Word: perelman
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Like some of the wilder prophets of the Old Testament-like Hosea or Micah or perhaps Jeremiah-Eliezer Perelman was a visionary possessed by one irresistible idea. He even spoke once of the transcendent moment in which it came to him: "Suddenly, like lightning before my eyes, my thoughts flew across the Balkans . . . to Palestine, and I heard a . . voice calling to me: The revival of Israel and its language in the land of its forefathers...
...Eliezer Perelman to hear such a voice and think such thoughts? A nobody, a young scholar in Vilna, on the Baltic coast of what was then the Russian empire, the land of the pogrom. Perelman knew Russian, French and German, but what bewitched him was Hebrew, the scriptural language that he had first learned from a tutor at the age of three. Ever since the Jews were driven from Roman Palestine in A.D. 135, Hebrew had survived only as a literary language, primarily of prayer; nobody had actually spoken it in everyday affairs for centuries. It did not even have...
...cubic yard. But it comes flirtatiously close to novelizing, a practice Keillor claims in a funny preface to have forsworn after one grotesquely bad unpublishable failure. He writes short pieces, he says, in homage to The New Yorker's former great infield of James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White...
...formidable array of interior evidence from the work--Proust's Madeleine was in reality a matzo ball, and the past unfolded itself to the Master as he sat hunched over a bowl of chicken soup in Flambaum's, the famous kosher restaurant in Paris..." And, almost invariably, the Perelman opening moves are as fine as always. For example, the beginning of "All Precincts Beware--Pater Tigress Loose" is a vintage piece--" Saturnine, Tweedy Gabe Hammerschlag, head of N.Y.P.D.'s Confidence Detail, struck a match on his desk top and, sucking the flame into the bowl of his pipe, eyed...
...somehow, things loosen up along the way. The jokes flow less smoothly and one's attention wanes as the story progresses. In his best work, Perelman's words crowd together on the page and jab at you continually. Here they seem to spread out and sit more complacently. It is a shame that in our last glimpse of this fine writer, he is not at his best...