Gimpel the Fool, by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer at the Wikipedia

Gimpel the Fool at the Wikipedia

Sumary

Analysis

Audiobook

Adaptation for theatre

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, by Aurora Ledesma

Biography

Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature, was one of the most admired Jewish writers of the Twentieth Century, as well as an important figure of Literature written in Yiddish, the language in which his books were published throughout his career. His writings describe Jewish life in Poland and the United States.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on the 11^th of November 1903 in Leoncin, Poland, and died the 24^th of July 1991 in Surfside, Florida. He was the fifth of six children, of whom only four survived. His father was a rabbi, and his mother, the daughter of the rabbi of Biigoraj. His sister Hinde Esther and his brother Israel Joshua, became writers as well and played prominent roles in his life and served as models for a number of his fictional characters. His younger brother, Moishe and his mother both died in the Holocaust.

His family moved to Warsaw, Poland, when he was four years old. Singer was also educated in a strict spiritual practice. He received a traditional Jewish education at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. But singer preferred being a writer to being a rabbi. In 1925 he made his debut with the story In Old Age which he published in Warsaw. His first novel, Satan in Goray, was published in Poland before he migrated to the U.S.A in 1935.

He was married in Poland and had a son, but, when he moved to New York, he left them and, then, in 1938, he met Alma Wassermann, a German Jewish refugee, and married her.

He settled in New York, as his brother had done a year before, and worked for the Yiddish Newspaper Forvets and he also translated many books into Yiddish from Hebrew and Polish, and some books by Thomas Man from German.

Although Singer’s works were now available in their English versions, he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish until his death.

Singer has popular collections of short stories translated into English, one of the most popular around the world is Gimpel the Fool. His short stories are saturated with Jewish folklore, legends and mysticism.

Among his most important novels are The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies, A Love Story, which have been adapted into films. The most famous story adapted to a film is Yentl with Barbra Streisand.

He also wrote My Father’s Court, an autobiographical work about his childhood in Warsaw.

 

THE STORY: GIMPEL THE FOOL

Gimpel, who has had the reputation of being a fool since his school days, is the narrator of his own story. Gimpel is an orphan who was being raised by his sickly grandfather. He lives in a town called Frampol and works as a baker. He believes everything he is told, trusting that even strange and crazy things are always possible. His neighbours convince him to marry Elka, a local prostitute, whom he believes to be a virgin, even though she already has one child and is pregnant when they marry. When Elka gives birth only four months after their marriage, she convinces Gimpel that the boy was born prematurely. Gimpel grows to love the baby and cares for Elka. One day, he discovers Elka with another man in their bed. Gimpel goes to the town rabbi to seek advice, and the rabbi tells him that he must divorce Elka and stay away from her and her two bastard children. Gimpel starts to miss Elka and the baby, and he retracts his declarations to the rabbi, believing Elka when she tells him he was simply hallucinating. Years later, Elka gets very sick, and, before dying, she confesses the truth to him: none of the ten children she had are his.

One day, a short time later, a demon visits him in a dream and persuades him to get revenge on his neighbours by putting urine in the bread dough and selling it in the bakery. However, before the bread can be sold, Gimpel buries all of it underground. Then he packs his things and leaves the town of Frampol forever. He continues travelling around the world as a beggar and storyteller for the rest of his life, determined to believe that everything is possible. At the end of the story, Gimpel says that, when he dies, he will do it so joyfully, as death and the afterlife cannot deceive anyone. 

 

QUESTIONS

Did you use to give nicknames to your schoolmates? Can you tell us about one that was original and caught?

What do you know about the Golem?

Do you think that the jokes that Gimpel’s mates played on him would be called “bullying” now?

What do you think about practical jokes played on the beginners?

What do you know about The Wisdom of the Fathers?

What is your opinion about this sentence: “Better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil”?

Is it a good idea matchmaking? And what about webs or applications to meet people?

“When you’re married, the husband’s the master”. Is this machismo, or we cannot use this term for a different society or for a different time?

“You cannot pass through the life unscathed”: what is the meaning of this philosophy?

What is “bear-baiting”?

What is the meaning of this sentence in context: “No bread can ever be baked from this dough”? Can you give some examples?

How they justify that Elka delivered a boy four months after the wedding?

Did Gimpel love people, or was he only a fool?

