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Who Doesn’t Love Roald Dahl?
By Dara Horn
November 15, 2020
Roald Dahl’s The Witches
HBO Max, 106 minutes
There’s nothing quite like the realization that what you thought was an empowering work of art is actually a 200-page exercise in trolling. It took me more than 30 years to figure out that I’d been trolled by Roald Dahl.
Dahl, who dominated juvenile publishing when I was growing up, revealed himself late in his career to be a vicious antisemite, who thought “powerful American Jewish bankers” ran the US government. He told the New Statesman that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” This was in 1983, the year in which Dahl published The Witches, his 13th novel for children.
Apparently, Dahl had been an antisemite his entire life, but it didn’t prevent him from being essentially canonized after his death in 1990, and it didn’t much affect my thoughts about him either. I had adored his books as a child, and I’ve never taken much interest in the now-obligatory grunt work of connecting artists’ personalities (often horrible) with their works (sometimes great). And although Dahl was not only an antisemite but also (and even more damningly these days) a misogynist and a racist, he hasn’t been canceled yet. Who doesn’t love Roald Dahl, or at least his stories?
Hollywood certainly does. The most recent Dahl adaptation, which began streaming on HBO Max this Halloween season, is called Roald Dahl’s The Witches (note the value of the authorial brand), directed and written by Robert Zemeckis, with the help of two younger Hollywood powerhouses, Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro. It stars the high wattage Octavia Spencer, perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning role in The Help, and A-lister Anne Hathaway, not to mention the voice of the comedian Chris Rock. In fact, this is the second big-budget version of The Witches, the first having been a 1990 film starring Anjelica Huston.
But The Witches was on my mind long before I’d heard about the new movie. It was one of my favorite books when I was a child, one I read repeatedly and pressed into the hands of friends. I was eager to share it with my own children and hesitated only because, as a child, I’d also found it somewhat terrifying. But when I read it aloud to my eight-year-old son last month, I discovered that it was far more terrifying than I remembered, and for entirely different reasons.
The key to Dahl’s success as a children’s author lay in how he pitted children against adults, making children into a beloved underdog class whose moral victory lay in vanquishing their powerful exploiters. His heroes are blameless boys and girls tortured by diabolically abusive adults, whom they destroy in outrageous revenge sequences of the sort even the most fortunate child occasionally fantasizes about. In James and the Giant Peach, for instance, the orphaned James, enslaved by his villainous aunts, squashes them to death with the titular fruit. In Matilda, a kindergartener uses magic powers to terrorize a school principal who routinely locks children in a nail-studded closet. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the starving Charlie, living in the sort of poverty that would make Oliver Twist qualify as a one-percenter, inherits a fantastical candy factory—but only after a book-length morality play in which wealthy children and their entitled parents are absurdly tortured and maimed. In George’s Marvelous Medicine, a boy forced to care for his heartless grandmother concocts a potion that makes her shrink and disappear.
In short, Dahl is like a modern Charles Dickens, except instead of social justice and spiritual redemption, Dahl’s books offer only revenge. Kids, like all emotionally and morally stunted people, eat this stuff up. Dahl tapped into something primal and hideous in the human psyche: the desire of disenfranchised people to feel righteous precisely by demonizing others. As a kid, I bought this too. The sheer sadism of it went right over my head until I shared these books with my children and saw how I’d been punked. And The Witches was the worst.
The Witches is about a boy who is orphaned in the opening chapter—pity points are always crucial for Dahl—and then adopted by his loving Grandmamma, a kindly old lady who fills him in on a little-known scourge. Witches, she explains, are real. They are demons disguised as women, and their sole purpose is to entrap and destroy innocent children through their diabolical magic. One unfortunate boy, for example, went off with a witch and returned unharmed—but later hardened into a stone statue. After vanishing with a witch, a girl reappeared only in a landscape painting in her family’s home, changing positions whenever the family wasn’t watching and even aging as years passed. (That one haunted me for decades.) Other children are “disappeared” in ways worthy of an Argentine junta. Kids better watch out.
One summer on a beach vacation with Grandmamma, our hero wanders into a hotel conference room occupied by a group calling itself the “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.” In fact, it is a coven of witches discussing their latest plan, a potion designed to turn children into mice. They discover the boy and immediately mouse-ify him, but now that our talking mouse hero knows where they keep their potions, he and Grandmamma hatch a clever plot to administer them to the witches themselves. Hijinks ensue, evil is vanquished, and although the narrator remains a mouse, he doesn’t mind. He and Grandmamma embark on a crusade to take out the witches of the world, and he never has to go to school again.
