Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Several hundred people have viewed the video we created in 2020 as a new way to introduce The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization to the world. But most of them probably aren’t aware of the video music’s connection to Purim. The title of the lively piece is “I’m Done Dressing Up for You” by musician, poet, and Torah teacher, Alicia Jo Rabins and it refers to Queen Vashti, the queen of Persia, who appears in the opening scenes of the Book of Esther. During one of his drunken revels, King Ahasuerus wants to show off his beautiful queen to his guests and summons her to appear. Tired of his boorish behavior, she refuses, and the King and his courtiers begin interviewing candidates to replace her. This eventually leads to young Esther becoming his queen.
That music introduces us to many delightful Purim-related selections in The Posen Digital Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, all available for free once you register. In fact, the entire Book of Esther appears as one of the “Short Prose Narrative Books” from Volume 1: Ancient Israel, from Its Beginnings through 332 BCE. All who have heard it read on Purim will probably agree with the editors’ description: “a burlesque comedy matching the tone of Purim; it is full of caricatures, exaggerations, improbabilities, comic misunderstandings, and sexual innuendos.” Ahasuerus’s viceroy, Haman, chose the day of his genocide of the Jews by casting lots. Purim gets its name from the Hebrew pur, or lot (pl. purim). If you want to see a striking image of an ancient lot, check out the PDL or Volume 1.
Lot (Akkadian: puru), Assyria. Copyright © 2016 Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. YPM catalog no. YPM BC021122.
“Esther’s Triumph,” a Spanish-language poem from 1847 by Moses L. Penha captures the light-hearted spirit of Purim as it enjoins us:
Friends, let’s celebrate this day—Viva!
Purim, occasion to be gay—Viva!1
Over the years, Purim has accumulated numerous traditions. In “Matzo Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South,” Marcie Cohen Ferris reminds us that in New Orleans Purim often occurred during the Mardi Gras season and was celebrated with costumes and revelry. Jewish families there “enjoyed homemade pralines and hamantaschen: the latter a cookie dough pastry made into the shape of Haman’s three-cornered hat and filled with a poppy seed, prune, or fruit filling.”
Commenting on the costuming tradition, photographer Pesi Girsch wryly captioned one image “If One Day during Purim, Everybody By Chance Will Disguise Themselves as Orthodox Jews, Will the Messiah Come?” And in “Jacob Studies ‘The Selling of Joseph’ with His Sons,” Itzik Manger demonstrates how a father’s pedantic stage directing can drain all the joy from a Purim play.
These selections and thousands more are all available for free on the Posen Digital Library. Registration takes just a few minutes.
But Purim is not without its dark side. In “The Czech Transport: A Chronicle of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando,” Zalmen Gradowski reminds us in 1944 that “the ‘authorities’ made special efforts to carry out their major massacres on Jewish festivals” and so had planned a slaughter on the night of Purim. Masquerade takes on a different horrific meaning in his harrowing account of this incident.
In an excerpt from “Months and Days,” one of the longer selections in the PDL, the Ukrainian writer Itsik Kipnis recounts scenes that seem ripped from today’s headlines as he describes a Jewish family’s experiences fleeing a pogrom in 1926. They travel from town to town, not knowing where they can stay or whom they can trust. “It was neither Purim nor the Interval Days on the street.” In one chilling scene, the family hears what they think is a woman singing as she walks alone down the middle of the street. But she is not singing. She is the wife of the local tailor who has just been murdered. She is declaiming:
Of course you all know Dovid,
Dovid Frenk of Doinye,
Yeshue the furrier’s son.
He was a furrier, too.
But he was dearer to me than a prince.
Dovid . . . that Dovid . . . was my husband.
Of course you all know Dovid.
There was no reason to look into his face.
Murderers killed him in Behun.
He was vibrant and lively
When they tore him from my arms.
I begged them:
Murderers, kill me too.
Murderers, have you no human heart?
You must also have wives and children.
Murderers, kill me too.
I kissed their feet . . .
I humbled myself before them,
And I begged:
Murderers kill me too.
Dovid, you can’t go . . .
You can’t go without me.
And what shall I do with your child?
Ah, Jews—if you only knew . . .2
Cherish your loved ones and be well.
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
What is The Posen Library? (video)
Credits
1 Moses L. Penha, "El Triumfo de Esther" [Esther's Triumph], from Isaac S. Emmanuel and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, vol. 2 (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1970), p. 1089.
2 Itsik Kipnis, "Months and Days," trans. Leonard Wolf, from The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe, ed. David G. Roskies (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 324–44. Copyright © 1989 by the Jewish Publication Society.
