CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — There’s an old joke about a Jewish telegram back in the old days when we still communicated with telegrams instead of these new-fangled things call Tweets and Instagrams. It read “Start worrying. Letter to follow.” Classic Jewish humor, perhaps from Europe originally, or the from Borscht Belt comics in the summer Catskills resorts but whatever it’s actual origins, it mirrors Jewish anxiety over how things in the future — any future — could go wrong.
Well, first we had climate change angst, with dozens of cli-fi novels and movies about runaway global warming and all the nightmares that issue evokes.
Now, cli-fi, of course, is on the back burner, replaced by the current coronavirus global pandemic which is really something to start worrying about.
I learned about this old telegram joke the other day from a column in a Canadian newspaper by a Jewish professor named Arthur Schafer in Winnipeg. He was writing an essay about the COVID-19 pandemic and when I asked him about the old telegram joke he wrote back by email and explained that he had recently heard about it on a BBC radio program from London featuring four Jewish writers there chatting about Jewish identity in the 21st century during which novelist Howard Jacobson mentioned the Jewish telegram joke.
We are all already worrying about the virus and we all got the letter, too. It’s not the end of the world but it’s certainly not a pretty picture. Who knew when 2020 started off in January we’d find ourselves in a very scary situation just a few months later.
Forget climate change worries for now. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we are at war with an invisible enemy lurking at every corner.
Surely a new literary genre perhaps dubbed “corona-lit” will surface soon with novelists and short story writers creating a 21st genre that might not end well.
I’m worried.
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Dan Bloom is a freelance writer, inveterate web surfer, and climate activist residing in Chiayi City, Taiwan. More of his stories may be accessed by clicking his byline at the top of this page. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com.
True, but it’s not new – remember all those ‘outbreak’ movies of the 80s and 90s? Dustin Hofmann in a hazmat suit seemed to be everywhere at one point. Personally I would be reluctant to start a #coronafi novel right now though – a) I probably wouldn’t finish writing until well after the pandemic had faded from the headlines, and b) the reality is probably more interesting than a fictionalized version of it!
Good points, David.I agree with you on this. Let’s see what the future holds.