Word: kugel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...frenzied activity-cleaning, shopping, preparing meals in advance for the tranquility and family intimacy of Saturday. There are some personal satisfactions. At sundown, after the wife lights the candles preceding the traditional Sabbath-eve dinner (typical menu: gefilte fish, matzoh-ball soup, chicken or beef, potato kugel), the husband often chants an ancient song of praise for his wife. Drawn from Proverbs 31, it begins: "A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels." Says Mrs. Baris: "I obviously don't need it for my ego, but I've rushed and worked hard...
...PETER KUGEL...
...appreciate The Crucible without actually going to it (and if you haven't gone already, for Heaven's sake don't), you have to have savored a potato kugel heartburn. Potato kugel is a greasy dish made of ground potatoes, egg, and too much chicken schmaltz. Going down it is very smooth, but it keeps on insisting how good it tasted all evening long...
Mirsky's story, a humorous parody of the recent space of identity crisis fiction, unfortunately is marred by most of the major flaws of recent American Jewish fiction--not to mention a few offenses that are uniquely Mirsky's. "Lukshin Kugel" is sloppily sentimental, affecting an uncritical nostalgia for the ghetto, and is narrated in a shoulder-shrugging Yiddish tone that is not maintained consistently. In one moment, the narrator sounds like a much-oppressed peasant from the Russian Pale ("Myself, I say, you never know when a pogrom is going to come along. One minute you're in Minsk...
...Yiddish words; his extraordinary stress on Jewish self-abasement, passivity, and lamentation in Twirckoff's response to crisis; his condescending attitude toward his protagonist; and the intrusion of a phony mystical hallucination at the end to get Twirckoff off the spiritual hook--all of these flaws keep "Lukshin Kugel" from creating any unified effect...