Word: gleich
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fiendishly maximizes tension and antagonism. Then there are the long-absent daughter, Yahina (another Ma in the making), her husband, Feivet, a deaf mute, and her son, Pildesh, who while urinating from a fourth floor window, tumbles out. The savior of this twisted family is old, orange-eyed. Vossen Gleich, with his lopsided chest ("one side sunk in, the other humped and swollen to his chin"), who ends his virginity with poor, sickly Mrs. Charpolsky--from downstairs...
Into this madhouse prances Vossen Gleich with an admonitory "Oi, Shemanskys!" He pours out a stream of instructions on how to live together and how to mourn. Gleich is a nut too, but different from the Shemanskys: fortified with faith in ritual and his own deep warmth, Gleich temporarily stuns the Shemanskys into their tradition: to mourn, to rend their clothes, to talk compassionately of the dead idiot child. The Shemanskys, however, soon evict Gleich (who had moved in with Mrs. Charpolsky) and, as Ma dictates, do not mourn for Zadie (the Shemansky grandfather and financial supporter who died...
Though his book is wildly comic, Simckes also means to be profound. Gleich's humanizing influence on the son, Barish, is subtle and significant, awakening in the previously uncommitted and detached narrator pity--even for the most twisted form of life. Simckes also suggests the crucial necessity of ritual and law in giving life dignity. Such lessons are well taken but, I'm afraid, seem contrived; Gleich is too much the deus ex machine. He appears abruptly, expounds Simckes' orthodox panacea, and departs suddenly. The Shemanskys are too incredible. From the first page, they are fantastic, insufferable, sick...