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The Red Adam

Mark Mirsky

Price: U.S. $14.95
Mark Mirsky
The Red Adam
Series No.: NAF 19
ISBN: 978-0940650923, Pages:
American Literature, Fiction

A Sun & Moon title.

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This highly concentrated, evocative exploration of ancient religious beliefs about demonism is a novel written in the form of a "discovered" document--purportedly a text secreted in a Massachusetts library sometime in the 1940s. Its ostensible protagonist is a Jewish settler named Job Schwartz whose black magic causes chaos in his New England community, "a formerly wealthy milltown gone to seed." Mirsky reveals the narrative's events in brief flurries of prose, using quotations--most effectively from the 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards--both to propel the plot and to trace centuries of superstition ranging from witch-hunt hysteria to ancient beliefs about the golem (on which the title character is a variation) into a single story. Although the technique is strong in early chapters, the short novel eventually stumbles under the weight of its various philosophic conceits. Mirsky's desire to imbue the text with the deliberate quality of a documentary eventually dulls the reader's interest in the characters and their conflicts. (Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Book Review(s)

THE COLLIDESCOPE, December 31, 2023

by George Salis
From "The Yoke of the Kingdom: An Interview With Mark Jay Mirsky – Part 1"

The Five Books of Moses refuse to let us imagine another world and force us to trust this one, and surprisingly, one of the first rabbinic codes, the Mishnah, repeats this warning. In the novel I published with Sun & Moon, The Red Adam, based not only on Kabbalah but the brilliant scholarly work of Gershom Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, who influenced many other writers, and particularly Borges, I cite those lines: "Whosoever speculates upon four things, a pity for him! He is as though he had not come into the world, [to wit], what is above, what is beneath, what before, what after." (The Mishnah, Haggigah, 2:13). Of course, the writer is the pitiful scribe who takes that curse upon himself, herself. I remember in Rio de Janeiro, touching on the subject of evil as Scholem traced it in the mystical texts of rabbinic Judaism at a small reception, with the Brazilian authoress, Clarice Lispector, and her stepping into the middle of the room, her considerable body shaking as she cried out, “Eevil, oh Mark, I so want to doo, eeevil!” And how I have savored anew each time I re-read Cynthia Ozick’s The Pagan Rabbi how she evokes the sexual rapture of Greek mythology and its forbidden terrain.... READ MORE

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