Word: ghettoes
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Analysts tirelessly?and correctly ?say that unemployment, slum housing, inadequate schools and the pathology of the ghetto contribute to the spreading scourge of youth crime. But the reverse is also true: the ripple effects of crime eventually overwhelm a city and destroy its élan. People are frightened away from downtown, reducing business for stores, theaters, restaurants. In their place, thick as weeds, sprout porno houses, massage parlors and gambling havens, where criminals thrive...
Particularly in the ghetto, the gang gives a kid the structured life he has never had at home or anywhere else. The peer pressure to enlist is almost irresistible. Rico, 17, joined a Puerto Rican gang in Chicago for "protection, man, protection. I was a skinny little kid, and I was tired of having hassles. You don't last long if you don't belong to a club. You can always count on having someone stand up for you." A 14-year-old boy who committed frequent robberies in Central Falls, R.I., and once smashed 350 windowpanes...
...Soweto's one hotel now sleeps proudly on a water bed. True, no one can really escape the numbing boredom of being restricted at night to what is little better than a vast labor camp. But there is a new mood of assertiveness in this huge, dispiriting ghetto, and The Children-whose goal goes well beyond such rewards-have started...
Made in East Germany, this bleak, elegiac tale suggests that lies like Jacob's may be a necessary, if sometimes fatal condition of life. A young ghetto girl can sleep with her lover only by pretending that the lover's roommate is deaf and dumb-then, after the roommate is dead, by pretending that he is still there. Jacob (movingly played by Czechoslovak Actor Vlastimil Brodsky) has no choice but to indulge the illusions of his adopted niece, who is entranced when he slips around a corner and mimics a radio broadcast, complete with an interview with Winston...
...bringing her what she thinks is a cloud-a pillow-sized mass of cotton (an analogy, perhaps, to Jacob's trying to cure his neighbors by bringing them what they think is hope). The implication, indeed, is that these colorful visions persist amid the gray rubble of the ghetto just as the human spirit persists amid intolerance and oppression. But Jacob the Liar is too rigorous to claim any sort of triumph for that spirit - only that it is there...