Word: roitschwantz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...talent as a journalist-propagandist, but before he donned the chameleon motley of Soviet apologist-in-chief, he had a better story to tell. That story, partly his own. is embedded in an almost unknown novel, unpublished in the Soviet Union, called The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, which Ehrenburg wrote in 1927 when he had taken a leave of absence from Communist Russia and was living in Paris. Now available in English for the first time, the book shows, despite uneven translation, what a considerable comic talent has been squandered on the gloomy chores of propaganda...
...Roitschwantz is a poor Jewish tailor in Homel, a deeply confused little town in Russia during the confusing early years of the Revolution. His only asset is an epic garrulity and a wild Talmudic talent for splitting the wrong hair. His only crime is. he confesses, "the fact that I am alive"-although he explains in a frenzied bout of surrealist logic that he is not exactly responsible for that. Reading his fabulous and farcical misadventures is an experience like being cornered by a compulsive talker whose merciless spate of words first glazes the eye until a thread of rewarding...
...members of a godless and classless society. The results were not always happy. One rushed into the synagogue shouting, "Down with that rotten Sabbath! Long live, let us say, Monday!" Some changed their names, but although "it was only a matter of two rubles and the proper enlightenment," Lasik Roitschwantz passed up the opportunity of becoming Spartacus Rosaluxemburgsky. Adopting two saints' names in the hagiography of Marxism* was his last chance to stay out of trouble. Instead, he sighs the wrong sort of sigh ("a purely pathological phenomenon") before a poster mourning the death of a party bigwig...
...outrageous odyssey continues in France and Britain, but Author Ehren burg would have been wise to recognize that satire on those countries is best left to natives. He does better in what the Soviets had taught Roitschwantz to call "that criminal country, Palestine." By now, he is a "miserable leaf chased by a hundred-year-old storm," his "body a passport," a palimpsest of bruises, and he is on his way to his 19th jail. In Palestine he finds a people who "wanted to organize a stock market in a Biblical manner," Jews beat other Jews for smoking...