Call Me Moishe: The True Confessions of a White Whale

Call Me Moishe: The True Confessions of a White Whale. First Edition. Call Me Moishe: The True Confessions of a White Whale retells the story of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick by a survivor other than Ishmael, and there was one: Moby Dick himself. But of course Moby Dick can’t write: he was a whale and a fictional whale at that. Neither disqualifies him from getting his story out telepathically, by brain mail, in this case to Professor Morris (Moishe, Moe) Dickens, Professor of English at the University of Snowport in upstate New York. Whether this actually happens or Professor Dickens is out of his mind, or whether he is just a writer who has dreamed up a fantastic premise and dramatized it with himself as the protagonist, is not clear. Moishe’s girlfriend, Ellen Niagara, a psychiatric social worker, believes he has an imaginary playmate; her DSM-IV manual has an entire section devoted to such cases. She does not believe him to be dangerous. Moishe Dickens is in his late fifties during the novel, and author of several books. But he is bored with a professional life of monotonous piecework that offers him few challenges, so that Moby’s – Mo’s – intervention proves to be fortuitous. He takes up Mo’s cause as much out of professional self-interest as out of a desire to contribute to the protection of endangered whales and other oceanic mammals. And one more thing. His inner life is orchestrated by a jukebox that is on 24/7. He is involuntarily swept by tunes, and he commonly allows pop music phrases to make do for conversation. Some chapters are saturated with his sound track and are linked to You Tubes. Moby’s story follows the plot of Melville’s Moby-Dick, so that the pelagic events mirror Melville’s and the Pequod does go down at the end. However, five subplots weave loosely through the main story. One is the life of Moishe Dickens, which is glimpsed in vignettes. The second is a capsule history of Snowport, as personified in the fortunes of its founding family, the Melvilles, who made it in steel and steal. The third is the evolving relationship of Moe Dickens to his relentless imaginary double. The fourth consists of Snowport poets, named after members of the Pequod’s own crew. The fifth is Moby’s gathering of a pod of partisan whales who help him stalk and destroy the Pequod. Call Me Moishe ends in a double crescendo: the sinking of the Pequod and the collapse of the Snowport University English Department in Melville Hall during a poetry reading on New Year’s Eve 2000: “The Night the Muses Died.” A single insistent theme winds like the coils of an armature around all five: “Save the whales.” This edition of Call Me Moishe is the first of two editions and is text only. A later edition, lavishly-illustrated, will be published in mid-to-late summer of 2014.