Love of books — and sushi
A leading children’s writer tells Angela Kiverstein about his Book Week experience
The book was the queen in our family,” says Eduard Shyfrin, former World Jewish Congress vicepresident, physicist, PhD in metallurgy, entrepreneur, philanthropist, lecturer on Torah and Kabbalah — and now children’s author.
Shyfrin was born in the USSR; his family was not well off but still “I was surrounded by books and I started to read at three-and-a-half-years old. My parents had 6,000 or 7,000 books.”
Yesterday, he spoke about his extraordinary children’s book, Travels With Sushi in the Land of the Mind (White Raven), at Jewish Book Week. He has spoken at JBW before – about his adult book on Kabbalah – and the experience made a deep impression: “When I saw hundreds of Jewish people queuing for tickets for the various talks and there were not enough chairs for my full audience, it was a great encouragement. This is why I decided to support Jewish Book Week — we are the people of the book.”
Another Jewish hallmark, he says, is abstract thinking (Shyfrin believes faith in an invisible God fosters one’s abstract-thinking ability), which is why his new book is not just an exciting fairy-tale fantasy (exquisitely illustrated by Tomislav Tomic) but weaves in ideas from quantum physics, Torah and Kabbalah. “This book has layers of meaning,” he says. “My challenge was not to write an easy book but to write a meaningful book.”
He originally wrote Travels with Sushi for his grandchildren – who love sushi. “I often tell them fairy tales and I try to include a hidden lesson for them in each one.
“We have a duty to introduce children to God, Jewish history, science and art. To teach them to think and how to deal with crises because everyone experiences crises in life.” (He himself experienced one in 2002, which was when he turned to the study of Torah — “I think God wanted to give me a little kick.”)
The book is soon to be published in Hebrew and Shyfrin is keen to see what Israeli reviewers make of the hidden meanings: “Many people tell me Travels with Sushi is not just for children. I suspect they are right.”
The Impeachment Trial of President Donald Trump
SINCE PLAYHOUSES closed on March 17, 2020 theatre-makers have attempted to reach audiences through laptops. The results have often been noble, yet a shadow of the art form they exist to replace. But then last week online theatre finally came up with a production that had the kind of gripping drama not seen since it was possible for audiences and actors to share a space indoors.
The stage was the United States senate which on January 6 had been overrun by a blood-thirsty mob. The event was the impeachment of President Donald Trump who was charged with inciting the crowd.
As in the best drama, expectations were defied. Most observers had an idea of how events would unfold. Arguments would be put by the Senate’s House managers against the former president; they would be rebuffed by his legal team and Republican senators would refuse to vote in the required numbers to impeach no matter how damning the evidence. That is pretty much how it turned out.
But what had not been anticipated was the sheer potency of the case against Trump being compiled by the House legal team led by Jamie Raskin, the Jewish lawyer and Representative for Maryland’s 8th district who speaks with the authority of one of his nation’s founding fathers and has a bald patch at the back of his head that looks like a kippah.
His contributions were forensic in their detail, irresistible in their
Raskin’s voice became strained as he remembered the sound of the mob pounding on doors
logic and as heroic as those given by such great fictional and factual lawyers as Atticus Finch and Clarence Darrow.
Raskin’s dismantling of his opponents’ early objection that you cannot impeach a president if he is not in office was an early indication of the quality of argument he would deploy throughout the proceedings. With the clarity of winter sunlight he pointed out that if his opponents were right, a president’s final week could never be held to account.
But it was when legal argument gave way to testimony that the silent Senate chamber crackled with the kind of tension more often seen in a production of Miller’s The Crucible. Here Raskin described how he was in Congress with his 24-year-old daughter and son-in-law on the day of the riot. The day before, he and his family had buried his son (who had suffered from depression and committed suicide) and senators from both sides of the house had, Raskin said, offered their support and sympathy.
His voice became increasingly strained as he remembered the sound of the mob later pounding on doors and his daughter and son-in-law whispering and texting goodbyes to loved ones, afraid they were about to die.
But, aided by his fellow House managers, Raskin was at his most potent when weaving the American constitution into his own case along with the carefully set out evidence of Trump’s guilt. Much of it using video evidence.
The response by the former president’s legal team was a car crash. There had been much talk that no decent lawyer would work for Trump, but what followed was so staggeringly inept it supplied the comedic relief that all serious drama needs.
Counsel Bruce Castor kicked off his defence by accidentally describing himself as a prosecutor.
He was supported by his colleague Michael van der Veen who summoned a tone of indignant outrage, presumably in the hope of giving his rambling irrelevances some heft, triumphantly citing Trump’s single use of the word “peaceful” during the fateful incendiary speech on January 6 as proof that there was no incitement.
Raskin responded devastatingly by comparing Trump to a bank robber who, on the way out, shouts that it’s wrong to steal.
Trump would have been better off hiring David Brent from The Office to represent his innocence through the power of breakdance. It would at least have been less cringeworthy.
Of course, in all the most popular courtroom dramas, good is usually on the side of the defence which is why they tend to end with acquittals. The brilliance of this one is that it breaks that mould. Here, good was on the side of the prosecution and our faith that, no matter what their prejudices, jurors — even Republican senators — are open to reasoned, humane argument, is subverted.
The result was a sobering reality check. But as entertainment, streaming drama online has reached new heights.