Word: werfel
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SONG OF BERNADETTE-Franz Werfel-Viking...
...Franz Werfel is a second-flight European man of letters with the schooled competence of his breed and with a reverence for the human spirit which too many of his literary superiors lack. In this novel about the miracle of Lourdes, which is an act of piety transcending blood and creed ("I am not a Catholic but a Jew"), he brings that reverence into clean, spacious focus...
...Song of Bernadette is the story of an adolescent girl in the French Pyrenees who saw, or indestructibly believed that she saw, the Queen of Heaven. Werfel solemnly vowed to write it one day in 1940 when, in Lourdes, in desperate flight from the Nazis, it must have seemed a miracle to him that he might ever survive to see the shores of the U.S. He reached those shores in safety, and he kept his vow. He has also kept an "older and far more unconscious vow": "In the days when I wrote my first verses I vowed that...
...What happened was this: the ignorant, the primitive and the poverty-stricken believed and defended the miracle. Roused to .a pitch of hope such as seldom touches the earth's hopeless, they became as powerful a fact for the world to reckon with as the vision itself. Franz Werfel builds up a compassionate and ludicrous picture of how state, science and the Church handled this strange wild beast against which no weapons had been invented. Scientists trembled in scorn and terror at the challenge to their royalty over the century. The Church, sternly resolved to distinguish between truth, fraud...
...Mahler partisans are organized as intensely as movie-fan clubs. One group awards a Mahler medal to outstanding torchbearers (Philadelphia's Conductor Eugene Ormandy, Boston's Sergei Koussevitzky, German Exile Bruno Walter-Mahler's disciple). Commentator at the broadcasts is Czech Author Franz Werfel, third husband of Mahler's widow...