Moses
Kindergarten-Grade 3?Heavy-lidded, frowning, seamed, and baggy-eyed, the mournful Moses on the cover of Fisher's book looks like he has already foreseen how ineffectual the stone tablets at his fingertips will be. Admittedly, he's been through a lot, what with intransigent Egyptians and backsliding Israelites. His God is a heavyweight, too, devising gruesome plagues, wiping out Pharaoh's army, and then slaying the 3,000 exiles who forgot themselves with the golden calf. Moses is as uncompromising as his God, who allows him only a glimpse of the Promised Land before he dies. Fisher's art emphasizes the starkness of the narrative. Human figures (their faces wholly or partly obscured) barely hold their own before the crushing vastness of the sky, Mount Sinai, the water-walls of the Red Sea, or the Brutalist architecture of Kadesh. This vengeful God and stern, flawed patriarch are certainly a strand of Western tradition, and Fisher's retelling (with God speaking in the awe-full cadences of the King James Version) takes Moses beyond the usual Ten Commandments scene. Nevertheless, Mordicai Gerstein's The Shadow of a Flying Bird (Hyperion, 1994), although focused on Moses's death and not his life, gives a much more positive impression of the patriarch and his achievements.?Patricia (Dooley) Lothrop Green, St. George's School, Newport, RICopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.