The book chimed perfectly with the stories of “stranger danger” that other 1980s children and I were constantly fed in state-mandated school curricula, but it made that threat delightfully preposterous—and manageable since all one had to do was believe that certain adults were actually demons with recognizable tells. It was a highly rewarding fantasy. After all, it was clear to me, as it was to every young reader, that even adults who didn’t molest children in shopping malls were nonetheless conspiring against us, making us do dehumanizing tasks like making beds and taking tests. The book was empowering. With its frisson of secret knowledge, it made us feel righteous and invincible. Unfortunately, revisiting it as an adult revealed that the book was cribbed from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and helped me understand, for perhaps the first time, antisemitism’s seductive appeal.
“Witches,” Grandmamma explains, “are not actually women at all . . . They are demons in human shape.” How do you spot one? Well, since they’re demons, they have toeless hooves instead of feet and claws instead of fingers, disguised by fashionable shoes and gloves. You can’t spot those, but you can spot their “larger nose-holes than ordinary people” (the better to smell you with, my dear). But the real tell, of course, is that witches are bald—which is why a witch always wears “a first-class wig,” which she puts “straight on her naked scalp.”
As I read this aloud to my enthralled son, it was hard to miss how much these witches resembled women in, say, Stamford Hill (the London version of Borough Park). It was also hard to miss how much they resembled caricatures from Der Stürmer or a medieval blood libel. Was I overinterpreting?
You be the judge: “Wherever you find people, you find witches,” Grandmamma tells her innocent grandchild. “There is a Secret Society of Witches in every country. . . . An English witch, for example, will know all the other witches in England.” If this was too subtle, Grandmamma clarifies: “Once a year, the witches of each separate country hold their own secret meeting. They all get together in one place to receive a lecture from The Grand High Witch of All the World.” The boy’s question about this fun fact is, at this point, predictable: “Is she rich?”
Grandmamma replies, “She’s rolling. Simply rolling in money. Rumour has it that there is a machine in her headquarters which is exactly like the machine the government uses to print the bank-notes you and I use.” The boy then asks, as any normal child would, “What about foreign money?” You already know the answer: “Those machines can make Chinese money if you want them to.” Here, the boy turns skeptical: “If nobody has ever seen the Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?” Grandmamma counters, “Nobody has seen the Devil, but we know he exists.” All of this isn’t merely true, we are told, but “the gospel truth” (the italics are Dahl’s). After all, Grandmamma “went to church every morning of the week and she said grace before every meal, and somebody who did that would never tell lies.” As Grandmamma warns her dear boy, “All you can do is cross your heart and pray to heaven.”
Alas, crossing his heart and praying to heaven doesn’t protect our hero from his encounter with the Elders of Witchdom, at which point Dahl drops all pretense. The Grand High Witch, we learn, “had a peculiar way of speaking. There was some sort of a foreign accent there, something harsh and guttural, and she seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter w. As well as that, she did something funny with the letter r. She would roll it round and round her mouth.” The Grand High Witch, in her Yiddish accent, explains to her secret society how they will lure England’s children by buying high-end sweet shops and poisoning the candy, since “Money is not a prrroblem to us vitches as you know very well. I have brrrought with me six trrrunks stuffed full of Inklish bank-notes, all new and crrrisp” (italics mine).
Few children can resist the lure of witches. My son loved the book so much that he wanted to see the movie. Perhaps you are wondering: is the 2020 Hollywood version, whose creators unsurprisingly included plenty of Jews, antisemitic? The short answer is no, or not exactly, but that’s also the wrong question.
Adapting from a source this hideous was never going to be easy or entirely uncontroversial, and the new film has already been slammed for portraying limb differences as evil (instead of the claws mentioned in the book, the film’s witches are depicted with missing fingers). Despite that tone-deaf choice, it’s clear that the filmmakers were aware of the book’s larger problems. To their credit, they knew they had to fix something, and they went big: instead of contemporary England, Roald Dahl’s The Witches takes place in 1968 Alabama, and the protagonist and his grandmother are Black (Octavia Spencer’s Grandmamma is even a voodoo healer). Unlike the 1990 movie, the witches no longer have big noses and are, in fact, racially diverse. At first, this does seem poised to dilute some of the book’s inherent awfulness: when a Black witch attacked the protagonist in an early scene, I had high hopes for a story where “evil” was depicted solely through Marvel Universe methods of pancake makeup and special effects. But that scene proved to be half-hearted tokenism, since the rest of the film focuses almost entirely on, to use the current term, white-presenting witches—and most tellingly, what really distinguishes witches in this film is that they are rich. As we watch a flashback of the lily-white and fabulously dressed Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch attacking an impoverished Black child in a 1920s Alabama shantytown, Grandmamma tells us that “witches always prey on the poor.”
