Writers are taught the value of clarity, so the novelist R.F. Kuang should already know precisely how to extricate herself and her fans from the awkward situation in which they find themselves.
Kuang, the author of the celebrated novel Yellowface and others, has a new book in the works. A page of it was leaked, and now Kuang faces a serious allegation: that she is giving credence to the idea that Israeli people exist.
Kuang’s novel, set for a September release, includes a page with an Israeli character, reports the Times of Israel: “The musician, a successful pianist whose performance ignites a near-religious fervor for a character in the story, is not named, and the text identifies him as ‘a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.’”
Ah, so maybe he’s a bad Israeli! Kuang’s fans are taking this theory under consideration. Perhaps, it has been suggested online, Kuang is offering a sly critique of colonialists by suggesting that all Israelis are bad people. Obviously not Arab-Israelis. Just the you-know-whos.
But this, too, must be rejected. As the article notes, the negative portrayal of Jewish Israelis is still a woke infraction: “Casey McQuiston, the author of the 2019 romance novel ‘Red, White, and Royal Blue,’ initially included a scene where the U.S. president jokes that an ambassador ‘said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologize.’ In 2021, McQuiston said they would remove the reference to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in future printings of the book.”
It is at times hard to believe these people are real. But there are enough of them for an author to bowdlerize her own book because it referenced an Israeli person engaged in the crime of existing.
Not everyone thinks Kuang deserves banishment from the cloud kingdom of BookTok. The piece quotes a Threads user who wrote: “The people canceling a preorder over [a] single mention of an Israeli pianist being booked at a concert hall in R.F. Kuang’s new book lack so much f–king nuance. There’s literally no mention of Zionism yet y’all can’t seem to differentiate.”
Now that you mention it, I have noticed a distinct lack of nuance when it comes to differentiating between Zionists and the “good Jews.” As protesters wave Hezbollah flags, yell “we support Hamas,” and call Jews at a synagogue “pedophiles,” I worry about the lack of nuance, too.
Kuang’s defenders believe she is fully on their side when it comes to the question of whether Jews ought to be permitted to exist. But why, exactly? It’s true that Kuang canceled her appearance in the United Arab Emirates to honor the wishes of the Palestinian BDS movement. But she doesn’t seem to discuss the issue publicly. It has been suggested that she donated to a Gaza charity, but that claim was presented with no confirmation.
What if Kuang doesn’t even hate Jews? Could her fans have been so wrong about her?
The easy way to settle this is clarity. Why let the question linger? Kuang can very easily address whether or not she believes Israeli Jews ought to exist or whether the draft page of her forthcoming book was merely the result of an oversight on her part.
In fact, as I see it, an author ought to want to clear the air here. If I were a novelist and my fans all loved me in part because they believed I, too, was a rabid anti-Zionist, I’d be insulted. Why the silence thus far?
It’s not just Kuang, either. A Jewish teenager in Brooklyn wrote yesterday in the New York Jewish Week that after “Free Palestine” signs popped up all over his neighborhood, he decided to ask his neighbors what the sign meant to them. To his disappointment, his neighbors didn’t want to talk about the sign or the conflict; they just wanted to signal.
It’s a modern reversal of the way Jews in ancient Egypt were instructed to put lamb’s blood on their doorpost so the Avenging Angel would bypass their house. Whatever you believe about the conflict, who wants to be the one without the “Free Palestine” sign? What if someone starts to wonder if you really hate Israel all that much after all? If it can happen to R.F. Kuang, surely it can happen to you.
Source:
www.commentary.org
