Word: barish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...characters are as memorable as they are grotesque. Short, fat Ma Shemansky rules her Lower East Side tenement to cruelly that "she thinks she's just." Zelo Shemansky counters his wife's attacks by going into fits, "twitching like a toilet chain." While balancing the Shemansky powers, crippled son Barish fiendishly maximizes tension and antagonism. Then there are the long-absent daughter, Yahina (another Ma in the making), her husband, Feivet, a deaf mute, and her son, Pildesh, who while urinating from a fourth floor window, tumbles out. The savior of this twisted family is old, orange-eyed. Vossen Gleich...
Though his book is wildly comic, Simckes also means to be profound. Gleich's humanizing influence on the son, Barish, is subtle and significant, awakening in the previously uncommitted and detached narrator pity--even for the most twisted form of life. Simckes also suggests the crucial necessity of ritual and law in giving life dignity. Such lessons are well taken but, I'm afraid, seem contrived; Gleich is too much the deus ex machine. He appears abruptly, expounds Simckes' orthodox panacea, and departs suddenly. The Shemanskys are too incredible. From the first page, they are fantastic, insufferable, sick...