I’ve been listening to Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 on audio book, and it’s gotten me in a mid-century mood. The book, by the way, has been more engaging than I expected. There are a few too many lists of numbers and percentages for my taste (much easier to take these sorts of things in the gestalt way I usually read text) but every once in a while Judt comes out and makes Some Big Pronouncement that makes me feel like I should have been paying more attention for the past 30 minutes.
As you might imagine, Jews do come up quite a bit in this history (at least where I’m currently at, which is still very near the end of WWII) and so the Holocaust has been on my mind these past few days.
While flipping through the Times tonight, I came across an article talking about the Jewish origins of Superman:
“They were planting little hints as to his ethnic heritage and the fact that he was Jewish,” Mr. Tye said. For example, Superman’s arrival on Earth as an infant in a rocket ship parallels the biblical story of baby Moses being delivered to Pharaoh’s daughter in his papyrus basket. And his Kryptonian name, Kal-El, sounds like the Hebrew for voice or vessel of God.
This got me thinking about Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and wondering, why don’t they make the movie already? It would be brilliant.