Word: greenfeld
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...PLACE FOR NOAH by Josh Greenfeld Holt, Rinehart& Winston; 310 pages...
Lesson one for writers: write about what you know. Lesson two: don't be surprised if you would rather not have known what you wrote about. In 1966 Josh Greenfeld, novelist, playwright and screenwriter (Harry and Tonto), and his Japanese-born wife Foumi had their second child. They named the infant Noah. At the time, Greenfeld was attracting attention as a resolutely independent journalist, and a critic with a nose for new talent and a style that cut effortlessly through literary baloney. Foumi was cultivating her own career as a painter, and together the Greenfelds looked forward to lives...
That conclusion appeared in A Child Called Noah (1972), Greenfeld's hypnotic day-by-day account of how a family survives and continues to love under the pressures of caring for a brain-damaged child. In 200 pages of brief takes, Greenfeld created a whole familial world. A Place for Noah is a sequel to that earlier diary, and together the two books are a contemporary classic that directly transmits the experience, emotions, conflicts, practical difficulties and even the humor that can attend such a domestic tragedy. Entry for March 5, 1973: "Last night we had Chinese food. Noah...
This private truth has made Greenfeld more sensitive to our common human feelings than most American men would choose to be. In spite of this his diary is never sentimental, self-pitying or gratuitously bitter. His anger at medical and educational bureaucracies, even at a fate that has dealt him what he calls "the joker in the bourgeois deck," is always tempered by stoic irony. "Instead of being a driven writer," he notes, "I have become a driving writer." Entry for Sept. 22, 1976, two days after Greenfeld's play I Have a Dream opened to rave reviews...
...take off our shoes before entering," says Foumi Greenfeld in a pronounced Japanese accent. She weighs only 95 Ibs., but she is not frail. Her hair is touched with gray, yet youthful energy and intelligence snap from her eyes. One is reminded of an enduring, middle-aged heroine in a Kurosawa film...