First Things First…
I wasn’t impressed by the first two Poe stories I reviewed. Here’s another I know nothing about.
The thing is, he’s got so many classics, most of which I’ve read and love. And for years, I’ve called him my favorite author just based on those. But I’m desperately hoping to find some hidden gems to fall in love with as I work through his catalog.
Maybe this will be the one??
1 Thing I Like
1. 30 Shekels of Silver
Of all the biblical allusions in this story, this is the one I got and appreciated. The three main characters each pay 30 shekels of silver to the Romans for their sacrificial animal. That’s the same price Judas was paid to hand Jesus over to the authorities. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence, and a betrayal was coming.
1 Thing I’m Mixed On
1. The Gizbarim
These are the three main characters. They have very little substance. The only reason I’m even putting them here is because of this description of Simeon the Pharisee:
“… [he] belonged to the sect called The Dashers (that little knot of saints whose manners of dashing and lacerating the feet against the pavement was long a thorn and a reproach to less zealous devotees… )”
The Pharisees in the Bible are criticized by Jesus for being showy in their strict devotion to church dogma—they’re essentially the originators of the description “holier than thou”—while not adhering to the spirit of the faith at all.
This passage is a clever way to mock those people. But it’s about the only noteworthy thing about these characters.
2 Things I Don’t Like
2. A Climactic Pig
The betrayal, and the punchline of the story, is that when the three Jewish men finally get the sacrificial animal they paid for, they expect it to be a lamb or even a fatted calf. But instead, they’re given a pig—an unclean animal, according to their doctrine, which they can’t use.
Maybe this would’ve been funnier or gone over better with audiences of the time. To me, I can put aside that the story culminates with a cruel joke. It’s just not a funny joke.
1. Lacking Historical Context
For such a short story, there’s so much I don’t understand because of a lack of context. Some of it is religious—but thanks to my 12 years of Catholic school education and lifetime of churchgoing, I at least picked up a couple of the references. But apparently, this story is also a parody of a book that was popular at the time. I guess Poe didn’t like it. He was known as an incredibly harsh literary critic in his day, so maybe this was his way of criticizing that particular book. Whatever the case, and whatever his motives, for a modern audience that doesn’t know what he’s attacking, how, or why, it falls completely and utterly flat.
Tim Matassa
