Word: greenbergs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everyone remembers 1968, and most of over-40 Detroit remembers, at least vaguely, Hank Greenberg, Schoolboy Rowe and the class of '45. And everybody has heard Sparky Anderson's too-loud propaganda about the 90 wins in 1980 and the division title in '81. But the real action is now, as the Tigers finish out another long summer at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull...
...strumming the guitar as a boy in Brooklyn. Later, while studying musicology at N.Y.U., he met Kay, a pianist whose landlord had forbidden her to practice in her apartment. She took up the recorder as a consolation, and Michael experimented with accompanying her on the lute. Inspired by Noah Greenberg's pioneering New York Pro Musica, they "roped in a few friends," and the Waverly Consort-named for Waverly Place, a street that runs past the N.Y.U. campus-was born...
Although the whimsy in this story is nicely done, Bessie's punishment strikes a censorious note that is less happily picked up throughout the book. Greenberg draws a number of characters only so that she can quarter them. A young man smuggles cocaine from Mexico into the U.S. and meets up with a malakh, a Jewish angel who subjects him to humiliating lectures: "Whenever the Lord has been convinced to widen His mercy or extend His patience it has been at the behest of a fool. You are such a fool...
...reader may agree wholeheartedly with such statements and still have an uneasy feeling. Greenberg displays little of the sympathy she expended on the mentally ill in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) and on the deaf in In This Sign (1972). People in these stories are self-maimed, and get treated accordingly. The artistic regimen is ascetic. "Talmudic Law," one of her characters explains, "forbids the overdecorated letter, a letter for art's sake and not for the formation of legible words." Nothing is overdecorated here; Greenberg spends little time telling where her characters live or what...
What remains clearly legible throughout is Greenberg's complaint against contemporary society and what one character calls the "weekend-guest view of life." Aunt Bessie bobbing helplessly across her ceiling is a comic parable of the effects of freethinking, except that the author is not laughing. Her stony integrity often redeems these stories from irritating knuckle-rapping. They engage the mind, unsettle it and survive as disputatious reminders of first principles and last things. -Paul Gray