Puck of Pook's Hill #10

 My reading of the final, tenth, chapter of "Puck of Pook's Hill" by Rudyard Kipling (1906). This time the children meet the shade of a Jewish doctor and accountant. Not the most politically correct delineation of a Jewish character ever written, but the character plays a subtly heroic role in this final tale-within-the-tale.

Worth bearing in mind that "The Song of the Fifth River" was published in 1906 (presumably written a little earlier than that) and that Israel was not proclaimed as a nation state until Ben-Gurion did so in 1948 - so when Kipling composed it no Jewish person was metaphorical king of their own nation. I cannot find a musical version of that poem. There is a musical version of "The Children's Song" by an amateur composer, but I'm not including it here because the tune was just painful to listen to.



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