Latest news with #Fagin
Iraqi News
4 days ago
- Business
- Iraqi News
Prime Minister Mohammed S. Al-Sudani Meets with the U.S. Embassy Chargé d'Affaires in Iraq
Baghdad-INA Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani stressed on Sunday the necessity of cooperation between Iraq and the United States in accordance with the Strategic Framework Agreement. The Prime Minister's media office said in a statement received by the Iraqi News Agency (INA): that "Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani received the Chargé d'Affaires of the US Embassy, Steven Fagin, on the occasion of his assumption of his duties in Iraq. The Prime Minister extended his congratulations to Mr. Fagin, wishing him success in his mission and in efforts to advance relations in a way that serves the mutual interests of both countries. Prime Minister Al-Sudani emphasized the importance of cooperation between Iraq and the United States, based on the Strategic Framework Agreement, memoranda of understanding, and ongoing coordination and consultation. He particularly highlighted key areas of collaboration, including the economy, investment, security, energy, education, and private sector activities. Mr. Fagin underscored the importance of the bilateral relationship and the United States' support for its partnership with Iraq across various sectors. He commended the government's efforts in accelerating development and reconstruction and affirmed a commitment to facilitating the entry of American companies into Iraq's investment and partnership landscape.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Thrilling, Lush New Historical Fiction
Fagin the Thief You might be surprised to learn that Oliver Twist has nothing more than a walk-on part in FAGIN THE THIEF (Doubleday, 321 pp., $28). And even more surprised to learn that Dickens's notorious villain emerges from this reimagining of his origins as somewhat less villainous — still a sinister master criminal, but indelibly shaped by the prejudices of 19th-century London, where even as a boy he suffers 'the natural consequence of being visibly Jewish and visibly poor.' The narrative begins with a nod to Dickens's novel, introducing us to a coldblooded middle-aged Fagin as he directs his gang of child pickpockets. Then, in flashbacks that intersect with some of what we remember from Dickens, we're shown how Fagin got that way: his own youthful apprenticeship to a flamboyant thief, the terrible illness that killed his widowed mother, his professional partnering with warmhearted Nan Reed and her ill-fated attraction to his former pupil Bill Sikes, whose bond with Fagin has morphed into a 'creeping cancer he called a friendship.' In an author's note, Epstein considers the most common ways that modern adaptations of Dickens have dealt with the antisemitic 'Fagin problem,' remarking that 'both of these options — sanitizing Fagin or disowning him — feel like a loss to me.' Instead she has created a deeply nuanced character, understandable if not wildly sympathetic, a loner who has learned a tragic lesson: 'Iron hearts can't break.' The Delicate Beast 'The bliss and the brutality' of a childhood in early-1960s Haiti are portrayed with dreamlike, then nightmarish, eloquence in Celestin's autobiographical first novel, THE DELICATE BEAST (Bellevue Literary Press, 431 pp., paperback, $18.99). There's a mythic feel to the larger context — the setting is known only as the Tropical Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier as the Mortician — which makes the precise detail of this depiction of a young boy's privileged yet fragile life in a large upper-class family even more effective. As the Mortician consolidates power, the routines of the family's days 'seem infinite even as they are coming to an end' in an onslaught of violence that will send the boy's parents into hiding, then impoverished exile. After he and his brother join them in New York, the novel opens out into a more conventional consideration of rootlessness and alienation. The previously unnamed boy grows into a man, Robert Carpentier, but as he travels through Europe, establishes a career in academia and separates from his family he never entirely succeeds in walling off the past. 'There was no second chance,' he ruefully concludes when the hoped-for shelter of his marriage crumbles, 'no possibility of a life empty of damage.' A Fool's Kabbalah In A FOOL'S KABBALAH (Melville House, 287 pp., paperback, $19.99), Stern sets the post-World War II activities of the real-life scholar Gershom Scholem, famed for his study of Jewish mysticism, against the wartime antics of a fictional 'shtetl scapegrace' named Menke Klepfisch, whose remote village on the Polish border succumbs to the occupying forces of the Reich. Scholem has been tasked by the Treasures of Diaspora Archive in Jerusalem with procuring whatever books and artifacts have survived the carnage in Europe. Menke is an inveterate clown whose life — and death — challenge conventional attempts to confront the horror of the Holocaust. Both alternating narratives are steeped in a poignant form of gallows humor. While Scholem struggles with bureaucrats and kleptocrats and conspires to smuggle a shipload of books across the Mediterranean, Menke engages in increasingly futile high jinks, attempting to distract the Nazis from their depredations. But when he and the village's other Jews face imminent destruction, they retreat into a bizarre kind of magical thinking. How will the terror-filled superstitions of their last days align with the academic theories advanced by Scholem, who could pass as 'a religious anarchist,' possessed of an 'orthodox nihilism'? Moral Treatment The vacant grounds of the Northern Michigan Asylum in Traverse City were a frequent childhood haunt of Carpenter, whose first novel, MORAL TREATMENT (Central Michigan University Press, 367 pp., paperback, $19.95), vividly recreates one late-19th-century year of its existence as a public institution for the mentally ill. The tensions that ripple through its cluster of buildings are revealed from the perspectives of two characters on opposite sides of the doors to the locked wards: a teenage girl with a penchant for self-harm and the elderly hospital superintendent, whose theories are being challenged by younger, more interventionist physicians. The dynamic between the staff members and their patients is particularly complex and convincing. This is a place where humane 'moral treatment' is emphasized, where a predictable routine, healthy food, satisfying work and regular exercise are believed to be the best route to a cure. But the superintendent is forced to acknowledge the challenge posed by certain hardened residents, who may lead their more vulnerable companions astray. These friendships could easily be more harmful than helpful — especially when the opposite sex is involved.
