Word: groves
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...What happened to them?" she asks. "Did you lose contact with them?" He pauses. Shakes his head. "I don't know. We didn't know them that well, you know. That's the strange thing." Quiet settles over the table again. I ask, "But they did the right thing?" Grove offers a chilling display of his pragmatism. He looks at me, dry-eyed now: "They did the right thing because it worked. If they had got killed over it, it wouldn't have been the right thing...
...Grove, the right thing after the war was to try to fulfill his parents' dream--his father, somehow, had survived the Eastern front--of his getting into college. Science was not his first passion. At 14 he joined a local youth newspaper and fell hard for the joys of journalism: writing, thinking, exploring. "I loved it," he recalls--until a relative was detained without trial and Grove became persona non grata at the paper. Nearly 40 years later he wrote, "I did not want a profession in which a totally subjective evaluation, easily colored by political considerations, could decide...
This was another Grove passion: opera. Seduced by Carmen's "Toreador March" as a youngster, Grove dreamed of becoming an opera singer. He took lessons and sang around school. And in the weeks before he fled Hungary, Grove and a handful of classmates sang the first, murderously lovely scene of Don Giovanni in a Budapest recital. Grove can't remember if he took the part of the footman Leporello (who beseeches, "Potessi almeno di qua partir!" [I wish I could escape!]) or the blackguard Don Giovanni (who bellows, "Misiero! attendi se vuio morir!" [Wretch, stay if you would...
When the Soviets entered Budapest, Grove knew that was the time to leave. "There were growing rumors of people being rounded up on the street," he recalls. "I said, 'I could sit on my ass here and go out for a loaf of bread one day, and you'll never see me again. Or I can get out.' In today's terminology, one had an upside and the other didn't." Grove, not for the last time, bet his ass on the upside...
...United States, and I expected there would be some of the same because I was an immigrant. And there wasn't." From his spot in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where he was housed by an aunt and uncle who had left Hungary in the '30s, Grove devoured Eisenhower's America...