skygiants

EPHRAIM: I mean, it's not like I have a secret wife in the attic or hidden leprosy dungeon or anything!

He's not wrong that this puts him ahead of the curve . . .

I was very excited about Lucien, who comes across as deeply competent and basically in charge of David's abolitionist agenda; unfortunately he does not appear ever again after this section of the book.

Yuletide!

(The other person who can cope is spinster stepsister Eulalie, who is mean and bitter and passive-aggressively anti-Semitic, but also has spent a lot of time learning how to do actually useful things while everyone else was going to parties, so eventually she and Miriam come to a truce of agreeing to cordially dislike each other while nonetheless usefully coping to keep everybody alive. I actually quite liked this story thread.)

I can see how that would appeal to you. This is a different Catholic stepsister than the one whose husband Serious Gabriel shot in the face?

Meanwhile, David writes a lot of letters back home about what it's like for Jews in the Union Army, because Belva Plain did a lot of research and would like to demonstrate this fact.

DOES HE WRITE LETTERS ABOUT THE THING WITH ULYSSES S. GRANT?

How do you know a man's REALLY hot? WELL LET ME TELL YOU --

So Tennessee Johnson (1942) is not a good movie. I watched about three-quarters of it one night because it was in the TCM buffer and starred Van Heflin (early in his career with MGM, at a point where they were kind of throwing him into different genres to see what stuck; he wouldn't win his Oscar for Johnny Eager until the following spring) and then it expired out of the buffer and it should tell you something about the film that even for Van Heflin I did not try to track it down on YouTube or DVD. It is a heavily fictionalized biography of Andrew Johnson, playing up his more endearing qualities, like his all-American rise from illiterate tailor's apprentice to Vice President of the United States, and flatly erasing his more racist ones, like his well-documented veto of the Fourteenth Amendment; it wasn't as horridly anti-history as Santa Fe Trail (1940), but it ran a close second as it flickered past genuinely interesting episodes in Johnson's life, like his decision to remain in the Senate after the secession of Tennessee—the only Southern senator to do so—or his later, heroic war service as the Lincoln-appointed military governor of Tennessee, in favor of allowing Jefferson Davis to speechify at length about the sorrow with which the Confederate States must of necessity secede from the Union. It's the kind of movie where Lionel Barrymore plays Thaddeus Stevens, legendary abolitionist and advocate for the rights of black Americans before and after the Civil War, as a clean-shaven mustache-twirler, our hero's personal nemesis for no better reason than that Johnson won't wheel and deal with him. I get that national unity was on everyone's minds in the years of World War II, but I still fail to see why this had to produce batshit racist historical pictures. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that by the halfway mark of Tennessee Johnson, Abraham Lincoln had been frequently referred to, and even once quoted at length in a personal letter, but never once seen onscreen. It started to feel as if the filmmakers believed it was impossible to depict the most venerated American president in the person of some random actor. "Perhaps he's like Christ that way," I joked. And then our sixteenth president made his sole personal appearance in long shot and I realized he actually was Christ for all extents and purposes of the movie—a figure glimpsed from a distance, recognizable by iconography and reverent reputation. There was a close-up of his stovepipe hat. There was a historical photograph. Someone actually said, "Mr. Lincoln sees deep into all hearts and he knows yours." There's not even an actor credited with the part on IMDb as far as I can tell. And that was so completely hilarious that I almost forgave the movie everything else wrong with it, although not so much that I actually care about seeing the last quarter unless it comes around on TCM again some night.

it is pretty cool to see historical fiction about Jewish people that has the fact of their Jewishness interwoven into the story without making specifically-Jewish-suffering the entire point and plot. And there's still not a whole lot of that going around.

Agreed!