We consider ourselves worldly folks here at the Screengrab, with a wide array of interests and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture minutiae. But every once in a while, we’re reminded that there’s an inexhaustible supply of weirdness in the world. Perhaps my colleagues were already aware of “Stalags,” but I’d never heard of them before reading Beyond the Multiplex this morning. “As many older Israelis apparently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as 'Stalags,' whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable.
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