When the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch presented his play "God of Vengeance" at a Warsaw salon in 1906, his mentor, I. L. Peretz, told him to burn it. It's a shtetl tragedy: a Jewish brothel owner buys a Torah to celebrate his daughter's wedding to a scholar, but, when he learns that his daughter has fallen in love with one of his prostitutes, he casts her and the Torah down into the brothel. Asch ignored his mentor's w…
SOURCE: The New Yorker at 07:03AM on May 12, 2017