Word: polisher
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...badly worried over themselves. Dr. Angell wrote a report: "College is no longer a place for those who wish to become cultured. It is a social prac- tice ground. Men and women come here to make friends and to carry on mutual undertakings that require a certain amount of polish. . . . What with athletic practice, committee meetings, play and musical rehearsals, moving pictures, dances, intercollegiate games, and-what is worse-hours and hours of idle talk about these and other di- versions, little time is left for the principal purposes of college study...
These mourners of Isaac Friedman were of the Hasidim, a cult of Judaism that had its origin among the Polish Jews in the 18th Century, as a movement of popular protest against the strict ritualism and insistence upon the immutability of the law as propounded by the Talmudists, or orthodox rabbis, whom the Hasidim call the Mitnaggedim, or "opposition." The belief in the miraculous powers of their rabbis, and in the blood-kinship with David of a line of rabbis now represented by Isaac Friedman's 17-year-old son, is essentially mystical and emotional in character. Orthodox Jews...
...Author. St. Reymont was born in 1868 in what was then Russian Poland. His family was large, poor, patriotic. His mother and her five brothers took part in the Polish insurrection of 1863 against Russia. He, too, is a patriot. He has been telegraph operator, actor, railway clerk, farmer, even spent months in a Paulist monastery. His complete works comprise 28 volumes of novels and short stories...
Yagna, a neighbor's daughter, was strong as any man, with a milky complexion and a passionate fondness for adornment. The village tongues wagged and the hearts of the village swains were stirred. Constantly they sent to her "proposers." (When a Polish peasant wishes to propose, he sends two friends with vodka to the lady of his choice. If she drinks to him, they are assumed to be affianced.) Yagna bestowed her heart nowhere, and her shrewd mother had not yet seen fit to bestow her hand...
...Significance. This first part of St. Reymont's epic of the soil is "a panorama of the whole round of peasant life, a brilliant picture of Polish nature ... the tragic sense of the elemental forces which dominate the efforts of the tillers of the soil." The work is truly epic in its scope, a carefully worked, heroic pattern. It is a sweeping view of Poland, ground under the imperial heel of Russia...