Stalin does not respect you, Joe Poet. He is willing to torture and kill you. You’re Jewish.

Another piece from The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Nathan Englander‘s “The Twenty-Seventh Man” (1998) owes its existence to Stalin’s anti-Semitic oppression in the Soviet Union. Four Russian literary artists, among twenty-three others, are arrested and destined to die, because they are Jews. “We’ve lost our universe, this is true,” one of them says. A young man named Pinchas represents the artist who is snuffed out by a sinister world before he is known and loved.

A terrific story, this. Englander writes wryly and knowingly. His dialogue is delicious. John Freeman opines that this is a tale about the madness of “a state at war with truth.”

Most migrants do not qualify for legal asylum in the U.S. This is an unsurprising info item in a short documentary which contains a few surprising info items and many unsettling ones. I mean the Federalist dot com documentary (which I viewed on YouTube), Cartel Country: The Untold Story of America’s Black Market on the Border (2022) , a sad film about border crossers and the cartels.

Migrants flee poverty, organized crime, and gang violence. Curiously, we hear Haitians tell an interviewer that they emigrated to such places as Chile and Brazil but eventually moved out (because of no prospects?) to try to enter the United States. We see migrants in Mexico near the U.S. border naturally filling the shelters until there is no more room and people are sleeping in the streets. Many of such migrants do not know how to enter the country once they’re close to it. Often they wish to hire lawyers.

Lawyers or not, masses of them are here. Illegal immigration is much in the news right now, but I don’t much care what the major networks are saying about it. I would decidedly rather see this 36-minute doc. Calmly it presents quite a lot.

The Scalphunters is an often silly 1968 Western directed by Sydney Pollack and written by William Norton. It’s interesting and fun, though, and has some merit as a racialist work. Black actor Ossie Davis co-stars in a major role. There is no miscasting here: Davis is a well-educated black man of the 1800s. Shelley Winters is delightful, “nuance” her middle name. Even the limited Burt Lancaster is acceptable as a gruff trader.

By ’68 there was a tasty realism in Western movies, even if The Scalphunters is yet another film more interesting than good.

In The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, I have read “Emergency” (1991), set in a problematic 1973. It begins with common trauma and sensitivity in a city emergency room before centering on the illicit drug experiences of two of the ER’s orderlies. The title summons the thought of there being a true state of emergency for modern Americans/Westerners. They’re spiritually adrift. (One of the orderlies feels like going to chapel.) A man who can make the claim that “I save people” ought not to be a drug addict.

A Denis Johnson story, “Emergency” remains relevant to our times. Unerringly written—Johnson was right, after the orderlies take a car ride, to return the piece to the hospital for a short passage—the story is clever and humorous and grim. Not to be considered DOA.