Half-century old reel-to-reel tapes stored in an East Coast basement recently surfaced, and they held three lost Allan Sherman parodies. I was tempted to say they are legendary, but they are too obscure for that. Nobody knew of them, and so no legends could be promulgated.
Two of the songs parody tunes from Porgy and Bess. They are “Summertime” and “There’s a Jaguar Leaving Soon for the Concord.”
The third Sherman song is, “You’re a Nudnick, Sondara Goldfarb.” It is a parody of “You’re a Queer One, Julie Jordan,” from Carousel.
Thank you, Mark! (Not myself. Another Mark)
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My review of Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora. The title is an intimidating mouthful, but the voices of 16th century Sephardim, found in Inquisition records and rabbinical responsa (legal opinions and rulings), are fresh and alive.
“I thought that Jesus Christ was the same person as Moses, son of Queen Esther,” one woman told the Inquisition.
You don’t hear that everyday.
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Got a kick just now from a review on NPR of Saul Bellow Letters, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. She quoted one of my favorite lines from the book,
“and then a nice police dog chained to a parking meter, wearing a cast on his broken leg and barking. He may have been asking to see the humanity in relation to which he was supposed to be a dog.”
I quoted the line in my review in the Forward.
Listen to Goldstein here.
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