This class warfare idea is utterly absent from Dahl’s book...
////////
Hmm..... What happened to the rest?
Lost somewhere in a cloud.
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It points to a new review written by Dara Horn regarding a movie"Witches" coming to t..."
Thanks for this! I didn't catch that email yet, but I love Dara Horn's articles.
Funny, I've never been that into Roald Dahl. Have a book of his scary stories for adults somewhere and read the 1st one years ago but never continued--too (what?) mean-spirited? scary? Never knew either about the antisemitism. Ugh! About the anti-adult stuff, hey -- I grew up in the era where we were not to trust anyone over 30. No problem for me! I had issues with my parents, not that unusual I guess. And before that there were years and years of "children should be seen and not heard." Peter Pan, the revenge; children as oppressed minority! But in the '60s we had a population boom & took over. 😎 I will read the rest of that article eventually!
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It points to a new review written by Dara Horn regarding a movie"Witch..."
I wasn't a fan either, and now... I will never be a cheerleader..
I was just very surprised about his anti-semitic persona.
Not sure if many people were aware of that.
And he wrote children's books?
I think if he were to have been as blatant as Mel Gibson, the more aware people would have been.
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I was just very surprised about his anti-semitic persona.
Not sure if many people were aware of that.
And he wrote childre..."
Now I'm curious to look at the book I have. Think I still have it. Never was motivated to take another look at it previously!
But, Stacey, that stuff isn't too hard to find. I have a book The Jew In The Text: Modernity And The Construction Of Identity. it's not new; 20-years-old or more. It's languishing because it was depressing to read... and more fertile fields elsewhere.
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Would like to read them sometime!
Lori, I made the shchi tonight. Had to do it with a Napa cabbage since that's what I had, but used other veggies too + a box of beef broth. I even had a small hunk of beef intended for another soup recipe; it went in. At the end was lacking a little something, and the answer was a little sauerkraut brine (not vinegar but salt brine from homemade). Really craving it and couldn't wait for a real cabbage! 😋 Still have nearly 100 pages in the book, though, so doubt I'll get through as I'd hoped.
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I was just very surprised about his anti-semitic persona.
Not sure if many people were aware of that.
And he wrote..."
Jan, Dara Horn's article was on the mark.
I wasn't looking to seek out antisemitic authors, or even those who write children's books.
Because I never read the book Matilda but saw the play, I recognized Horn's words; while "Witches" looks to be very similar though its a movie. Both scary with unspoken undertones.
As you are very aware, antisemitism is quite rampant; though following us forever.
The point I thought I was making was subliminal- in that
Dahl, as a children's author makes for a disappointing ugly role model to a child.
Dahl passed away in 1990.
No reason to comment on Gibson.
An interesting analysis by Dara Horn.I've read all of Dahl's children's books numerous times and must say I've never picked up on the anti-Semitic bent.
I did some investigation into Dahl's own childhood. His much older father died when he was very young, leaving his mother with 3 children to raise. The father had been "of means," and people advised the young mother to send Dahl to boarding school at age six. That's where he was tortured for the next several years, giving him plenty of material for the sadistic treatment the protagonists in his books suffer at the hands of callous adults and even older children.
He was clearly a misogynist and had many, many other flaws as a human being. Should I take up one of his books again, I'll have my antennae up for signs of anti-Semitism. Still, you have to hand it to him. He wove magical tales that entrance children. (My personal favorite is the BFG , the Big, Friendly Giant.)
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I've read all of Dahl's children's books numerous times and must say I've never picked up on the anti-Semitic bent.
I did some investigation into Dahl's own ..."
Hi.
Nice job, detective:)
Hope you are well.
As you said, it was an interesting article.
I as well had never heard he was antisemitic until reading Dara Horn's article. Very unexpected.
It's so funny that you did some fact finding. I started to do the same thing until I was interrupted and never finished .
I would have guessed- too many drugs based on what I saw, yet Horn strips back a little history to show something different.
