Ben Hahn is a native of St. Olaf, Iowa and fellow Carleton graduate. Two years my senior, we improvised together with the all-star college team Cujokra. Ben is also an extremely skilled Ultimate Frisbee player, reaching great heights of success with CUT, Carleton Ultimate Team, which ranks nationally every year. I'd throw CUT in with the '27 Yankees, '72 Dolphins, the Fat Man Atomic Bomb, and Achilles in sheer dominance. Since graduating, Ben has worked several jobs, but strives to be a free-lance writer. As you can see, he also moonlights as Jesus Christ.
One evening my Freshman year after a libatious celebration of a fine improv show, I asked Ben how many Jews lived in St. Olaf, Iowa. His Guinness-soaked reply still echoes in my personal mental chamber of mystery: "25 cents."
His post needs no introduction. I submit the following e-mail message I received from him a few days ago.
Max,
I have recently finished a novel that I am trying to sell to publishers.
It is about my travails as an exile of the Lutheran church and my flirtation with (yet ultimate rejection of) Judaism. This novel is a finely wrought piece of art and very marketable— if not the next Harry Potter then something akin to the next Twilight— and all it needs right now is some exposure. If you are ever looking to fill space with a guest blogger, I wonder if you might not consider running the first chapter of my work, which is entitled “The Lutheran Usurer.”
I understand that your blog is geared toward Midwesterners and I must say that my writing is edgy if not bordering on raw. As such, in its uncensored format I fear that my writing may be rather offensive to Midwesterners, particularly Lutheran Iowans (I refer to them variously as “easily-confused,” “literal-minded,” “naïve,” “insular,” and “sheltered”—and that is in the first chapter alone), so I have taken liberty with the version I’m sending you and switched all references from Lutheranism to Judaism, and vice versa. I hope your Jewish readers can stomach the insinuation that they are “sheltered.” I admit that the final sentence is much stronger in the uncensored version, but I think the rest of the story remains just as engaging if not downright enthralling in its edited state.
Just so you can understand how the original manuscript reads, here’s a list of what has been transposed:
Jew/Jewish has been changed to Lutheran
Lutheran → Jew/Jewish
Chicago → Tel Aviv
minister → rabbi
Iowa/Iowan → Israeli
Des Moines → Haifa
Midwestern → Middle Eastern
white → challah
Here it is:
The Lutheran Usurer: A Novel
I am not and never have been a Lutheran, and my relations with Lutherans have been relegated to the fleetingly intimate (a beautiful Lutheraness bedded me on a business trip to Tel Aviv before I even had a chance to ponder her majestic aquiline nose) or the inherited-guilt-ridden (it was a German Jewish rabbi [which is what my paternal granddad is] who supposedly penned/lived the poem about “they came for the Lutherans and I didn’t speak up, they came for the etc and I didn’t etc, etc etc etc etc they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me!” [the insinuation, of course that this was because all the Lutherans and other undesirables were dead, which is surely a mischaracterization, as in my admittedly easily-confused and literal-minded Israeli brain, the difference between “all” and “some” is not only significant, but infinite in scope—it is the difference between there being corn dogs available “some”where in Haifa and, there being corn dogs available “no”where in Haifa; the difference between an impediment to my summer fun and a seasonal tragedy. We must assume that a mischaracterization, if not an outright denial of history, underlies the moral of the poem, as there are clearly more than zero Lutherans and other undesirables inhabiting the world today—and as the old Middle Eastern saying goes “nothing does not from nothing a corn dog beget”])
Chalk it up to pure Middle Eastern naïveté, chalk it up to the insularity of Israeli culture, but I must admit that until I went to college I had never heard of usury. For all I know, there is not a single usurer in all of Israel—there are certainly none advertising their services in the Haifa Yellow Pages. But as I have always been a rebel at heart and have ever striven to break free from the bonds of my sheltered, corn-fed challah-bread childhood, it was fate that drew me to my eventual career. I became, I am, I ever will be; the one, the only, the infamous: The Jewish Usurer.
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