This cassette contains three Chanukah stories commissioned by National Public Radio for broadcast in November and December of 1994, which is probably why you get a genuine orchestra for incidental music instead of cheap electronic effects. Oboes and bassoons come up in the break before the coda of Ellison's story, “Go Toward the Light,” and are joined by strings under his voice.
That voice is considerably more husky, even hoarse, than on earlier recordings. Matty's a first-person narrator, so there's plenty of huffing and puffing, chuckles, brief interjections and imprecations, and repeated words and phrases. Ellison delivers the line "I raised the jagged rock ... and crushed his face to a pulp" in a tight rasp and tone that one has never heard from him before.
If the story is not one his stronger efforts, the two other tales, by Chaim Potok and Rebecca Goldstein, are even more slight. Potok's narrator is a Jewish "chaplain" in the U.S. Army, in 1956 Korea, and the tale mostly involves what goes on around him -- from a leave in Japan where he blessedly stops being just a Jew for once, to the way Israel's war with the British and French armies in the Sinai affect the lives of Jews and anti-Semites in the American Army. The Goldstein story is even more delicate; it ends right when an interesting crisis starts to develop.
If your humble reviewer may be permitted a brief toot on his own horn, this early version of "Go Toward the Light" also lacks a parenthetical comment explaining how Stephen Hawking could have survived well into the twenty-first century, which I urged Ellison to include in the version that was printed in Slippage. He grumbled, but he did it.
“Go Toward the Light” was reissued in 2001 by Audio Literature as part of the collection, “The Voice From the Edge: Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral.”
