Word: maxed
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...Max begins his quest immediately after arriving in Warsaw. He ogles a group of young women sitting alone at a cafe. He makes eyes at a middle-aged married grandmother. He also begins to seduce the beautiful and impressionable Tsirele, daughter of the neighborhood's virtuous rabbi, telling her that his wife is dead and giving her money with the secret hope that he'll "be able to come to an understanding with...
Accordingly, impotence is what Scum is all about. As Singer writes, "Max knew that he had really come to Poland looking for a girlfriend." Even though there are a variety of other "matters to settle," including visiting his parents' graves in the country to repent for having abandoned them without a word, the only thing that Max seems to pay any attention to in Poland...
With so many effortlessly available (or tantalizingly unavailable) women around, it is not surprising that our Casanova overcomes his physical impotence. The reader is also not puzzled when Max permanently abandons any hope of retrieving his moral potency. By the chaotic end of the novel, he has become incoherent and amoral, a prisoner of his own cravings...
...Max's old neighbors suffer at the hands of the new society. Tsirele's father is impoverished and powerless under new legal codes, and her brother, educated in a state-run Jewish school, loafs about on the balcony, out of school for a secular holiday. Even Max's friends, the old Warsaw lowlifes, feel that they have lost control of the city's crime networks...
...Max lives up to the book's title--indeed, his amorality and ultimate powerlessness make his character supremely unsympathetic. However, Singer enables the reader to appreciate Max's society even as we grow to dislike him. The presentation of decaying Jewish Warsaw is thoroughly moving, perhaps more so because the culture was completely destroyed during World...