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The Mourners
Bernard Malamud’s short story "The Mourners” first appeared in ''Discovery'' in January 1955. The story was included in Malamud's first collection of short stories, ''The Magic Barrel'', published in 1958. Plot summary Kessler used to be an egg candler, and is living alone in a cheap apartment located on the top floor of a decrepit tenement building on the East Side of New York City. He'd had a family but he outgrew them. Thirty years have passed and Kessler had made no attempt to see them. In turn, his family hadn't seen him, yet it didn't bother him much. Kessler lived in the apartment for ten years, but he remained relatively unknown to the building's occupants. It was the tenement janitor, Ignace, who knew Kessler best. He had been up to the apartment on occasion to play two-handed pinochle with Kessler, but grew tired of losing and stopped going up to see him. Ignace uses his free time to complain to his wife about the condition of Kessler's apartment and spreads rumors ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, ''The Natural'', was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel '' The Fixer'' (also filmed), about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Biography Bernard Malamud was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Bertha (née Fidelman) and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants. A brother, Eugene, born in 1917, suffered from mental illness, lived a hard and lonely life and died in his fifties. Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression. From 1928 to 1932, Bernard attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. During his youth, he saw many films and enjoyed relating their plots to his school friends. He was especially fond of C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Magic Barrel
''The Magic Barrel'' is a 1958 collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Also, the Jewish Publication Society released its own edition at the same time. It won the 1959 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. "National Book Awards – 1959" . Retrieved 2012-03-28. (With essays by Liz Rosenberg and Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) It was also Malamud's debut collection of stories. Overview Many of the individual stories collected in ''The Magic Barrel'' depict the search for hope and meaning within the bleak enclo ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tenement
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other (such as Gladstone's Land). Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets. Traditionally an immigrant, working-class neighborhood, it began rapid gentrification in the mid-2000s, prompting the National Trust for Historic Preservation to place the neighborhood on their list of America's Most Endangered Places in 2008. The Lower East Side is part of Manhattan Community District 3, and its primary ZIP Code is 10002. It is patrolled by the 7th Precinct of the New York City Police Department. Boundaries The Lower East Side is roughly bounded by East 14th Street on the north, by the East River to the east, by Fulton and Franklin Streets to the south, and by Pearl Street and Broadway to the west. This more extensive definition of the neighborhood includes Chinatown, the East Village, and Little Italy. A less extensive definit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinochle
Pinochle (), also called pinocle or penuchle, is a trick-taking, Ace-Ten card game typically for two to four players and played with a 48-card deck. It is derived from the card game bezique; players score points by trick-taking and also by forming combinations of cards into melds. It is thus considered part of a "trick-and-meld" category which also includes the game belote. Each hand is played in three phases: bidding, melds, and tricks. The standard game today is called "partnership auction pinochle". History Pinochle is thought to have two possible origins. One is that it is a cousin of Binokel, with both games evolving from the game of Bezique. A second alternative is that Pinochle actually developed from the Swiss and, later, South German game of Binocle or Binokel, which in turn is a descendant of Bezique. The word pinochle has several different potential derivations. It may come from the French word ''binocle'' literally meaning "two eyes", or "eyeglasses" or "binocular ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Landlord
A landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business, who is called a tenant (also a ''lessee'' or ''renter''). When a juristic person is in this position, the term landlord is used. Other terms include lessor and owner. The term landlady may be used for the female owners. The manager of a pub in the United Kingdom, strictly speaking a licensed victualler, is referred to as the landlord/landlady. In political economy it refers to the owner of natural resources alone (e.g., land, not buildings) from which an economic rent is the income received. History The concept of a landlord may be traced back to the feudal system of manoralism (seignorialism), where a landed estate is owned by a Lord of the Manor (mesne lords), usually members of the lower nobility which came to form the rank of knights in the high medieval period, holding their fief via subinfeudation, but in some cases the land may also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marshal
Marshal is a term used in several official titles in various branches of society. As marshals became trusted members of the courts of Medieval Europe, the title grew in reputation. During the last few centuries, it has been used for elevated offices, such as in military rank and civilian law enforcement. In most countries, the rank of Marshal is the highest Army rank (equivalent to a five-star General of the Army in the United States). Etymology "Marshal" is an ancient loanword from Norman French (cf. modern French ''maréchal''), which in turn is borrowed from Old Frankish *' (="stable boy, keeper, servant"), being still evident in Middle Dutch ''maerscalc'', ''marscal'', and in modern Dutch ''maarschalk'' (="military chief commander"; the meaning influenced by the French use). It is cognate with Old High German ' "id.", modern German ''(Feld-)Marschall'' (="military chief commander"; the meaning again influenced by the French use). It originally and literally meant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italian-American
Italian Americans ( it, italoamericani or ''italo-americani'', ) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, with significant communities also residing in many other major US metropolitan areas. Between 1820 and 2004 approximately 5.5 million Italians migrated from Italy to the United States, in several distinct waves, with the greatest number arriving in the 20th century from Southern Italy. Initially, many Italian immigrants (usually single men), so-called “birds of passage”, sent remittance back to their families in Italy and, eventually, returned to Italy; however, many other immigrants eventually stayed in the United States, creating the large Italian-American communities that exist today. In 1870, prior to the large wave of Italian immigrants to the United States, there were fewer than 25,000 Italian immigrants in America, many of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the Chancellor of Germany, chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated European theatre of World War II, World War II in Europe by invasion of Poland, invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of Holocaust victims, about six million Jews and millions of other victims. Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary and was raised near Linz. He lived in Vienna later in the first decade of the 1900s and moved to Germany in 1913. He was decorated during his Military career of Adolf Hitler, service in the German Army in Worl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German-American
German Americans (german: Deutschamerikaner, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 43 million in 2019, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the United States Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. German Americans account for about one third of the total population of people of German ancestry in the world. Very few of the German states had colonies in the new world. In the 1670s, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the British colonies, settling primarily in Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia. The Mississippi Company of France moved thousands of Germans from Europe to Louisiana and to the German Coast, Orleans Territory between 1718 and 1750. Immigration ramped up sharply during the 19th century. There is a "German belt" that extends all the way across the United States, from eastern Pennsylvania to the Oregon coast. Pennsylvania, with 3.5 millio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, its worldwide peak was 11 million, with the number of speakers in the United States and Canada then totaling 150,000. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Hambu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1955 Short Stories
Events January * January 3 – José Ramón Guizado becomes president of Panama. * January 17 – , the first nuclear-powered submarine, puts to sea for the first time, from Groton, Connecticut. * January 18– 20 – Battle of Yijiangshan Islands: The Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army seizes the islands from the Republic of China (Taiwan). * January 22 – In the United States, The Pentagon announces a plan to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), armed with nuclear weapons. * January 23 – The Sutton Coldfield rail crash kills 17, near Birmingham, England. * January 25 – The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union announces the end of the war between the USSR and Germany, which began during World War II in 1941. * January 28 – The United States Congress authorizes President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use force to protect Formosa from the People's Republic of China. February * February 10 – The United States Seventh Flee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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