The Beggar's Cup Author:Eric Blau Morris Cohen, movie mogul, is the undisputed King of Horror, powerful and wealthy. But as a child he hid alone in the forests of Poland while his entire village was consumed by the Holocaust, and was saved only by a vision of the great Zionist leader that came to him in his madness and despair. — Years later, tormented still, Cohen conceives of t... more »he magnum opus that will redeem him at last: a film about Herzl, who failed in his desperate attempt to establish a Jewish homeland and yet remains, perhaps, "the greatest Jew since Moses." Cohen then recruits Zachary Barthelmes, an accomplished if skeptical screenwriter who soon becomes obsessed with Herzl, and with the magic and complexity of the Holy Land. Barthelmes and his girlfriend encounter a remarkable range of people - from one of the "fixers" who armed the infant Israel to an Upper West Side rabbi who converts the Gentiles, or refuses to - and the results are miraculous: life is breathed into the clay of history and into a man long dead and mostly forgotten.
The Beggar's Cup is the story of a country fighting for both its ideals and its survival, and of men and women grappling with their own lives and beliefs. In their experiences we find a heroic love story (indeed, several of them) and an equally heroic suicide; the mysteries of families and nations; acts of both God and war; and the world - horrifying, unbearably sad, beautiful - as we ourselves find it.« less