Word: lodz
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Israel Joshua Singer's big book, published two years ago, was The Brothers Ashkenazi, a chronicle of Polish Jewry told against a background of the textile industry of Lodz. Critics praised the vigor of its narrative, verisimilitude of its atmosphere, especially its detachment. Some critics called it a Polish Forsyte Saga; a few went so far as to call Author Singer the Polish Tolstoy...
Before their personal rivalry reached its great climax the War broke. Max made another fortune in Russia, was arrested by the Bolsheviks, saved by his brother, who was killed in an anti-Semitic outbreak. Max returned to Lodz to build still another fortune. But the prosperity of Lodz had depended on the Russian market, and as panic followed inflation the grimy "Manchester of Europe" lost its reason for being, and Max symbolically died as his city began to stagnate...
...details of clothing, finances, property. True to this pattern to the point of tedium. The Brothers Ashkenazi resembles a Polish Forsyte Saga packed into one volume, is dullest in its accounts of its heroes, most interesting in its pictures of the growth of the industrial city of Lodz that flourished before the War, declined after...
...started him on his way to fortune. Because Max was considered one of the cleverest boys in the city he was selected as the bridegroom for lively, warm-hearted Dinah, daughter of a small manufacturer. But she loved Yakob who was attracted to her. In half-primitive, backward Lodz, periodically split by savage strikes of the Jewish and German weavers, by pogroms that were encouraged by the Tsarist police, the two brothers soon became business rivals. Max coldly divorced Dinah in order to marry a woman whose fortune would aid his plans. Yakob thereupon married Max's daughter...
...going down to the Bialystok station when "Maxie's" special train is going through to Warsaw, sometimes gets enough money to pay a month's rent, sometimes only one of Maxie's cigars, sometimes a cuffing from Maxie's Red Guards. Last week in Lodz the potent Bolshevik's indigent old sister Ester was shoved into the street by an irate landlord who dumped her furniture on the pavement...