Narrated as seen through the eyes of Steve Kowalski, laying bare his Racially White blue-collar, Polish-American, Roman Catholic façade to reveal the raving antisemite beneath
Lo, as I slowly and surreptitiously unroll the play’s exposition throughout this frame!
Behold my mastery of the perfected technique!
A graceless, clunky murmuration of claw-hobbled rooks, a feverish street-shuffling swarm of giant black hats and pointy cloaked shoulders occupy the locus just outside Kyiv Unedited’s undisclosed headquarters in Kyiv’s mighty river-running district of Podil – beaten down of late because of war.
The bouncing black mass surrounds and presses in on the hapless Bob Covertonesos and the Ukrainian soldiers who’ve been ordered to ferret him out of his Kyiv Commix Union Joker desk and guard him pending further instructions. The soldiers are forced to begin shoving Hasidim away from, and now prying them off, the shaking prisoner, but soon give up as the aggression and vehemence of the crowd becomes overwhelming.
The war-darkened street becomes ominously illuminated by a melee of smartphone flashlights and makeshift torches of petrol-soaked rags wrapped around broken sticks, the variegated lights of the ceaselessly recoiling collective intertwine and slither in the midair murk like snakes from outer space.
From the opposite sidewalk, Steve Kowalski, watching the unfolding scene alongside the Hunched Cornish (a profusely gruesome long-living freak who actually holds Kowalski in a high degree of unequivocal contempt, yet cuts his pathetic ass some slack due to a felt affinity he cannot quite explain), is certain the din raised by the Hasidic mob sounds far more like a hiss than any kind of roar.
And now they see soldiers picking up a stunned and petrified Covertonesos, his shins bloody after being felled by a crazed assault from the exclusively male Hasidic crowd.
It is odd and uncanny for Steve to behold, but Covertonesos’ leg wounds are gashes large enough to drop and trail blood on the ice and snow, as the black-lit horde now pushes and prods him up the streets toward his extinction, the Ukrainian soldiers, whose number has been reenforced, only just managing to restrain the discharge of total mayhem.
And now they have all stopped within the militarily fenced-off perimeter of a boarded-up eyesore that had once served as the site of the notorious Hasidic Strip Bar. Shockingly, looming up before the deadly dead joint – a real guillotine! The lunatic lights of the mad swirling maelstrom of black hats and tassels below again and again catch the slanted glint of the massive blade suspended in the inky air, like lightning flashes suddenly betraying a werewolf’s giant fangs to the anxious night-woods traveler – and it’s too late… And each time the flash, Steve’s body cannot restrain its shudder; he has been shocked into horrified disbelief.
And why the Hasidim have let this goyische Steve in, he can only guess: perhaps, no, highly likely because, they see he is with the Hunched Cornish, to whom no entrance can be denied. And besides, the Jews, though gesticulating, shouting, and frenzied, appear to be oddly familiarized with this half-myth, half-mutant anomaly, this hideous abomination worse than Frankenstein’s monster; worse yet than any golem run amok in some beleaguered and set-upon medieval Prague ghetto conjurable by rabbi-doctors out of the Talmud’s depthless forbiddings.
At this juncture, to Kowalski the Cornish says:
“Hmph… This isn’t the guy. I don’t want to collect his head. This isn’t the one who wrote the Anit-Notes in The Commix doubting this Great People’s Power. I don’t like that. Clearly the work of the Half Guinea. I know his MO. Guess he had his reasons, of sorts. Still… he should just stick to his black chicks…”
“Wha… what’s that supposed to mean?”
Grim silence; and then: “I don’t like it, is all. I just don’t like it…”
Meanwhile, around Bob Covertonesos’ neck the Hasidim have hung a sign: “Ephemeral = Not Here For Long”, a cruel, even wicked, double entendre referring both 1) to the word that allegedly Bob used in his Anti-Notes to describe them, and the most ghettoized, dumbed-down definition they could muster for it (as if angered by the fact – Steve draws this conclusion – that they’d been forced to look it up to make sure they understood exactly what was being said of them), and 2) to Bob’s quickly approaching fate.
Bob’s shins and knees continue bleeding out onto the icy snow next to the guillotine, and he is crying.
“I’ll go up to the guillotine and reason with them,” the Hunched Cornish says. “I’m sure that will sway them to change their minds. After all…”
A moment later, near-silence descends upon the mob… And now, the Hunched Cornish speaks:
“Dear Jews, I am a reader and a studier of the Kabbalah, a longtime student, I think I can fairly say, and not just some fly-by-night hobbyist, or worse, a mere enthusiast.
