There was never any question for me what story I would be retelling from the moment I conceived this anthology. One of the most notable things about The Merchant of Venice is its classification as a Comedy, which it earns due to its protagonists getting their happy ending, finding love, et cetera. Of course, for Shylock—the Jew—the story is tragedy upon tragedy, especially to those who see Shylock’s ultimate punishment through the same lens he does.
I originally read The Merchant of Venice when I was in (Yeshiva) high school, which was, in retrospect, something of a “safe space” for it. Certainly I wasn’t surrounded by people who bought into what might be the most enduring anti-Semitic depiction in the history of Western literature. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I would see its effects, and so, given the opportunity to mold the story in a different way—one that wouldn’t erase Shylock’s very real emotions of anger, isolation, resentment, and desire for justice, but would give him both more agency and more community—I leapt at the chance to rework it into a version that wouldn’t make light of either its consequences or its “villain.”
This isn’t to say that as a Jewish reader, I find no merit to the original; Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is one of the most humanizing monologues in Shakespeare’s canon. But it is, of course, telling that Shylock is in the position of needing to humanize us in the first place, and it was just so biblically familiar that I had to mesh it with one of my favorite Jewish stories of complex heroism: the book of Esther, in which family and revenge win the day.
(With thanks to the Pixies for the title.)