Word: jakob
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SPECULATIONS ABOUT JAKOB (240 pp.)-Uwe Johnson-Grove...
...Jakob of the book's title is a line dispatcher in a smoggy railhead city on the Elbe in East Germany. The story opens with his death-run over by a switch engine one foggy night. Was it an accident? Suicide? Was he pushed...
Faulknerian Fragments. The reader is soon plunged into a bewildering narrative jigsaw puzzle that reconstructs Jakob's life. Snippets of dialogue between Jakob's co-workers alternate with long Faulknerian monologues by a state security officer who has been shadowing Jakob. Small, never entirely explained incidents-like the sudden flight of Jakob's mother to the West-switch abruptly to recollections of Jakob by a girl who grew up with his family and has long since escaped to West Berlin. Piecing these fragments together reveals a shadowy plot. But in the process of finding out what happens...
...Jakob is hemmed in by the paraphernalia of a semipolice state-threats of jail, surveillance, party slogans. Jakob's mother and the girl are already in the West. Why doesn't Jakob join them? Jakob is not fond of the party, or of the Russians. But he takes pride in doing his job well. When a Russian troop train must be rushed through to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he shunts off local traffic to let it pass. He rejects a colleague's suggestion that the switchmen should hold it up. Such a gesture...
...personal tributes by many of Wolfson's closest associates, such as Profs. Jakob Rosenberg, Morton White, Austin W. Scott and the late Arthur Darby Nock are deeply touching in their sincerity and warmth, and evoke a vivid picture of Wolfson's Harvard--Widener Library, "Wolfson's table" at the Faculty Club, the Square, and the University (now Harvard Square) Theater. It is at once one of the great things about Harvard and one of the saddest that these everyday sights mean so many different things to so many people. To Wolfson pre-eminently they are a setting for "his work...