Word: perera
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...good many Americans appear to distrust their own currency, and fear that foreigners will not accept it. The U.S. offices of Perera Co. Inc., money dealers, are thronged with tourists seeking to buy foreign money, or traveler's checks denominated in ten foreign currencies, before they go overseas. They worry that if they take dollars, the price in foreign money will sink farther before they reach their destinations. Nicholas Deak, head of Deak & Co. Inc., which owns the Perera offices, wonders how Perera's staff will get through the summer. "They are already exhausted, and the peak tourist...
Much is genuinely funny in Perera's saga of a guilt-ridden innocent abroad. Bendana has a mad. malapropriate sister, who feels "like a fish in Coca-Cola" instead of a fish out of water. He finds himself standing on the road before a brothel "tallying figures in his head, wondering uneasily if they would take a traveler's check." There are lapses, of course. Perera slumps toward collegiate humor or into yuks too obviously derived from the new school of American-Jewish humor. His story line suffers the common affliction of the picaresque novel, midsection...
Gamble on Change. Last week lines of tourists bought up pounds, francs and yen from Deak's Perera Co., busiest currency exchange in the U.S. and only one of Deak's skein of 20 currency "stores." The tourist trade is a small part of Deak's business; his plumpest profits come from the active shufflings of currencies in crisis. "Whenever countries are not stable," says Deak, "their currencies are heavily traded." Currency speculators and companies operating in inflation-ridden countries such as Brazil or Italy try to conserve the value of their cash by buying or selling...
...modern questioning of traditional ethics. Christianity has taken a dramatic position on this issue, giving no quarter to sins brought on by the harlot, yet offering her soul communal redemption. But in by-passing the powerful intellectual and emotional conflicts posed by the Church's stand, Cole and Perera give Saint Pelagia its sorry artistic impotence...
...suffocating triteness and over-weaning propriety of this work result largely from Perera's failure to make his music serve any broad dramatic purposes. The lines sung by Pelagia and the monk Nonnus, her father, maintain a sickly melancholy which seems quite inappropriate to her sins, the supposed point of it all. At the same time, when she appears, surrounded by suitors, it is always to the same cheery dance tune which first accompanied the banter of the two monks. Because Perera's popular melodies and Cole's humor fail to guide the opera's ideas and dramatic progression...