Word: sauls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Harvey was the second of three sons of Saul and Miriam Fineberg of Pittsburgh, neither of who had the opportunity to go to college because of the Great Depression...
White's is a transformation that begs for comparison with Saul's on the road to Damascus. Grandson of a tent revivalist, White was ghostwriter of choice in the 1980s to the Evangelical elite, co-authoring books with Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. One day, sitting with Falwell in a car surrounded by gay protesters, he realized he should be on the outside. After 25 years of clandestinely trying to "cure" himself via exorcism, electroshock and prayer, the father of two divorced and settled down with a man named Gary Nixon. Then he began searching...
...somewhat dreamy father Saul, the cantor at Beth Simcha synagogue, sees Eliza's skills with the alphabet as a sign that she is a "mystical prodigy" and begins training her for spelling competitions and for greater, more spiritual challenges ahead. "What do you and a Torah scribe have in common?" he asks her, and then answers when she falters: "Both spelling bees and Torah scribes share the idea that a word should be constructed perfectly...
...Saul's obsessive attention to Eliza comes at the expense of her older brother Aaron, who is being bullied at school and who feels his own religious aspirations, closely modeled on his father's, unfulfilled. And then there is Miriam, the Naumann wife and mother, whose already pronounced remoteness from her husband and children grows apace while Eliza and Saul are sequestered in his study, poring over dictionaries. Miriam too is on a spiritual quest, although it oddly manifests itself first in shoplifting and then in breaking into and robbing houses...
...over the year or so covered in the novel. This technique emphasizes the essential isolation of each family member, how a genteel unwillingness to cause scenes or make hurtful comments has atrophied into an inability to say anything truthful at all. Miriam is simply baffled by her children; Saul's parental love is directed more at what they can become than at the needy young people they happen to be. Although she craves victories, Eliza also begins to feel that winning spelling bees is a necessary precondition to her family's happiness...