Word: twirckoff
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...student Twirckoff, Yom Kippur was always a day of dread." Thus begins Mark Mirsky's short story, "Lukshin Kugel" (in English that's noodle pudding). Twirckoff's dread--What does it mean to be a Jew?--sets the tone for this second issue of Mosaic, a literary magazine published by the Hillel Society...
Mosaic includes three articles on religious subjects, a number of poems and stories, and two book reviews, but Mirsky's story is easily the most interesting piece. Harvard student Twirckoff (no first name) is Jewish, a senior in Eliot House; he wears Brooks Brothers clothing, professes agnosticism, and scorns his bourgeois antecedents (he won't even eat his mother's noodle pudding). In all these matters Twirckoff reminded me of Richard Amsterdam, the socially ambitious protagonist of Remember Me to God, the best-selling Harvard novel of a few years ago. But the basic difference between Richard Amsterdam and Mirsky...
Mirsky's inordinate use of Yiddish words; his extraordinary stress on Jewish self-abasement, passivity, and lamentation in Twirckoff's response to crisis; his condescending attitude toward his protagonist; and the intrusion of a phony mystical hallucination at the end to get Twirckoff off the spiritual hook--all of these flaws keep "Lukshin Kugel" from creating any unified effect...
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