Word: polished
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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GIMPEL THE FOOL, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (205 pp.; Noonday; $3.50) is a collection of twelve tales about Polish Jews who are important to nobody except themselves, God and the devil. In these pages Satan and all his imps lope through the swamps and forests of Galicia. tempting a vain girl with an enchanted mirror, destroying a placid marriage, debauching the entire village of Frampol with dancing, vodka and banknotes. God comes slowly after, not to punish Satan for his mischief, but to apply his lash to the backs of sinful Jews...
...Polish-born Author Singer, 53, a columnist on Manhattan's Jewish Daily Forward, takes a Manichaean view of God and an ironic view of man. In Joy, the Lord of Hosts finally justifies his stern ways to a modern Job. In The Wife Killer, Author Singer touches on a recurrent theme, that vengeance is God's business, not man's. The book's best tale is the title story about Gimpel. who has seven names in all: 'Imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool. The last name stuck." Gimpel the Fool...
...just can't help it-like me. I knocked around for a long time before finding my niche." Growing up in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Rabi was "always making things." After studying chemistry at Cornell (B. Chem., 1919), he got a job with a chemical firm "analyzing furniture polish and mother's milk," tried running an abortive weekly newspaper ("a nonprofit organization") and even a private banking concern. "And then came the vision." Rabi returned to graduate school "and found physics and myself...
Ruth Slenczynska was different. Before she was even born, her Polish immigrant father knew she would be a musician, and when he first saw her in a Sacramento hospital two hours after birth, he sobbed ecstatically over her sturdy wrists and padded fingertips. Twelve days later he confidently announced that she would "be one of the world's greatest musicians." He meant...
There are lesser known figures as well as established greats: a still life represents polish-born Louis Marcoussis who became in Paris one of the most sensitive cubists, yet remains little recognized. Henri Hayden, another Polish expatriate, is represented by Les Trois Musiciens, reminiscent of the two much produced Picassos and, interestingly enough, done before neither of them...