Your information certainly can account for his sadistic mind where he at least had the sense use his books and plays as an outlet- as far as we know.
I am going to dig a little more, maybe even peruse the book you like, BFG.
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I wasn't looking to seek out antisemitic authors, or even those who write children's books.
Because I never rea...."
Last night I took a little while to put my feet up and read the whole article on my tablet. I didn't disagree at all about the antisemitism, and feel Dara Horn supported her points well. Nevertheless there's something about the article that hit me not quite right, and I have to say this is the 1st nonfiction input from Dara Horn that I felt was slightly off.
Not talking about her novels, but her articles and other teaching, for example an ELI talk.
I am not accusing you of seeking out antisemitic authors in general, Stacey; not accusing you of anything. 😘
But it's just that in any Jewish outlet, left, right or center, you will so frequently get warnings of antisemitic this or that, so that I pick and choose which ones I'm going to read. And I did read this one because it's Dara and I have found her so enlightening in general. And I agree it's especially bad b/c it's for children.
Yet that's part of what we get living in diaspora. We do get steeped in it.
So the other part was that she went on from there to the movie, and it wasn't antisemitic but it was successor ideology-based, i.e., the witches were mostly white, it's being okay to "punch up" these days, in the view of those who ascribe to those views.
And beyond that, it's not impossible to get the impression that, now that she's a mom instead of a child, the anti-adult part really set her off--and maybe was even the main thing that set her off, more than the antisemitism. I'm not saying that is what set her off, just that it's a possible impression.
So, very glad I read this, and thanks so much! I will look forward to seeing whether the JRB publishes any other reactions...or maybe they have a facebook group & I don't have to wait! Maybe my reaction is --- way off --- won't be the 1st time! 🙄
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I usually don't have time to read all the articles I subscribe to. She is no stranger in writing articles/reviews for JR of Books.
What caught my eye was her article coupled with anti-semitism.
As you, I enjoy her writing so I made time to read it .
And, as you, I was never into his books either, except Charlie and the Ch. Factory.
It was only by chance I was in NY and saw the play. It was opening night, and the news attended interviewing many of the kids and parents before and after the play. Not a word was uttered referencing antisemitism. Some families left only because the younger kids got scared.
But to your point, fast forward to now, the warning you refer to comes from a respectable person.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, Horn put it out there publicly. Whatever her trigger was, I think she probably knows more than she let on. She received a fellowship to study in Hebrew or Yiddish in England after she graduated college which is where Dahl grew up and stayed. I think she is too smart to rock her reputation, though Its too early to know what others opinions are.
I recognize your thinking about the Diaspora, and in my humble opinion only, don't feel that is applicable for her side opinion in her review..
Just my impression as well. I have been wrong before.
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I thought the book was wonderful, and I feel that the synopsis
did not do the book justice.
I cant get over the humility and the simple acts of kindness from the
one family the author writes about.
They are a non jewish couple who save and hide two little boys from the the Nazi's. We refer to them as "the righteous".
Please read this book. It is because of them these boys learned what family is. Because of that, these boys were able to survive and have families of their own.
Sounds like a good book - I'll add it to my list!
I just finished Not our Kind which I found out about from this group. I enjoyed it! Were we supposed to read it for a group discussion?
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Were we supposed to read it for a group discussion?"
Hi Lori!
Im glad you liked the book.
Yes, this one of the two book for "intermarriage/relationships"
discussions. The other, which is moderators choice is "Enemies-A Love Story".
ps.. I wanted to ask you a question not pertaining to books. I tried to to contact you through your website but had no luck. :(
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Were we supposed to read it for a group discussion?"
The link is up for discussion.
Fire away.!!!
Jan wrote: "For my possibly one-too-many book club, I'm reading A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, a very odd selection for that particular group for which nearly all the prior b..."Jan wrote: "For my possibly one-too-many book club, I'm reading A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, a very odd selection for that particular group for which nearly all the prior b..."
I can identify with the book club deadline syndrome, especially when some of the books have become so long. I like the Lucinda Riley books - the seven sisters and others. But it's 836 pages worth of paper and could be fatal if you are reading it while falling asleep. I'm on one of the sisters, but anything she writes is excellent. (albeit a race to deadline). Not a drop of Jewish there. There's Daniel Silva if you like the combination of thriller, spy and Israel/Jewish. Question to Jan - Readers are sending me reviews of my book. Is there a place designated on Jewish Book Club to download them?
