I think there's any amount of text indicating a variety of prayer frequencies for angels -- the famous story from Shabbat 119b, for example. Those angels are praying, potentially, once a week! The passage from Chullin 91 has fully nine levels of unresolved disagreement about how many times angels pray, so I'm not sure once a day is as strict a baraita as all that. The Rambam would insist that the mere presence of angels makes the whole thing necessarily a prophetic vision, after all.
I feel like treating this book as though its plot is mainly referencing Gaiman (or even opposing Gaiman) is a bit reductive, though obviously it's a clear referent. Rather, I see Lamb moving quite fluidly between a variety of influences, including Yiddish migration literature like IBS' urban magical realist stories and what seems like a pretty solid grasp on nuts-and-bolts Jewish migration history of the turn of the century. I'm pretty sure Rose is a shout-out to Rose Schneiderman, and there's a pretty thinly veiled Cecilia Razovsky expie who definitely did not come from Gaiman, for example. (Also, this one might be a reach, but there were some distinct plot elements and motifs there that made me think Lamb read Dreams in the Golden Country as a youth.) So I agree with lannamichaels that the decision to go to America is not merely cribbed from Neil Gaiman's "mushroom" metaphysics of gods but represents Ash and Uriel's own agentive decisions to proactively migrate, just like the people of their shtetl -- for reasons which we all know are profoundly international. I think in this particular instance, the migration metaphor is just migration! Can't argue with wanting to see more of the "spiritual lay of the land" pre-colonization, though.
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Date: 2024-09-06 10:57 pm (UTC)I feel like treating this book as though its plot is mainly referencing Gaiman (or even opposing Gaiman) is a bit reductive, though obviously it's a clear referent. Rather, I see Lamb moving quite fluidly between a variety of influences, including Yiddish migration literature like IBS' urban magical realist stories and what seems like a pretty solid grasp on nuts-and-bolts Jewish migration history of the turn of the century. I'm pretty sure Rose is a shout-out to Rose Schneiderman, and there's a pretty thinly veiled Cecilia Razovsky expie who definitely did not come from Gaiman, for example. (Also, this one might be a reach, but there were some distinct plot elements and motifs there that made me think Lamb read Dreams in the Golden Country as a youth.) So I agree with