Word: gimpel
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...race, in red Colorado, Al Gore won the support of more than 42% of the voters. Bush won 41% in blue California. If every state adopted 36's rules, those supporters' votes would count for something. "It could make California and New York worth a Republican effort," says James Gimpel, an Electoral College expert at the University of Maryland. "Wouldn't it be nice, if you were a Democrat in Texas, to actually see a Democratic presidential candidate visit?" The reform would also greatly reduce the chance of a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote...
Singer had every right to act the celebrity, yet he was never at home in the modern style. His works were often published first in Yiddish in The Jewish Daily Forward and later in translation. Saul Bellow brought him wide recognition by rendering the poignant anecdote Gimpel the Fool in English. But royalties were slow to arrive, and for many years Singer lived modestly on the earnings of his second wife Alma, a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Until late in life he kept his name in the Manhattan phone book, and at lunch hour he could be found munching...
...hardly obsolete. All of Singer's short fiction, from long-established classics like Gimpel the Fool to the latest story, hot off the presses, is amazingly of a piece. Three basic formulas are constantly repeated. Unrest stirs a rural Polish village, thanks to the mischief of its inhabitants and their attendant demons. An aspiring young author passes his time in Warsaw visiting the Yiddish Writers' Club and storing up everything he hears and does. An older incarnation of the same man, expatriated from Poland and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, submits willingly to readers and strangers who come...
...characters so severely while they achieve it. His no-nonsense prose prohibits moral posturing. All of these stories were written first in Yiddish, a language that draws rough vitality from the vernacular; Singer has seen to it that his many translators preserve the outspoken qualities of the originals. (Gimpel the Fool was rendered in English by Saul Bellow, a rare instance of one future Nobel laureate transcribing another.) And the passage of time has ratified Singer's vision of the living and the dead busily coexisting. The places of many of his stories are no more, their inhabitants long...
...worked as a salesclerk in Manhattan department stores. By the time of his brother's death in 1944, Singer had become a recognized writer-but only to readers of a dying language. One of them was a young novelist named Saul Bellow, who translated Singer's tale, Gimpel the Fool, the story of a village simpleton transfigured by the belief that the next world "will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception." Remembers Singer: "This story brought me so much popularity-somehow I have the strange feeling that all the literary people in America read that...