Word: foremans
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...most of these good Europeans carried the fate of the wanderer in their blood. They took off their airs as they put on their work clothes, willing to do anything to survive. Composer Paul Dessau was a hired hand on a chicken farm; Writer Walter Mehring became a warehouse foreman; Philosopher Heinrich Blucher shoveled chemicals in a factory. In the sassy spirit of Berlin cabarets of the 1920s, they devised impromptu dictionaries of slang, with emphasis on "dough" and "bread." Twelve-tone Composer Arnold Schoenberg dispensed to fellow exiles his one-note advice for social success: When in doubt, smile...
Initially, Berger's storyline seems to have been teased out of a W.C. Fields film like The Bank Dick. Hornbeck's Dolf Beeler, "a burly, beer-bellied foreman," enters Bud Bullard's Millville hardware store for a can of paint remover. The dead cigar butt in Beeler's mouth leads to an argument about smoking on premises stocked with flammable merchandise. The appearance of Bullard's cousin Reverton is a piece of unfortunate timing. Rev is a bitter geezer who lies about being a railroad detective and carries a starter pistol to intimidate his enemies...
Though a comedy, Moscow Circles is dense with darker implications as Erofeev mercilessly reveals the absurdities of Soviet life. The reader learns, for example, of his stint as a construction foreman; the workers would lay some cable one day, get drunk, take it out the next, get drunk, and so on ad nauseam. He was eventually fired because he made the system more efficient--be dispensed with the cable altogether. The turgid rhetoric of state propaganda is lampooned in the workers' hypocritical socialist pledges, but the humor does not eclipse more sinister themes: "I like the fact that my compatriots...
...court. The FBI man struck a deal with Borders: for $150,000, the Romanos' three-year sentence would be reduced to probation. Borders received the money, and last year he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The evidence against Borders was "overwhelming," said the jury foreman after only one hour's deliberation...
Moonlighting. Four Polish laborers spend an edgy month in London-December 1981, when Poland fell under martial law. Writer-Director Jerzy Sko-limowski has devised a bitterly funny metaphor for the dilemma of the liberal tyrant. As the foreman, isolated from his workers and his own best instincts, Jeremy Irons is quietly spectacular...