Wrapping up the second half of Heym’s The Wandering Jew turned out to be easy enough. On reflection, it was the 16th century plot with Eitzen that kept bogging me down. The exchange of letters between the academic was the plot that flowed best for me, which oddly this review by Eva Hoffman doesn’t mention at all. She compares Eitzen to a “lumpen Faust.” A more tangential comparison (mine) is The Master & Margarita with almost every ounce of humor sucked out.
Hoffman is dead on about the best passages lyrical are the ones from the thread concerning Ahasverus and Reb Joshua, but it was the theological arguments that made a few gears in my head click, connecting historical events to the rise of certain myths.
Heym is turning out to be a pretty odd character.