Word: ashkenazi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Israel Joshua Singer's big book, published two years ago, was The Brothers Ashkenazi, a chronicle of Polish Jewry told against a background of the textile industry of Lodz. Critics praised the vigor of its narrative, verisimilitude of its atmosphere, especially its detachment. Some critics called it a Polish Forsyte Saga; a few went so far as to call Author Singer the Polish Tolstoy...
...BROTHERS ASHKENAZI-I. Singer-Knopf...
...these aids to good reading, such books usually possess an elusive quality that critics call solidity: elaborate documentation on the social background, careful discussion of daily family battles, naturalistic reporting on the details of clothing, finances, property. True to this pattern to the point of tedium. The Brothers Ashkenazi resembles a Polish Forsyte Saga packed into one volume, is dullest in its accounts of its heroes, most interesting in its pictures of the growth of the industrial city of Lodz that flourished before the War, declined after...
...Yakob Ashkenazi were the twin sons of a pious Jew who wanted them to be rabbis. Max was calculating, clever, unscrupulous, ugly; Yakob openhanded, strong, a great favorite first with the girls and then with the heiresses who started him on his way to fortune. Because Max was considered one of the cleverest boys in the city he was selected as the bridegroom for lively, warm-hearted Dinah, daughter of a small manufacturer. But she loved Yakob who was attracted to her. In half-primitive, backward Lodz, periodically split by savage strikes of the Jewish and German weavers, by pogroms...