“And as much as I am indifferent to your right to behead someone who has brought the shadow of a doubt to bear upon the characterization and nature of your Power, I stand here before you tonight, next to this terrified man, the humiliating sign around whose neck I’m now removing, in an appeal to your ages-old wisdom and superior intelligence, to let go one I know to be innocent of the crime you accuse him, and spare his head, so that he might use it to proclaim your superiority and greatness from this day forward until his more natural end.”
Elder 1: To proclaim our greatness, we need no others, for it is self-evident, nor especially do we need any goyim for it, although we’ll take the extra praises, because why not, I guess – for will this not serve to underline the truth? Maybe. So, perhaps we can use it. In any case, it won’t hurt.
Elder 2: We recognize you, ugly monster. For many years, we have seen you often under the doors of this city’s two synagogues – for what reason, we could never say – and we also already know some things about you. Therefore, answer to us this question:
What manner of being or beast, apparently wielding some reasoning powers, with conscious self-awareness, if no conscience – heh – and what may even be some degree of free will, the nature of which he doesn’t understand, except that it drives him on to live, and to want to live, as well as one who knows how to read, is unable to say, even after 4,000 years of claimed existence upon the earth (almost as long as us – heh), whether he is the offspring of late and disappearing Minoans, or early and appearing Myceneans, on the island of Crete, birthplace of the all-powerful Zeus?
The Hunched Cornish: But… I don’t see what that has to do with –
Elder 1: Pt’u! Even so – it has everything to do with it! For what kind of… creature… as you have been known to call yourself – in your private, hidden moments, when you think no one else can hear you over that tragical music you like to play – who purports to be able to establish another criminal’s innocence before us is, in the same breath, unable to establish his own line of descent? So, I will do it for you:
Pasiphae, your grandmother, lay with a bull, rather than with her husband, King Minos of Crete, producing Asterius, otherwise known as the Minotaur, and was therefore a whore. Now let’s take this further; to the end. Your Cornish mother, who was one of the many mortals thrown to the Minotaur for a meal, did not get eaten by him, but lay with him, instead, producing you! So, your mother was a whore, too. Which makes you, whatever it is that you are, or claim to be, the bastard seed and grand-seed of whores! On both sides of your family! And that is your line! And that is your descent!
Elder 2: Therefore, why should we have anything to do with you? For we know who we are; even the children of Abraham, and doing as he would do! We know who are our fathers and our mothers. And we therefore know ourselves, and where we are from. But who are you?! Even the sterile spawn of a Cornish tin-mine whore and a Minotaur, punished by Y-H-W-H with the torture of an endless life he cannot account for, and doomed to perpetual fruitlessness through all the millennia, until he finally dies, forever unable to bring forth from his own filthy fornications upon the goyim shiksas another accursed one like unto himself…
Elder 1: … and all for insisting on having the will to live! Therefore, be gone! And let us get on with our business, for what have we to do with you – monster-son of whores?!
A hunk of debris from the exploding Hasidic Strip Bar hurtles toward Steve Kowalski and strikes him squarely in his large forehead before he is able to perceive it and jump out of its way, knocking him out.
Jews closer to the blast go flying in the air like supermen, in all directions; some, amazingly, keeping their giant hats on. Perhaps something like in a painting by Chagal. Like stricken tenpins, the rest are scattered to all sides across the icy courtyard grounds.
Steve is shaken to by Bob Covertonesos. Steve lifts his head and notes blood dripping from it onto the ground. His sudden panic is immediately calmed by Bob. He sees the blue flame of Commix-told-tales and lore turning yellow, orange, and red; he feels the compounding heat burning closer, and blinks his eyes to focus on the scene before him, and then he remembers the backstory of what he’s seeing, even as he shakily gets to his hands and knees preparatory to his hoped-for escape:
Hasidic Jews surrounded by flames. They hoot, yelp, and jump around the courtyard with the hotfoot, trying to smother their burning soles in the piled-out ice and snow, all while pushing each other to get the hell out of there. Observing the scene from even farther out than Kowalski, I must say, it all looks very comical to me. Ukrainian soldiers shoot at the Hunched Cornish, to no effect or avail, and now are also desperate to escape his hellish conflagration, no longer able to stand before its reach and heat. And the Hunched Cornish, himself, in silent, demon-driven rage, all haloed afire, pulsating a deep, extravagant blue, smashes the guillotine to shards and pieces, somehow half-melting, half-sinking its giant blade into a horizontal section of pipe fencing, rendering it into useless metal scrap – junk not even worthy of his own whimsical fireplace mantelpiece.
“Come on,” Bob says as he helps Steve up to his feet, “let’s go!”
Filed by The One Who Shall Remain Unnamed, January 9, 2026