Word: hutzpa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Messrs. Morey and Paul have taken considerable liberties with Moses' brief account of the rise and fall of the tower of Babel. In the nine verses of the original (Gen,: xi, 1-9), the tower is a monument to hutzpa; in their musical play, Morey and Paul suggest that, in fact, it symbolized fraud and sham. And they and their small cast argue so wittily and so tunefully that I am inclined to take their word...
...such great nostalgic demand that Dear Me arrived on Broadway as a presold hit, with $400,000 in advance ticket sales and a golden barge train of 365 theater parties in tow. Its chief asset is Gertrude Berg, a supermom with a heart as big as her hutzpa...
Here Robbins' bad taste becomes really impressive; setting a new West Coast record for hutzpa, he supplies an "inside" ending to the murder case quite different from what the court determined in the actual Stompanato affair. But this is merely a matter for quiet pride; what is important is that Robbins climbs out of his garbage heap smelling like money...
Other sections of Contemporaries are more satisfactory: in essays collectively called "Relevance of the American Past," Kazin is on his own, his native grounds--and, although he has had the hutzpa to reprint the preface from the Riverside paper-back edition of Moby Dick (the edition with all those foolish notes), he has good, sometimes brillant things to say about Thoreau, Stephen Crane and John Jay Chapman, among others. In a later section of the book, he gets into his real meat, the turn-of-the-century naturalists and the generation of the '20's and '30's. Here...