Word: chelms
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...town of Chelm, Singer's all-star cast shows the foolishness of unworldly wisdom. A congregation of elders, including Zeinvel Ninny, Feivel Thickwit, Dopey Lekisch, Gronam Ox and Shmendrick Numskull, encourages a wealthy man to move to the slums and live forever; after all, the records show that no one of means has ever died there. And when a huge carp slaps Gronam Ox with his tail, he sentences the fish to capital punishment: death by drowning in a lake...
Three stories illustrate the lives of the poor in czarist Russia. In Chelm, some imbecilic peasants play tricks on the village naif (Jack Gilford). For sage advice the victim consults the local, and unfunny, rabbi: "Why is the sea salty?" "Because of the herrings who live in it.'' In The Bandit, Gilford plays Aleichem himself, terrified by a thief, then retelling his role, à la Falstaff, as heroic. In The High School, the longest and most didactic episode, Gilford plays a domineering and ignorant father whose son is anxious to leave the ghetto for the new century. Between...
...government promptly denounced the strike as a political act, and the union claimed that police in Crackow and Chelm detained 15 Solidarity members for putting up strike posters. Nowhere, however, were the printers prevented from striking. The government ran off skeleton newspapers on army presses and managed to put out a sizable run of the armed forces daily, Zolnierz Wolnosci. The Communist Party paper, Trybuna Ludu, printed only 150,000 copies of its normal 1.1 million circulation. Most news vendors obeyed a Solidarity call not to sell papers...
Concern over food supplies kept the labor struggle pulsing. Workers in Piotrkow Trybunalski, southwest of Warsaw, occupied local government offices for four days before authorities agreed to provide more meat and butter. Meat rations were also increased in the eastern town of Chelm, where workers held a one-hour strike to protest short supplies. Solidarity, meanwhile, announced a "massive petition drive" for the release of seven political prisoners. In another move that may have repercussions, Solidarity seemed to spurn a government proposal for alternate Saturdays off. The union has been insisting on every Saturday, as the authorities promised last September...
...enterprises hit by strikes. More significant, the workers won the regime's promise not to retaliate against strike leaders. Even as the Lublin walkout ended, other strikes were bursting out: at the Stalowa Wola steel mill about 50 miles south of Lublin, among transport workers in Chelm 40 miles to the east, among newspaper deliverymen in Warsaw, at an agricultural machinery plant in Wroclaw. The strikes came in the midst of an economic crisis that could compel the regime to impose further austerity. If it does, there are few signs that the people will go along...