Word: starke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...considered Central Square too ordinary a place to think of a story about. What did they mean by ordinary? Well, there are neighborhoods resembling it in a lot of people's home towns. Broadway in New York is flanked by a similar utilitarian snarl of dingy department stores and stark donut or submarine joints. From my own experience in Midwestern cities of about 200,000 inhabitants or less, I can cull couples and triples of Central Square cafes with blacked out windows and steel doors bearing discreet Budweiser placards, or upper stories rented by optometrists, orthodontists and somebody named Arthur...
Bafflement is surely the least obvious fault of Bashevis Singer's stories. They all resound with a clarity that comes from sparse language and a discerning eye for only the most important details. And through this clarity, a stark precision that has captured the lives of a very small segment of mankind, there comes a kind of broader perspective I can only call wisdom because it seems so rare in the modern short story...
...knock came, I obeyed a longstanding rule of mine for interruptions at that hour. I didn't answer but waited for the second and third knocks, standing clear of the door in case the caller knocked it down or shot through it. Finally I opened the door, purposely stark naked, for you often gain a few minutes thinking time if ordered to get dressed and go with whoever is there." Now back in Nairobi, Griggs confesses that he is "beginning to feel like a midwife, a birth-of-a-nation expert...
...Stark Note. At 77, Mrs. Meir is ca pable of self-assessment - but not objectivity. In her own eyes she was inflex ible, but solely in matters that affected the welfare of Israel. Her celebrated in transigence occurred only in the eyes of "people who are not great admirers of mine." She was also a self-confident leader with "only a circle of one to con sult, myself." At the same time, after she became Premier, Mrs. Meir admits that she "could certainly understand the reservations of those people in the country who thought that a 70-year-old grandmother...
...reason for this reticence seems manifest: Mrs. Meir's career ended on a stark and bitter note. During the Yom Kippur War, it fell to her as Premier to assess intelligence reports of Arab intentions and, as a circle of one, decide at what point the Israeli army should be mobilized. She waited too long; before mobilization was finally ordered and the battle with Egypt and Syria stabilized, Israel had lost more men than in any war since 1948. "I should have listened to the warnings of my heart and ordered a call-up," she now admits. For Israel...