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Jewish concepts of hell and the occult
(In case anyone is wondering where I sprang from, Blake Head dragged me along. Greetings, everyone. *waves*)
Jews don't tend to go on about hell much, but there have been a few Jewish writers exploring Jewish ideas of the occult. The most obvious one is Isaac Bachevis Singer, who once said that he wrote in Yiddish because he liked to write ghost stories, and what more suitable language for a ghost story than a dead one? He also remarked that he believed in the resurrection of the dead, and at the end of time all the Yiddish-speaking dead souls would arise and enquire whether there were any new books for them to read.
Most of Singer's works that I have read are set in eighteenth-century shtetls [Jewish villages] in Poland, and a large proportion of those deal with demons (occasionally fake, sometimes as narrators), dybbuks (demons who possess people), people set on a path that takes them straight to hell (e.g. an unusual combination of adultery and ritual animal slaughter), hauntings, and random mystical occurrences. Try his volumes of short stories, such as A Crown of Feathers, Short Friday, The Spinoza of Market Street. There's also a short novel which may be relevant, Satan in Goray, but it's years since I borrowed it off my best friend and I can't remember it. I think it's about Satan gradually taking over a village.
For a more modern, snarkier twist, see if you can hunt down Ellen Galford's novel The Dyke and the Dybbuk. The starting scenario might be typical of I.B. Singer, with a dybbuk called up to possess someone's ex-girlfriend and her descendents to the thirty-third generation, but it then jumps a couple of centuries to give you the possession of a lesbian taxi-driving film critic in north London, or should I say the attempted possession, since it doesn't go quite as planned. Hell is a company, Mephistco plc., there's a trade fair, a takeover by the Japanese, and the whole thing is hilarious, though well-rooted in Jewish literary tradition.
I've no idea whether it's still in print, but Picador do an largeish anthology entitled Great Works of Jewish Fantasy, ed. Neugroschel, which is not about the genre we currently call "fantasy" but rather about folklore, the occult and so forth. Again, it's a while since I ploughed through it, but there are demons galore and probably quite a few stories set in hell.
For a completely non-Jewish slant, there's the existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre which is set in hell, Huis Clos (usually translated as No Exit). It contains three incompatible people locked in a room for all eternity, and is the origin of the famous phrase, "Hell is other people." |
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