What’s the meaning of “Shoulders are from God, but burdens too”?

The story is situated in Frampol. Where is it? And Lublin?

“He found an obscure reference in Maimonides that favoured him”. What is for you the value of tradition or classical books for science?

 

VOCABULARY

hee-hawed, lying in, all the way to (Cracow), made tracks, pranksters, yeshiva, candle-dipper, cat music, took me in (take in), fined, hand-me-down, sexton, hallah, revels, burrs, Tishe b’Av fast day, kneading trough, galore, rooked, beat it, welkin, colicky, bear down, serve, louts, loudmouths, going over, take stock in, dybbuks, leeches, cupping, bill of goods, spin yarns, outlandish, hovel, shnorrer

A Lecture Tour, by Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun at the Wikipedia

A Lecture Tour: analysis

Knut Hamsun, by Dora Sarrión 

Biography

 
Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen in Lom, in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway, in 1859. He was the fourth of seven children. His family were very poor, so, when he was three, they moved to Hamarøy in Nordland County, to farm a land of an uncle.
At the age of nine, he was sent to live with his uncle Hans Olsen, who used to beat and starve him. Later, Hamsun stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874, he escaped from his miserable life, back to Lom; for the next five years he did any job for money: he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, and an elementary-school teacher.
At 17, he became a ropemaker's apprentice; and, although he had almost no formal education, he started to write. He asked the businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908).
He left Norway for the United States twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. There, he travelled and worked in various jobs, falling in every project he began. His bitter experience in the American territory led him to write in 1889 a book full of negative comments about the life in that country, From the Spiritual Life of Modern America.
Although this was his first writing, it wouldn’t be released until his next novel, Hunger, was published in 1890. This semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in Kristiania (now Oslo), the Norwegian capital.
Hunger introduced the typical structure of Knut Hamsun stories: a nomadic protagonist who does not fit in with the people around him, who seeks to return to his origin, drawing inspiration from his own experiences.
Following the success of this novel, there were many other interesting works: Mysteries (1892), Victoria (1898), Under the Autumn Star (1906), A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909) and Wayfarer (1929).
Hamsun achieved his greatest popularity in 1917 with his publication The Blessing of the Earth. Thanks to this work, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1920.
In 1898, he married Bergljot Göpfert, with whom he had a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1906. Three years later, he married Marie Andersen, who was 23 years younger than him. They had four children.
Hamsun had strong anti-English views, and openly supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Due to his professed support to the German occupation of Norway, he was charged with treason after the war. In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. 
During the more than 70 years in which he was writing, he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays, and some of his works have been the basis of 25 films and television miniseries adaptations.
Hamsun is considered to be “one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years” and “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun”. He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
 
A Lecture Tour
 
The story, written in first person, is about a professor of Literature who was short of money and decided to go to Drammen, to give a lecture about the novelist Alexander Kielland, one of the most famous Norwegian writers of the 19th century, to earn some extra money.
After reaching Drammen and looking for a hotel, he visited an editor and a lawyer. Both of them put him on the alert that there wasn’t much interest in literature in the city, and he probably would lose money on his business. Furthermore, the same day that he scheduled to give his lecture, an anti-spiritualist was doing his show with apes and wild animals, and it would attract a crowd.
Despite these warnings, he rented one of the pavilions, he paid for an insertion in the newspaper giving the date, place and topic of his lecture, and hired a man to hang cards with publicity around the city, advertising the event.
By chance, both the narrator and the anti-spiritualist stayed in the same hostel.
Each of them talked about what their show was like, and the anti-spiritualist asked him to work on his show because he needed a man to introduce the animals. The narrator didn’t accept it because he thought the anti-spiritualist “was afraid of the competition and was worried that he would steal his audience away from him”.
The day of the show, only the lawyer came to the lecture on literature because almost everybody was watching the show with apes and wild beasts.
When the narrator got tired of waiting for his spectators, he returned to his hostel ashamed and disappointed and aware that he didn’t have any money for the train going back home.
In the middle of that night, the anti-spiritualist, after his show was finished, came into the narrator's room and inquired him about how his lecture had gone. With a bit of embarrassment, he said that he had cancelled it. After that, the anti-spiritualist gave him details about how many problems he had with his presenter that evening and offered him once again the occupation as a presenter of the beasts.
One more time, the narrator found this offer offensive. “Never would I be a party to such vulgarity!!! A man had his honour to consider”, he thought.
The following day, the anti-spiritualist offered him some money if he looked over the speech about the beasts, correcting the grammar and brushing up the language.
It was impossible for the narrator to refuse this offer because “he was doing the man a favour really, and it was, after all, a service in the cause of literature”, and, the most important, he needed the money.
Not only he remade the speech from the beginning to the end, but also accepted to do the speech during the show.
Although the show ended up being a success and the anti-spiritualist was pleased and thanked him warmly for his support, he refused to pay him unless he accepted to appear in his show the next evening. But the narrator decided not to continue with this business and return to his city.
In our story, the protagonist believes that literature itself can bring great benefit to people's souls, and that it doesn’t matter what their real needs are. But the harsh reality shows him that his work can only be successful if it’s adapted to the tastes of the people who are going to receive it.
The citizens of Drammen work hardly during all day, and, in their free time, they only desire to entertain themselves with any activity that will help them forget about their daily routine. They don’t want to be educated.
The protagonist failed his initial approach on his literary tour and was wildly successful when he adapted to the crowd, but I'm not sure if he learned anything from this experience.
I wonder what the real usefulness of literature in our current world is, and if different types of literature are necessary, depending on the social or cultural class of the person.