Washington Post
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Charles Dickens's Fagin gets rehabilitated, again
What do you do with a problem like Fagin, the petty-thief ringleader and most indelible character in Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' — and one of the most vicious antisemitic stereotypes ever committed to paper? Even Dickens himself didn't know. In the years after publishing his famous tale of the impoverished, golden-hearted orphan Oliver, who is bleakly introduced to the London underworld by the leering, greedy Fagin, he came to deeply rue the vitriol that his villain channeled into the world. After Dickens befriended a Jewish couple in the 1860s who told him of the harm the character had done to their community, the author set to work excising mentions of Fagin's Jewishness from subsequent editions of the novel. And, in a final act of penitence, he wrote a Jewish character, Riah, into 'Our Mutual Friend,' who is, in his saintliness, almost as unbelievable as Fagin is in his wickedness. Over the decades, many have tried to bring more nuance to the character, including the beloved Broadway musical 'Oliver!,' which painted him as comic more than menacing; a turn-of-the-century BBC miniseries adaptation of 'Oliver Twist,' which gave him a backstory as a magician in Prague; and the lauded cartoonist Will Eisner's graphic novel 'Fagin the Jew,' which imagined his early life in London's slums. Now, yet another writer is trying their hand at rescuing Fagin from the depths of iniquity. Allison Epstein's 'Fagin the Thief' is a sorrowful, reflective novel, pockmarked with episodes of real insight and beauty. But it does not ultimately succeed in its efforts to humanize its central figure — in part because it, too, is riddled with stereotypes, of a storytelling kind, in a way that its premise may have made impossible to avoid. A blurb on the book's cover touts 'Fagin the Thief' as transforming its antihero as 'Wicked' did the Wicked Witch of the West. And as in 'Wicked,' Epstein's novel opens with the reflection that its central character had a mother and a father. As with Elphaba in 'Wicked,' the tight-knit community into which Fagin is born views him with suspicion from birth. (What sets him apart isn't the color of his skin but rather his parentage: his father — who haunts him through the book — who was hung as a thief before he was born.) Like Elphaba, Epstein's Fagin is tormented by a sense of an unrealized internal power, one that sets him apart from the herd-minded milieu in which he is raised; and he has a drive to care for society's downtrodden, an obscure need to help those who cannot help themselves — even though he knows that in a world as unequal and unforgiving as his own, any civic-minded aspirations are sure to prove delusional, if not to outright backfire. Why these comparisons? Only to note that entries in the subgenre of character rehabilitation — other examples of which include Madeline Miller's 'Circe,' John Gardner's 'Grendel' and the 'Maleficent' film franchise — tend to follow a familiar path. We see the central character at a time when they had not yet hardened into their final form; when they were subject to the tenderness and vulnerability of childhood; when they had the option, perhaps, to choose a different path. And then we see how the path on which they did infamously end up looked more complicated from their initial perspective, a navigation not between right and wrong but between survival on their own terms and submission. Jacob Fagin, in Epstein's telling, is obsessed with survival, perhaps because of his start as an outsider among outsiders; he is painfully aware that almost everyone he knows expects him to come to no good. So Fagin commits himself to that mission, despite his beloved mother, Leah's, profound wish for him to choose a different life. He strikes out alone as a teenager and becomes so accustomed to being rebuffed by the world that he cannot accept true affection when it comes his way. Eventually, in his 30s, Fagin effectively adopts an inept teenage pickpocket named Bill Sikes, setting the tenor for the rest of his life. He will take in other abandoned children to train as thieves; he tells himself it's a smart business choice, but it's obvious that his real motivation is his compassion for their lonesomeness and a desire to help. (Oliver is one of them and, interestingly, portrayed as a creature of real wiliness — not, as Dickens painted him, an ill-fated innocent.) And Fagin will increasingly live in abject terror of Sikes, whose unpredictable violence is the main threat in 'Oliver Twist,' and whom Epstein portrays as the real (wounded) menace. Literature thrives on familiar plotlines, but there is something about this particular one, the striving to give depth to a character unjustly inscribed in history as pure evil, that tends to thwart itself. The drive to humanize is a drive to make something understandable. But parsing a person as if they were an equation — one part traumatized childhood, one part hardscrabble launch into independence, one part secret soft spot — tends to make them come across as more inscrutable, not less. We still read 'Oliver Twist' despite the antisemitism — and the fact that it is extraordinarily depressing — because there is life in it. Fagin is horrid, and Oliver is in some ways an idealized blank, but around them is a cast that cannot help but sparkle. Yes, it is an old story — an innocent is taken advantage of, with justice served in the end — but it never truly feels like one, because it is full of fresh views. That freshness is missing from 'Fagin the Thief.' The characters too often feel present because they are useful, rather than real. 'Fagin the Thief' is elegant and, in its own way, moving. It easily held my attention. I slipped straight through it, as its title character might slip through a crowd in London's Haymarket, scoping out an unwitting target. But unlike Fagin, I never quite closed my grasp on my mark. He remained a distant profile, alluring in an off-putting kind of way, perhaps better left uncaught. Talya Zax is an editor at the Forward. By Allison Epstein. Doubleday. 324 pp. $28
