymes...and unlike Joyce, there's a glossary at the end of the book that defines most of the archaic terms...the thing is you have to interpret them as the reader!!!
From the Back Cover
A gut-wrenching and DERANGED saga from an author about a post-9/11 NYC whose palette was so vivid that it was BANNED by davechappelle.com!!!
REMEMBER ALL THOSE JAW-DROPPING CLOSE-UPS WHEN HENDRIX TOOK THE STAGE in the Monterey Pop Festival film???!!!!
Today, the pied piper doesn’t pipe. He types. He riles. He pokes and prods as he wings his way across the internet dropping in-your-face, strip-you-down, lay-you-out, question-your-reality hard-hitting missiles on blogs and forums across cyber-land. Who can’t remember the first time the mysterious EminemsRevenge graced their blog or forum with one of his insightful, instigating comments? Anyone lucky enough to entertain a visit from this enigma, knows the feeling well. You log onto your computer, check your blog or your forum and there it is, a bomb of a comment that makes you shake your head and think, “Who the hell is this guy?†You don’t know if you like him, but you can’t help yourself. You have to Google him….and then you’re off, surfing your way through the chronicles of one of the most banned entities on the net.
He’s the quintessential champion of free speech going to battle everyday fighting the censors and pundits who use terms of use and political media as a smokescreen for any kind of intolerance, be it racial, sexist, religious or simple narrow-minded mindlessness. Then, he drags them under the spotlight and shows us their dirty little secrets. In between, he finds those with smaller voices than his, the poets, the philosophers, the disadvantaged, with messages and words that need to be heard. He shows them the way to get their messages out. It will warm the heart of anyone who gushes at the memory of the first time he saw a college professor wearing a t-shirt that said, “Question Authorityâ€. It will piss off those who feel the need to hang onto all the crap they were ever force-fed in the name of propriety.
Life just isn’t always appropriate and ER uses that to wake us up and shock us into thinking in ways our minds forgot how to go. He’s been around and knows the deal. He doesn’t expect us to always agree with him, but he does demand to be heard and damn, he does it well.