QUESTIONS

Who was Alexander Kielland?

What’s the present name of Kristiania?

How did the porter guess that our protagonist was a poor man?

What other lecture was taking place at that moment in Drammen?

How can they warm the blankets?

What did our protagonist do to leave the posh hotel?

Where did he want to give his lecture?

What did the anti-spiritualist offer him at first? And what was his answer?

The literary lecture: how did it work? Why?

Why, according to the anti-spiritualist lecturer, cannot a local man present the beasts in the lecture?

Why did our protagonist accept to give the lecture about animals at the end?

This lecture was a serious exposition or only quackery? How do you know?

Was the lecture a success or a failure? How is it described in the text?

What happened with the hyena?

“That’s the power literature has to move men’s minds”. Do you think literature, or a book, or some books can change your life (remember Werther)?

How do you feel when you read something worth of reading, and you know its author is a Nazi?

 

VOCABULARY

took stock, befitting, catered, outgoings, carpetbag, touting, venue, furrier, outlay, swarming, foreboding, posh, butt, dozed off, breeding, scoffed, pelting, standing-room, badgers, marten, Jack of Clubs, mangle, houses, undertaking

Who Dealt, by Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner at the Wikipedia

Ring Lardner, by Sílvia Brunet

BIOGRAPHY

Ringgold William "Ring" Lardner (1885 -1933) was an American sports columnist and satirical short story writer who enjoyed poking fun at revered institutions such as marriage, theatre, and sports. His works were admired by his contemporaries, renowned authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and J.D. Salinger.

Born in Niles, Michigan, the youngest of nine children in a wealthy family, Lardner knew he wanted to be a newspaper man early on. In childhood he wore a brace for his deformed foot until he was eleven. As a teenager, he began work at the South Bend Tribune, then moved on to the South Bend Times, before moving to Chicago where in 1913, he published a syndicated column in the Chicago Tribune, titled "In the Wake of the News." It was carried by over 100 newspapers.

Lardner married Ellis Abbot in 1911.They had four sons, all of whom became professional writers. His son James Lardner was killed in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the International Brigades.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, a collection of fictional letters by a bush-league baseball player, loaded with satire about athletics' propensity for stupidity and greed. Some of the letters were published as short stories in The Saturday Evening Post the same year. Lardner's love for writing about the game faded after the "Black Sox Scandal" when the Chicago White Sox sold out the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Lose with a Smile (1933) was his last published collection of fictional baseball writings.

In addition to sports, Lardner admired the theatre, and co-wrote a three-act play which made it to Broadway, called Elmer The Great, with the legendary George M. Cohan.

Lardner died on September 25, in 1933, at the age of 48 in East Hampton, New York, of a heart attack due to complications from tuberculosis.

WHO DEALT?

The story “Who Dealt?” by Ring Lardner was written in 1925. It is written in first person. The story happens while two young couples are playing bridge. The characters are the Cannon couple (Tom and the narrator -we don’t know the name) and the Gratz couple (Arthur and Helen) who are the hosts.

