Word: papa
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Like.Marjorie, Wouk was born in The Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. Both parents came from Minsk, Russia. Papa Wouk started washing clothes in a basement, rose to be president of one of New York's largest power laundries. One of Herman's earliest memories is playing hide and seek among the machines. The Wouk family was "restless, like most New Yorkers," and while Herman was still a child, made four moves, from one canyonlike apartment house to another, all within what Wouk calls "that romantic, and much overcriticized borough," The Bronx...
...love that Mama and Papa Wouk lavished on him, his sister Irene and his brother Victor warms Herman to this day. Best of all he liked the Sabbath. As a rabbi's daughter, "Mama was treated rather like a princess around the house." But when Friday afternoon came, "she scrubbed the kitchen on her hands and knees until the place shone. The candles were lit, and we sang the joyful Sabbath hymns and drank the sacramental wine; the children, too. My father usually talked about the Bible." As in Marjorie Morgenstern's home, the menu was always gefilte...
...yesterday's glass of beer. Their strained efforts to rekindle brotherly love first produce boredom, then brotherly loathing. Kelly has degenerated into a Broadway fast-buck man who manages a double-dealing prizefighter; Dailey has overblown himself into a slobbish, ulcer-ridden TV idea man; Kidd, the papa of five of them, runs a crummy Schenectady diner specializing in "Cordon Blue" hamburgers...
...broader, slapstick way, Fernandel in Sheep takes on the tricky business of multiple roles, after the fashion of Alec (Kind Hearts and Coronets) Guinness. Separately, and in some technically flawless group scenes, he plays Papa Saint-Forget, a crippled, bitter old vintner, and five quintuplet sons, Alain, Bernard, Charles, Désiré, and Etienne. The episodic action begins in Trezignan, a French village where some 39 years before the film begins, Papa Saint-Forget, wanting a daughter, has become the unhappy parent of the five boys. In an effort to revive the prosperity that was Trezignan's when...
...Papa Saint-Forget would just as soon forget his offspring-they had been taken away from him as infants and designated a "national monument" by the government. To make matters worse, the five, in the old man's view, had all turned out unsatisfactorily. "At their mother's funeral," he fumes, "they appeared, wearing gloves!" Nevertheless, the committee decides to go ahead with the fete, dispatches the boys' godfather to round them up. As portrayed by Fernandel, they are an odd lot indeed...