Word: shtetls
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...hybrid composite of the sex-crazed fantasies of Alexander Portnoy and the excessive mentality of Fiddler on the Roof, Isaac Bashevis Singer is a refreshing breeze of sanity and reality. His stories and novels portary a life which vanished with the thud of German army boots-that of the shtetl, the Eastern European Jewish village. Not surprisingly, many of his simple tales and anecdotes of the old country ring with more authenticity than the slick, cynical products of our modern literati...
...born in Radzymin, a suburb of Warsaw, in 1904," he began. "But my parents moved to Warsaw when I was about three." For several years he lived with his grandfather in a village called Bilgoray. It was there that he acquired his impressive knowledge of shtetl life...
Crities and commentators often interpret Singer's purpose in writing his tales of the Shtetl in terms of a desire to teach American Jews about the old country. According to Singer, this is only a secondary consideration. "When I sit down to write, I never think for whom I'm writing," he insisted. "I think what I should write. If I am satisfied, I know there is a chance that some readers will also be satisfied...
Alan Bates plays Bok-a handyman, a fixer of broken things. His home is the shtetl, a rural Jewish village in 1911 Russia. It is a time of pogroms and malignant rumors of Jews who murder Christians as part of their religious rites. Bok, possessed of a barren, faithless wife (Carol White), abandons his emotions, his conscience and his home. His destination is the ancient Russian Orthodox city of Kiev, where he promptly sends himself to hell by passing as a gentile. In scenes that seem to have emerged from the mainstream of Russian literature, Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), a rabid...
Ritual Destruction. Soutine had a more difficult time finding his own style than did his fellow refugees from Russian ghetto life, who once they had arrived in Paris, turned toward cubism, like Jacques Lipchitz, or, like Chagall, romanticized the shtetl folklore with fiddlers on the roof. At the time that Lithuanian-born Soutine went to Ceret, he was still in his 20s, all but unknown. There he embarked on a series of extraordinarily dislocated mountain views, with houses and trees piled like limp wads of anthropomorphic soil...