The narrator is Mrs Cannon who is talking and talking all the time during the bridge game, about her life and other matters in an innocent and silly way. During her speech we began to know information about the four characters.

First of all, we know that Tom and, Arthur and Helen were real friends all their life. And there was a special friendship between Tom and Helen when they were kids. We also know, that the Cannon were married three months ago and the Gratz were married four years ago. She knows that Helen is a good singer. And she explains that Tom is abstaining from alcoholic beverages since they were married. She says that Tom is a secretive person. She continued talking about Tom experience with horrid football people at Yale, about their honeymoon in Chicago, about clothes, about the possibility of Tom to run for mayor thanks to the Guthrie couple, about how was Mrs Guthrie… Meanwhile, she was very bad playing cards, but she doesn’t mind.

There’s a point in the story when all seems to change, is when she begins to talk about the relation with her husband Tom. She starts saying that she and Tom are made for each other and agree in everything, but not in music, not in cultural matters, not in things to eat… She continues explaining us that she broke some Tom’s habits like big breakfast or taking his shoes off when he gets home, or changing the nightgown to a pajamas…

The tension is in crescendo when she confesses that Tom is an author, because she had found a sad poem dated four years ago and it was about other girl. And she explains too, he has written a story about two men and a girl which they were all brought up together. One man was rich, and popular like Arthur, and the other was an ordinary man like Tom, with no money, but the girl like him and promised to wait for him. She got tired waiting the poor man and married the rich one. The Tom story ends when they meet again and they pretend everything was all right, but his heart was broken.

The culminant point is when Mrs Cannon starts to recite Tom’s sad poem and the characters feel reflected on it.

In that moment Helen revoked in the game and Tom starts drinking Scotch again!

I wonder if Mrs Cannon is as innocent and silly as it seems…

QUESTIONS

Talk about the different people (job, the way they play cards, financial situation, hobbies, sports, studies, habits, clothes… anything you know about them)

The narrator Mrs Cannon

Tom Cannon

Arthur Gratz

Helen Gratz

Ted Jones

Ken Baker

Gertie Baker

A.L. Guthrie

Mrs Guthrie

Mr Hastings

What is a real friend for you? How do you know when a friend is a real friend? Do you think a real friend has to be a friend from your childhood, or you can make friends at any period of your life?

What is your opinion about boasting of children/husband/wife?

Would the narrator be a good detective, as she said of herself?

Do you know this saying, “You don’t know a person until you’ve travelled with them”? I think there is another one as good as this: “You don’t know a person until you’ve been a partner in a card game with them”. What do you think?

Do you like poetry? What kind of poetry do you read? What is your opinion about Tom’s poem in the story?

What is the meaning of the last sentence, “Why, Tom!”

What do these names refer to?

Black Oxen

Bryn Mawr

Irving Berlin

Gershwin

Jack Kearns

Humoresque

Indian Love Lyrics

Ed Wynn

The Fool

Lightnin’

Robert Chambers

Irving R. Cobb

VOCABULARY

on the wagon, drop, limelight, dumb, fooled, raved, worm things out, nine, half-back, tackle, had it in for, whose lead?, odd, wild, put on the Ritz, dummy, overbids, raise, run for mayor, lumbermen, janitor, it's all apple sauce, bashful, ace, sloppy, mushiest, T.L., pull, bell-boy, lobby, paging, the inside ropes, pull

