Word: laban
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...radically different dance took root first in Germany shortly before the War when Rudolf von Laban propounded his theory that the important thing was free, inspired movement regardless of its form, that music was unnecessary, at best a mere appendage to real dynamic feeling. Laban theorized down to the smallest detail, studied movements in relation to character and mental attitudes. First to give his ideas concrete expression was his pupil, Mary Wigman, a tense, rawboned woman who was 27 before she decided on a dancer's career. Wigman soon claimed that she could feel herself...
...they will not be disappointed. Author Mann has woven the threads of myth, history and fiction into a story of consummate artistry, but from time to time he deliberately breaks the thread, ties it into the deeper pattern of the tale's symbolic background. Joseph, Jacob, Isaac, Esau, Laban, Rachel, Leah take on vivid lifelikeness as characters in their own right, but at the same time their outlines are misty with suggestions of their ancestors and their posterity. Says Author Mann: 'I do not conceal from myself the difficulty of writing about people who do not precisely know...
...sitting in the moonlight by the side of a well. Their conversation rouses Jacob's ready memories, which the tale follows back to their beginning: his cheating his elder brother Esau out of their father Isaac's blessing; his flight from Esau's wrath to Laban's far-off farmstead; the long years he spent there serving the closefisted Laban that he might marry his daughter Rachel; how Laban in turn cheated him, substituting his other daughter Leah ; how Jacob ended by marrying them both and taking his family and riches back to his own country...
...matters of minor fact. Thus he says that Jacob's only daughter Dinah was older, not younger, than her brothers Issachar and Zebulun; suggests that Isaac was well aware that he was blessing Jacob instead of Esau; asserts that Jacob demonstrably served 25, not 20 years, with Laban; supplies Rachel's age at her death (41). He puts in Isaac's dying mouth a babbled prophecy that stretches back to Abraham, forward to Christ. Laban, unlucky until Jacob came to live with him, had sought to propitiate the gods by burying alive his infant...
...from thee too, Jacob, I am sore to part, for we were the right ones for each other. And now thou must muse alone and learn without Rachel who God is. Learn, then, and fare well. And forgive too,' she breathed, 'that I stole the teraphim.' [Laban's household gods.] Then Death passed over her countenance and put out its light...