Word: sholom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...upside down and irradiates it with originality. His hero is Morris Bober, an aging Brooklyn grocer who is clinging to solvency by his fingertips. But Morris is also that legendary Jewish figure of misfortune, the schlemiel, whose fate has been told and retold from the Old Testament to Sholom Aleichem. Bobers good intentions gain him nothing but hard knocks. The only dangers he escapes are imaginary ones. Yet, through all his woes, there shines unblinkingly the steady light of a good heart...
...sabras*, born in Palestine and accustomed to the language from infancy. The others, coming as immigrants, had to learn vernacular Hebrew at ages ranging from 19 to 33. Most of the stories reflect the authors' predominantly European culture, and echoes of Voltaire, De Maupassant, James Joyce and Sholom Aleichem sound more clearly than do the wild notes of Oriental imagery or the deep rhythms of the Old Testament...
Subtitled "a novel of fathers and sons," The Sacrifice takes its theme from the Bible, the talk of its old people from the folklore of Sholom Aleichem and the chat ter of its young from the Bronx locutions of Arthur Kober. Abraham is a patriarch in the classic mold-huge, fork-bearded, devout. When two of his sons are mur dered in a pogrom, he flees from the Ukraine to Canada. The tragedy briefly robs Abraham of his faith in God, turns his wife Sarah into a mindless zombie, and weighs down the frail shoulders of his remaining son, Isaac...
...World Was Tiny." In The Collected Stories, the bulk of his too little-known work is fully translated for the first time and prefaced with a perceptive introduction by Critic Lionel Trilling. Like another Eastern Jewish writer, Sholom Aleichem, Babel was a folk artist of the ghetto. To Aleichem (TIME, April 25), the ghetto was as comforting as a mother's lap, and he could always smile through the tears; to Babel it was just a prison cell which he tramped with despairing irony. Laconic and deadpan in style, his autobiographical stories are nonetheless as anguished and personal...
...with fat red cheeks," who can convulse his playmates by mimicking the rabbi's manner of taking snuff, or bring a glint of pride to his bearded father's eyes by citing chapter and verse in a Bible exam. Since he is more prankster than scholar, Sholom's boyhood sometimes seems like a parade of cuffs, slaps and beatings. As one observer has pointed out, "the Jews of Eastern Europe considered childhood a phase to be got over as quickly as possible, a sort of malignant disease, the curing of which justified the use of any means...