Elissa Allerhand
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Hi again, Elissa: just want to mention it's perfectly fine to mention "non-Jewish books" in this What Are You Reading thread! Comments welcome
As to reviews of your books, though: no. However, there is a place to announce your books, on the Authors Announcing Their Work thread. If you can't see it on the home page, click on "more discussions;" if you still don't I'll put in the link later this afternoon -- I'm under a little time pressure at the moment. There's a whole history here but basically it's about not wanting to divert the main purpose of this group. I can get back to you later this afternoon.
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It is not easy to write a review of a book you love, in hoping you will find the right "buzz" words to convince readers this is worth every page, and because of hindsight, don't be surprised if you see this edited a few times.
If I were to write a stuffy review, you may think this book doesn't warrant 5.5 stars.
Yes, its that good.
I was up to page 70 when I was interrupted by my husband asking me a question.
I never heard him come in, nor did I hear the question the first time he asked.
Because for the first time - I found myself taken inside the book, similar to Alice Stepping through the looking glass, and honestly it took a second to recognize what I experienced..
How many authors are lucky to have this gift-
"Rebel Daughter" is a historical novel about Esther and her family living through the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet at the same time, Esther fights and refuses in following the rules set by her family and culture; hence "Rebel" . The book is so much more than learning history, its a wonderful story with the inclusion of brilliant fiction. I thought I knew much of both . Wrong! Lets call that a double perk for me.
The topics addressed in the book may have been "overlooked" with a blind eye or even accepted during that time period. But today, these topics are quite the current ones which have consequences attached- as we speak.
The difference is that when history repeats itself, its up to the next generation to react.
The detail of research is amazing and accurate, but again, it is not a fact finding book and doesn't read as such.
I use the word amazing because of the style used to blend fiction with fact throughout the entire book..
The one fact I did learn from this book is that... my daughter is becoming a rebel. :)
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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It is not easy to write a review of book you love, in hoping you will find the right "buzz" words to convince readers this is worth every page. Because of hindsight, don't be surprised if you see this edited a few times.
If I were to write a stuffy review, one may think this book doesn't warrant 5.5 stars.
Yes, its that good.
It was easier to copy and paste than reply to the whole comment. Yes. This is what had been bugging me lately. I read some wonderful books in late October and early November. Some of them I was looking forward to for months and they did meet my personal hype and then bam I got reviewer’s block. I loved Magic Lessons so much I just couldn’t review it and that lead to me not writing any reviews at all. It’s taken over a month and now I’m still only reviewing sporadically and not the long analyses that I had grown accustomed to. When a book affects me sometimes it’s better to savor it for what it is rather than attempting to get those positive thoughts on paper or in this case screen. Thank you for helping me pinpoint why I have had trouble reviewing lately. I guess it’s because I’ve really enjoyed my books, which is always a good thing, especially now.
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It is not easy to write a review of book you love, in hoping you will find the right "buzz" words to convince readers this is worth every page. Because of hindsight, don't be surpr..."
Brina- I really understand,. I appreciate you taking the time to write. I wasn't sure my point would be recognized, so thank you for that.
Sometimes, trying to write a great review is not worth the frustration or anxiety I get, but I know its so important for authors. When I become anxious, the reviews get out of control and Im left with the choice of delete or not to delete. :(
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Totally agree. It removes the energy, time, and anxiety. I could write a book in the time it takes me to write and rewrite 15 times - kidding, but its important for the authors, which is why I try to do it.
Bring it on.. your next motto. :)
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Hi.
It is totally deserved-
And; you are welcome.
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Ha -- didn't even see that part last night, Brina!
Sometimes I have to think about them a while, but mostly what blocks me is TOO MUCH OTHER STUFF to do! 🤪
Just was listening to Max Gross and Nicole Krauss talk on that Zoom call. They reminded me: ever since finding "my voice" about ten years ago I need to write. Not professionally. But just seem to need to do it. Book reviews a good way to do it since gives some limits. In contrast, I used to write some practically limitless blog posts!
Also, on that call, they reminded us that reviews help the authors. Hard for authors today, even the established ones. Sometimes an author can win the National Book Award and still nobody reads their stuff. Our reviews do help (though that in itself wouldn't be motivation for me).
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Wow- Nice Job, Dara Horn!!
