Word: fidelman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming and plotting on the part of the prize jury...
...theme is most explicitly stated in The Last Mohican, a wry and witty fable about a serious-minded student named Fidelman who goes to Italy to write a monograph on Giotto. He scarcely steps from his train in Rome before his personal Old Man of the Sea latches onto him: one Shimon Susskind, a slat-thin Jewish refugee from, of all places, Israel ("The desert air makes me constipated...
...Five?" Susskind's hand is always out, while his mind is nimbly at work on projects that range from the selling of nylons to the peddling of statues of the Virgin Mary. Fidelman desperately attempts to fend him off, first with handouts, then with insults, but Susskind clings like chewing gum to a shoe: he pops up in a trattoria to spoil Fidelman's appetite by hungrily watching him eat; he stands shivering at his side to shame Fidelman for having warm clothing. Given four dollars, Susskind contemptuously counts the money, demands: "If four, then why not five...
...title story, the Old Man of the Sea is played by an extraordinarily antic marriage broker who enmeshes a young rabbinical student as thoroughly as Susskind did Fidelman. The Mourners tells of a gross landlord who, in trying to dispossess an unhinged tenant, becomes instead his brother. The Loan joins a man who desperately needs help with one who desperately wants to give it but cannot: they "embraced and sighed over their lost youth. They pressed mouths together and parted forever.'' Behold the Key is a vastly comic story of a young American whose search for an inexpensive...
Reaction was quick to come. Resort Owner Irving Fidelman, of nearby South Haven, declared that he would test the legality of Hendricks' experiment, probably on the grounds that using school classrooms for religious instruction is an unauthorized use of tax-supported public property: "Children meet in the school as Americans ... There should be no division ... to set them apart.'' His own three children, he added, were getting instruction in the Jewish faith outside school four times a week. In Lansing, State Senator Charles S. Blondy blasted the Bangor sessions as "an improper intrusion of religion...