Word: bittersweetness
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This is an appealing little autobiographical sketch, now published in English, by a writer who was as close to the folk stream of East European Jewish life as blintzes and borsch. In countless stories (The Old Country, Adventures of Mattel) he humorously chronicled the bittersweet life of the late 19th-century eastern ghettos-pious, self-contained, but poised on the brink of a new Diaspora to Western Europe and America. Born Solomon Rabinowitz, and raised in the little village of Voronko, Russia, the hero of The Great Fair is a "pretty boy with fat red cheeks," who can convulse...
With a cultured snort at reports that he would soon perform in a Las Vegas pleasure dome for $35,000 a week, British Playwright Noel Coward, in the U.S. ostensibly to browse around Broadway, showed a bittersweet regard for the prospect of such easy money: "I keep on getting offers, and what I am offered is often trebled by the press, which gives me a lovely false feeling of prosperity." But Las Vegas nonetheless holds a certain attraction for Coward, who has long lived opulently by his wits: "They do pay the most extraordinary kind of money...
Humor v. Sorrow. The same garnished taste spoils the plays La Sainte Courti-sane and Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and even De Profundis itself. The fairy tales are still charming to read, though they, too, present a problem: peopled with Disney characters who serve only to make bittersweet, intellectual points, they are neither for children (who prefer Grimmer stuff) nor wholly for adults, but perhaps only for people in those in-between years that British Novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (TIME, Nov. 22) so happily calls the "tweens...
...need of names to brighten its roster, Mexico's short-handed (membership: barely 5,000) Communist Party offered a bittersweet welcome to a long-lost comrade, Painter Diego Rivera, 67. In 1929, Comrade Rivera was excommunicated because of his growing list of deviations. He had fallen into the habit of firing off peppery pronunciamentos without first clearing them with the proper Red monitors. Confessed loose-lipped Rivera: "I got kicked out for shooting off my mouth." He later even gave haven in his home for two years to Leon Trotsky. Back in the fold again last week, Rivera...
...only partly the singer's fault that three songs of Faure did not come off quite so well. Set to poems by de Lisle, Silvestre, and Verlaine, they typify that bittersweet, almost perfumed school of French music on the border of out-and-out Impressionism. Utmost delicacy and nuance are needed to convince the listener that "jets of slender fountains sob with ecstasy." Samuel Walter's piano accompaniment, although accurate, completely neglected the musical imagery. Miss Wheeler, for her part, lacks the technique of "French" projection--a sharply defined, almost nasal quality--that the vocal lines demand. She was more...