Word: warsaw
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Scum begins in Warsaw. Max Barabander is a godless, physically impressive, womanizing ex-convict whose mid-life crisis leads him to abandon respectability in Argentina for the impoverished streets of his youth. At 47, his life has been completely disrupted. Max's only son has died, and he and his wife Rochelle find themselves haunted by a newly-discovered consciousness of their own frailty...
...begins his quest immediately after arriving in Warsaw. He ogles a group of young women sitting alone at a cafe. He makes eyes at a middle-aged married grandmother. He also begins to seduce the beautiful and impressionable Tsirele, daughter of the neighborhood's virtuous rabbi, telling her that his wife is dead and giving her money with the secret hope that he'll "be able to come to an understanding with...
This moral impotence is what most interest Singer, and his descriptions of Warsaw and its alienated citizens provide a poignant illustration of the decay that accompanied the city's forced modernization under Russian occupation...
...neighbors suffer at the hands of the new society. Tsirele's father is impoverished and powerless under new legal codes, and her brother, educated in a state-run Jewish school, loafs about on the balcony, out of school for a secular holiday. Even Max's friends, the old Warsaw lowlifes, feel that they have lost control of the city's crime networks...
...Blind Mayer" explains, "It's not the old Warsaw anymore. Gone, buried. Once everyone had his own territory. Now the worst lowlife comes here. Nobody knows anybody else...In my day, Commissar Voynov drank brandy with us. The sergeant used to bow to me and show me respect, may I live to be buried in a Jewish cemetary...