Word: sholom
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This week, in the year commemorating the arrival of the first group of Jewish families in America 300 years ago,* the Beth Sholom Congregation in Philadelphia announced that U.S. Judaism was hoping to close the gap. It had commissioned Architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a synagogue which would "wed the American spirit to the ancient spirit of Israel." Wright's synagogue began as a gleam in the pastoral eye of Mortimer J. Cohen, rabbi of the Beth Sholom Congregation...
...Defined by Sholom Aleichem as a man who escapes only imaginary dangers...
...head table sat Theologian Jacques Maritain and Labor Leaders John L. Lewis and James B. Carey, Illinois' Governor William G. Stratton and Capitalist Marshall Field. Chicago's Episcopal Bishop Wallace Conkling gave the benediction and Rabbi Louis Binstock of Temple Sholom asked God's blessing on Bishop Sheil in Hebrew. A check for $131,582 was presented to the bishop for his various funds, and 26 separate awards, each with appropriate words of praise, kept coming until midnight...
This cheerful excuse for a plot is taken seriously by neither Sholom Aleichem nor his characters. What matters is the vivid parade of penniless producers, starving actors, shrewd sharpers and keen-witted kibitzers who rollick through the book. This volatile world often seems like something out of the merrier parts of Dickens: a director with three wives, a sentimental actress always in search of a husband, and harmless scoundrels who are never happier than when plotting to steal each other's prima donnas...
...Flew. Sholom Aleichem was a master at capturing the folk poetry and humorous abuses of Yiddish speech, and even in a rather stiff translation something of the verbal crackle comes through. When a character wants to dismiss a story as nonsense, he says: "A cow flew over the roof and laid an egg." The actors' scorn of domesticity is expressed in their saying: "The best marriage is the worst death." When a director wants to tell the angel that the best of plans take money, he cracks: "Without fingers you can't thumb your nose...