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What is it about mockery that hurts so much? We all know. Mockery causes shame. It strips us. It exposes us. Mockery isolates some feature of another human being and then holds it up so everybody can see it and laugh and whistle. You isolate what you find so peculiar about another human being. Maybe you imitate it. Or, best of all, you force your victim to mock himself. So if you are a Nazi, you capture a rabbi and…

Lawrence Dorr has been writing fiction in English for more than forty years. Previous collections of his fiction include A Slow, Soft River (1974), The Immigrant (1976), and A Slight Momentary Affliction (1987). Readers already familiar with him know that Lawrence Dorr is the pen name adopted by a Hungarian survivor of the disasters that visited Hungary before, during, and after World War II. Born in Hungary in 1926, Dorr has lived in the United States since the 1950s, but…

"Liberia is a permanently haunted land filled with vengeful ghosts, and I had committed many sins there." So ends Hannah Musgrave's tale, chronicling her journey from a '60s radical dedicated to establishing an egalitarian, utopian society, to a complacent expatriate wife of a Liberian diplomat, to a disillusioned, aging woman returned to her farm in upstate New York. Over the course of the approximately thirty years during which the novel takes place, Hannah rebels against her status as the overprivileged,…

During Advent I enjoyed a performance of Handel's Messiah--music for Advent and Christmas, but music also relevant to Lent and Easter. While enjoying this past year's performance, I noted again how well Handel put this oratorio together. Although I have no complaints about his abilities as a composer, it is his use of texts I find most striking as he so freely mixes the genres of the Old and New Testaments. Old Testament prophecy, poetry, Pauline analogies, praise: all are…