Word: satanizing
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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...
...dead have arisen, that the Czar is visiting Frampol, even that his wife is faithful. In the first place, he believes because, after all, anything is possible. In the second place, he believes because if he does not, everyone shouts at him, his termagant wife loudest of all. Only Satan takes pity and whispers to Gimpel that he could be avenged on the world by deceiving it in turn. Gimpel tries, but it is not in him: he is too much the fool even to be evil. The worldly-wise (including the reader) are sharply reproached by Gimpel...
...Fatigue. The years pass; the people age as if dipped in a Max Factor makeup kit; and Author Caldwell has ample opportunity to punctuate her chapters with page-long diatribes in favor of God, the Fourth of July, the U.S. Constitution ("I worry only about the Amendments"), and against Satan, Communism, the graduated income...
Sacrifice to Satan. In the crypt of the chapel at Tiffauges, he gathered alchemists from all over Europe. They staged satanic orgies, sacrificing one after another of the child singers on the altar while begging the four principal figures of demonology-Satan, Beelzebub. Belial and Moloch-to help them turn base metal into gold. In 1440 Gilles was arrested and tried for murder. Before he was hanged at the age of 36, he confessed that he had presided over the murders of 140 children...
Cotton Mather said: "This town of Boston is become almost a Hell upon Earth, a City full of Lies and Murders and Blasphemies; a dismal Picture and Emblem of Hell. Satan seems to take a strange possession of it." But Bronson Alcott later observed: "There is a city in our world upon which the light of the sun of righteousness has risen. It is the same city from which every pure stream of thought and purpose and performance emanates. It is the city which is set on high. It cannot be hidden. It is Boston...