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Apr. 28th, 2014 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThis Shabbos I read Elia Bachur's early 16th century Yiddish verse romanceBovo Buch, which is basically the greatest thing ever.
Bovo is the son of a northern Italian king in a alternate Europe where basically everyone in Europe is kinda sorta Jewish (and everyone not in Europe is a heathen Moslem). His father was an old man who was never married when, in pretty direct parody of the story of King David, a beautiful young woman was given to him to warm his bed. She hated having to sleep with him (the passage in question is something like "Her days were pleasant, her nights were nightmares), but she gave birth to a son in King Guidon's old age.
Embittered, the woman schemes with the handsome but evil king of a neighboring kingdom to kill her husband and son and hand the kingdom over to her lover. She succeeds in killing her husband, but Bovo escapes and his travels take him on a series of adventures as far west as Northern Burgundy and as far east as Babylonia, wooing women, slaying knights, escaping multiple prisons, and ultimately returning to retake his kingdom in Lombardy and kill his mother.
And there's a storyline where the kind Sultan's daughter in Babylonia tells an imprisoned Bovo that if he'll repent his Judaism and become a heathen Moslem she'll marry him, and he tells her he'd rather die, but then later after he's escaped she writes a letter to him saying that she's changed her mind, she'll convert to Judaism if he'll marry her. So he agrees to it, but then his wife who he'd believed to be killed by lions shows up with his two sons and he's like "Oops, guess I can't marry the Sultan's daughter," so he foists her off on his best friend, and then for the rest of the story the Sultan's daughter keeps being like "I'm so glad I converted to Judaism to marry you and then you bailed, because your best friend is a pretty great consolation prize." And it's all so wonderful.
There's also a character who is repeatedly described as an animal because he likes to run around on all fours and kill people randomly. But he turns out to be a pretty good dude because he betrays the bad guy as soon as he gets a chance and is then pretty trustworthy until he's killed by a lion.
In sum, this is the greatest thing I've ever read.
Bovo is the son of a northern Italian king in a alternate Europe where basically everyone in Europe is kinda sorta Jewish (and everyone not in Europe is a heathen Moslem). His father was an old man who was never married when, in pretty direct parody of the story of King David, a beautiful young woman was given to him to warm his bed. She hated having to sleep with him (the passage in question is something like "Her days were pleasant, her nights were nightmares), but she gave birth to a son in King Guidon's old age.
Embittered, the woman schemes with the handsome but evil king of a neighboring kingdom to kill her husband and son and hand the kingdom over to her lover. She succeeds in killing her husband, but Bovo escapes and his travels take him on a series of adventures as far west as Northern Burgundy and as far east as Babylonia, wooing women, slaying knights, escaping multiple prisons, and ultimately returning to retake his kingdom in Lombardy and kill his mother.
And there's a storyline where the kind Sultan's daughter in Babylonia tells an imprisoned Bovo that if he'll repent his Judaism and become a heathen Moslem she'll marry him, and he tells her he'd rather die, but then later after he's escaped she writes a letter to him saying that she's changed her mind, she'll convert to Judaism if he'll marry her. So he agrees to it, but then his wife who he'd believed to be killed by lions shows up with his two sons and he's like "Oops, guess I can't marry the Sultan's daughter," so he foists her off on his best friend, and then for the rest of the story the Sultan's daughter keeps being like "I'm so glad I converted to Judaism to marry you and then you bailed, because your best friend is a pretty great consolation prize." And it's all so wonderful.
There's also a character who is repeatedly described as an animal because he likes to run around on all fours and kill people randomly. But he turns out to be a pretty good dude because he betrays the bad guy as soon as he gets a chance and is then pretty trustworthy until he's killed by a lion.
In sum, this is the greatest thing I've ever read.
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Date: 2014-04-29 10:38 pm (UTC)