JTA
EST 1917
QUICK READS
Roald Dahl’s family apologizes ‘for the lasting and understandable hurt’ caused by his anti-Semitism
DECEMBER 7, 2020 6:00 AM
British novelist Roald Dahl, pictured here in 1971, made multiple anti-Semitic comments in the decade before his death in 1990. (Ronald Dumont/Daily Express/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Thirty years after Roald Dahl’s death and months before the expected release of a new movie about his life, the family of the children’s author has apologized for his anti-Semitic comments.
Dahl was openly anti-Semitic during his life, telling the New Statesman in 1983 about the Jews, “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Those comments and others have colored Dahl’s legacy, even as children continue to enjoy the stories he wrote during his 50-year publishing career, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and the Giant Peach.” A new movie of “The Witches” released in October reignited criticism of anti-Semitic tropes in the 1983 novel.
Now, his family has released an undated, unsigned, 86-word apology. First revealed by the Sunday Times this weekend, the apology is not featured prominently on Dahl’s website, and neither it nor further comments to the New York Times mentions Jews specifically. Here it is in full:
Apology for anti-Semitic comments made by Roald Dahl
The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.
The apology has not fully satisfied Jewish groups in Dahl’s native England, which reportedly were not consulted or informed about the statement.
A spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism told the Jewish News, a British newspaper, “The admission that the famous author’s antisemitic views are ‘incomprehensible’ is right. For his family and estate to have waited thirty years to make an apology, apparently until lucrative deals were signed with Hollywood, is disappointing and sadly rather more comprehensible.”
i just read the following in the NYT and it relates to a fairly recent discussion about Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism:he family of Roald Dahl has apologized for “the lasting and understanding hurt” caused by anti-Semitic comments the author made during his lifetime.
Mr. Dahl, the writer of classic children’s books such as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The BFG,” made several disparaging comments about Jewish people in interviews and in his writing, and made no secret of his anti-Semitism.
“Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories,” the Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company wrote in the online statement.
“We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words,” the statement added.
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Making an accusation of this nature is serious stuff.
And yet, being a skeptic myself, it's difficult to recognize if the family's apology is sincere or politically motivated, due to the movie royalties and Netflix.
Included above is a link quoting unkind remarks from Dahl in the 80's.
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he family of Roald Dahl has apologized for “the lasting and understanding hurt” c..."
Looks like we were reading this at the same time. :)
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Was the apology by the fam in direct response to Dara's article? Sorry in advance if you already explained that!
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Was the apology by the fam in direct response to Dara's article? Sorry in advance if you already explai..."
Jan, I cant even remember what I ate two minutes ago or what day it is anymore.
I can understand how one becomes an agoraphobiac..
Not sure it says that on article I copied . I will look.
I know where you are going with this. :)
.
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The Tale of a Niggun
by Elie Wiesel."Great comment!!! Good book. Time for a re-read.
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Did you read " A Nazi on Trial in God's Court"
by Roberta Kagen?
Just 18 pages, the book makes its point.
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Are talking about the book written by Eli Wiesel
that is 161 pages?
Try the other one. It takes 10 minutes and very easy to read.
It could have been written as a Y/A novel.
Many have said its point is powerful.
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Here's one for you, Brina. I liked it. 😘 Instructions
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It points to a new review written by Dara Horn regarding a movie"Witches" coming to the home screen in January.
I had no idea that Ronald Dahl had been an anti semite.
I am not into Witch themes at all, so I wont be seeing the movie; but read her review as the word anti-semitic caught my eye.
I saw "Matilda" on Broadway the year it was up for an award-...
I didn't recognize any undercurrent of anti-semitism, but was curious at the same time "why" as a child, I was one of the very few who never had this book. According to my mother, it was too scary. :)
Has anyone else had an opportunity to read this ?
Im going to try to copy it, but for now the intro is below.
Dear........
Dara Horn, one of our favorite writers, says that it took her more than 30 years to figure out she’d been trolled by the famous children’s author Roald Dahl. Trust me, you’ll want to read her brilliant and troubling review of the new film adaptation of Dahl’s The Witches, even if you don’t have a 10-year old insisting that you join HBO Max to watch it.
Dahl, as you may know, was an unrepentant antisemite, and he didn’t try very hard to hide it in The Witches. Is the new movie antisemitic too? “The short answer,” Horn says, “is no, or not exactly, but that’s also the wrong question.” Our Winter issue won’t be out until January, but we thought you’d like to read Horn’s review now.
Enjoy!
Abraham Socher
Editor, Jewish Review of Books