Word: czech
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...SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Set in Nazi-controlled Slovakia in 1942, this perfectly played Czech masterpiece reduces an awesome tragedy to human size. Its seriocomic hero is a well-meaning Aryan nonentity (Josef Kroner) who seizes the button shop owned by a feeble, trusting old Jewess (Ida Kaminska) and finds himself a partner in her fate...
Suddenly two Viet Cong, who had slipped into the village the night before and hidden in a nearby house, burst in on the 40 worshipers. One fired a Czech burp gun, instantly killing the two officiating priests and Tuong's aunt, and hitting Tuong in the shoulder. Unable to draw his pistol, Tuong ran. A second burst cut him down in mid-courtyard. As so often happens in the terrorist war, the two assassins escaped in the confusion. In angry frustration, Tuong's nephew seized a long knife, raced next door and stabbed to death...
...worse than a Hitchcock movie," muttered the Frenchman. But no one was listening. Huddled in a dingy back room of Carnegie Hall last week, the seven finalists in the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Music Competition were wrapped in a cocoon of suspense, nervously awaiting the verdict of the judges. The Czech stared vacant-eyed at the wall; the Japanese seemed mesmerized by his feet. The German bustled around the room collecting autographs. The Chilean idly felt his wrist, suddenly exclaimed: "I have no pulse! My heart has stopped...
...problems that have not been solved," said the committee, "represent the loss of many thousands of millions of crowns." (There are 7.2 Czech crowns to the dollar.) "Consumers have not had a large enough influence on assortment, quality and range of production," the preamble continued, and production is so low that "living standards in this country greatly lag behind those of mature capitalist countries." Frankly admitting that it will take years to shake the economy out of its planning straitjacket, the committee justifies the switch in ringing words: "The development of the socialist way of life has nothing in common...
...nearly 18 months, Prague economists and apparatchiks have been hard at work on "NEM"-a New Economic Model for the nation designed to liberate the Czech economy from the worst rigidities of Stalinist central planning and to introduce widespread Western profit incentives for factory managers. Though the plan has yet to be unveiled, last week Prague's Central Committee published a 19,000-word preamble to NEM that was remarkable in its candor about past mistakes...