Telemachus, friend, by O. Henry

BIOGRAPHY, by Begoña Devis
 
William Sydney Porter was born in North Carolina in 1862 and died in New York in 1910. He was a great writer known as O. Henry after a cat he lived with for a time. He is considered one of the masters of the short story. His admirable treatment of surprise narrative endings popularized in English the expression "an O. Henry ending".
He had an eventful life. His mother died when he was three, and he and his father moved to his paternal grandmother's house. As a child he was a good student, and a great reader. He graduated from his aunt's school, who continued teaching him until he was 15. He then began working in his uncle's pharmacy and finally graduated as a pharmacist.
In 1882 he went to Texas, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his persistent cough. There he worked there as a ranch hand, as a cook and as a nanny. When his health improved, he went to Austin, where he worked as a pharmacist and where he began writing short stories. He was popular in the social life in Austin for his storytelling and musical talent. At this time, his problems with alcohol abuse began. In 1887, he eloped with the young Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy family. In 1888 they have a child, who died. In 1889, a new daughter, Margaret, was born.
In 1894, Porter founded a humorous weekly magazine called The Rolling Stone.  Then that magazine collapsed, and he moved to Houston, where he was a journalist at the Houston Post.
The most transcendental event occurred in 1895, when he was accused by the First National Bank of appropriating money that he had under his responsibility. On the eve of the trial he sailed for Honduras, where he lived for seven months, and where he wrote several stories, many of which appear in the book Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term «banana republic», phrase subsequently used to describe a small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.
In 1897 he returned to Austin when he knew that his wife was dying, and after a few months he was arrested and convicted, spending three years in the Columbus (Ohio) prison. There he continued writing short stories to support his daughter. When he was released from prison, he changed his name to O. Henry and moved to New York, where he lived until his death.
In New York, the city the writer loved and the setting for many of his stories, O. Henry gained public recognition, but he had a deep problem with his alcoholism. Indeed, there is an anecdote that his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi", was written under the pressure of a deadline, in just three hours and accompanied by a whole bottle of whiskey.
From December 1903 to January 1906, he wrote a story a week for the New York World, his most prolific period. He remarried in 1907 to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsey Colem, who left him in 1909.
O. Henry died on June 5, 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was held in New York and he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, died in 1927 and was buried next to her father.
In the United States, the O. Henry Award for short stories, one of the most important in the world, was created in his memory. Among other writers, it has been awarded to William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen.
 

TELEMACHUS, FRIEND
 
The story begins when a hunter asks a man named Telemachus about his damaged ear, because it seems mutilated by a beast. Telemachus tells him that this ear is a mark of a really deep friendship between he and a man named Paisley, a friendship as strong as the one Damon and Pythias had.
He explained him that Telemachus and his friend spent seven years together, doing several jobs and living different experiences. Once they were in the town Los Piños and here they met a widow named Jessup, and both friends were attracted to her and each one wanted to marry her. But they didn’t want to lose their friendship and decided that if one of them reached her first, he would wait to the other to come before making advances, and would not do anything in secret. They decided to stay friends whoever won.
This situation ended up tiring the widow, who was most interested in Hinks and saw that he didn’t make any advance without being in the presence of his friend.
In spite of this, she still decided in the favour of Hicks and decided to marry him. At the wedding ceremony, Hicks asked the priest to wait until Paisley came. He finally came looking in his best, just in case the priest confuses them and marry Jessup to him instead Telemachus.
At night, after the wedding ceremony, Jessup waited in the room while Hicks sat outside. She asked him to come inside. He said her that he was waiting for his friend to come. After that Hicks felt as if somebody had shot his ear. In fact, it was a blow by Mrs. Hicks’s broom handle. This is the mark of his deep and truly friendship.

 

Audiobook

QUESTIONS

Describe the two friends.
What kind of friendship do they have?

Which is the first threat to this friendship?

What do you know about Damon and Phytias?

What is the meaning of this phrase: "anchovy to forget his vows"?

Describe Mrs Jessup.

What did Telemachus mean with "fidus Diogenes"?

What was the problem with Spring Valley / Big Spring Valley?

What is "to make a movement that leads up the widow to change her name to Hicks"?

Try to explain this image: "The smiles of a woman is the whirpool of Squills and Chalybeates into which the vortex of the good ship  Friendship is often drawn and dismembered"?

What is the "hot biscuit of Mrs Jessup"?

What are the "medicinal whirpools"?

What is a jew's harp?

What was the woman reaction to their idea of shared courtship?

Describe their different kind of courtshiping.

-Paisley

-Telemachus

Give some information about

-Rider Haggard

-Lew Dockstader

-Parkhurst

What does this mean: "when she can be referred as 'née Jones'"?

What happened exactly in the paragraph "One night... but I didn't"? (page 171, lines 25-29)

Who marries Mrs Jessup at last?

Why did his friend come to the wedding?
What happened to Lem's ear and why?

VOCABULARY

intent, dipper, graft, entitlement, churn, surcease, habiliment, pry, anchovy, in hoc signo, dogwood, chip, accrue, japonica, hiatus, railroad tie, Squills and Chalybeates, opodeldoc, hoss, synonymously, gallivantery, dough, crock, cinctured, drought, pipeful, hike yourself down the gulch, disresume, Lem, nix cum rous, Hubbard squash, wear the willow, cinch, cuff, bowery, durn, 

My Vocation, By Mary Lavin

BIOGRAPHY, by Maribel Mayorga

Mary Josephine Lavin wrote short stories and novels, and she is now regarded as a pioneer in the field of women's writing.

She is particularly noteworthy for her stories on the topic of widowhood, which are considered her finest.

Mary Lavin was born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, EUA, in 1912, the only child of Tom and Nora Lavin, an immigrant Irish couple. She attended primary school in East Walpole until the age of nine, when her mother decided to go back to Ireland. Initially, Mary lived in Athenry, in County Galway, in the West Coast. Afterwards, her parents bought a house in Dublin.

Mary attended Loreto College, a convent school in Dublin, before going on to study English and French at University College Dublin. She taught French at Loreto College for a while. As a postgraduate student, she published her first short story, "Miss Holland", which appeared in the Dublin Magazine in 1938.

In 1943, Mary published her first book, Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland; it was a critical success and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction

In 1954 her husband died. Lavin, with her reputation as a major writer already well established, was left to confront her responsibilities alone. She raised her three daughters and kept the family farm going at the same time. She also managed to publish short stories, and she won several awards for her work, including the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1961, and an honorary doctorate in 1968. Some of her stories written during this period, dealing with the topic of widowhood, are her best stories.

In 1992, the members of Aosdána (an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland) elected Lavin Saoi (one of the highest honours in Irish culture) for achieving "singular and sustained distinction" in literature.
She died in 1996 at the age of 84.

MY VOCATION

My  Vocation was published in 1956 in the Atlantic  Monthly, a magazine in the USA, thanks to  a recommendation from J. D. Salinger (author of The Catcher in the Rye).

This is a story that talks about family, religion, life in Ireland, and about a daughter who was looking for her vocation: she was thinking of becoming a nun. One day she found in an ad in a newspaper that they were looking for applicants. She did not hesitate to write, and she received a telegram in answer to the application. She lived in Dorset Street and the best thing of Dorset Street was that it was like a big happy family, and everyone was proud of the idea of her going to the missions, although she did not like the idea of going with lepers. It was time for the interview: what did she decide for her future?

QUESTIONS

The “dowry”: does the tradition go on in the case of brides?
The smell of people: do you think people smell according their job? Have you read “The perfume”?
What do you know about Mary Magdalen? What is the irony in the story?
What are the Tiller Girls? And the Gaiety? What do you need to have to be a Tiller Girl?

What is the Seven Churches ritual? Is there something similar here?

In the story they say nuns don’t cough or sneeze because they are like angels. Here, when someone sneezes, we say “Jesus!”, or “Health!”, or, in catholic anglophone countries, “Bless you”. But usually in Great Britain, when somebody sneezes, he or she says “Sorry!” Do you know any different habits about sneezing, or yawning or belching?

What do you need to be a waitress, according to the story?

What kind of girl do the boys choose to get married to, according to the story? Do you know other clichés?

What do you know about Mary Alacoque?

What preparations did the mother do for the nuns visit? How did the neighbours help?

Our protagonist ties a knot in her handkerchief: What do you do when you want to remember something?

What do you know about leprosy and lepers? Have you seen the film “Sweet Bean”? And Papillon? What happened to Gaugin in the novel The Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham?

What is a Recruiting Officer?

Describe the two nuns that visit the protagonist’s house.

How did the meeting go?

On page 440, line 20, one of the nuns says: “Oh, we have to be ready for all the eventualities”. What do you think she means?

What cab did the girl order for the nuns? Describe cab, horse, cabby…

Tell us about the accident. Did the nuns get hurt?

At the end: is she going to be a nun? How do you know? What is Dollymount?

PREPARE YOUR SPEECH

 

What do you know (from your experience) about nuns? Did you study in a nun’s school? What do you think about your experience?

Tell us your experience about your call/vocation. Is it easy to know one’s call? An important number of students change studies after their first year: why is it so difficult to choose what one wants to be in one’s life? What would you do if you didn’t like your child’s call?

What do you think of Missions or NGOs? Do they really help the people they say they’re helping?

VOCABULARY

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