October and June, by O. Henry

SUMMARY, by J. Guiteras

The captain, who had kept his uniform worn out by time and service in a closet, was enchanted by the sweet and smiling lips of a woman.

He received a letter from this woman telling him that she would not marry him because of the age difference between them.

The captain, who was rich and handsome, did not resign himself to this refusal and took a train to see her so that she could reconsider.

She stood firm in her decision, arguing that within a few years one of them would want to be quiet at home and the other would be crazy about going out to parties.

The captain was sad because he had lost the battle and returned home.

The next day he reflected and came to the conclusion that Theo, the woman, was right, since one of them was 28 years old and the other was only 19 years old.

 

Reflection: I feel sorry for them because a younger person can always learn a lot from another one who is older and with experience and has a lot to teach to a youngster.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why was the age gap very important in the past, and now isn’t so?

-Do you think we’ll be able to overcome all the clichés? Are prejudices good or bad for daily life?

-In your opinion, what is the relation of the title with the story?

 

VOCABULARY

gloomily, rugged, squared, ‘Pon

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.

Life of Ma Parker, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma.

Ma Parker lived a hard life. She left Stratford-on-Avon at the age of sixteen and started to work as a kitchen-maid with a cruel woman, the cook, who would not let her read her letters from home and threw them away. She also worked as a “help” in a doctor’s house. After two years, she got married to a baker. This was also a very painful experience. She had thirteen children, seven of them died very early. Her husband also died and left Ma Parker to raise the remaining six children all by herself. When they started going to school, her sister-in-law came to her house, to take care of them. One day, her sister-in-law had an accident and injured her spine, and Ma Parker had to look after this woman who behaved and cried like another baby.

Two of her children, Maudie and Alice, left her and fell into bad ways. Her two other sons went to live in another country, and young Jim joined the army and left for India. Her youngest daughter, Ethel, got married to a worthless, little waiter who soon died, leaving behind a newly born son, Lennie, to be taken care of by Ma Parker.

The story begins when Ma Parker arrives at her work as a maid in the house of a literary gentleman. She had buried her loving Lennie, who was the only ray of light in her sad life, the previous day. After opening the door, the gentleman asks her about her grandson. She informs him that he had passed away the day before. He enquires about the funeral, but Ma Parker doesn’t say anything about it and walks to the kitchen to do her work. After changing her clothes, she puts on her apron in preparation for her duties. While she is cleaning the pile of dishes in the kitchen, she remembers her small grandson persuading her to hand over a cent. She recalls Lennie’s tribulations. He had had a chest infection that he seemed not to be able to get rid of. Even though she has suffered a lot in her life, she has never complained and never broken down, but now, the day after Lennie’s burial, she is overcome and finally wants to cry.

Suddenly, she puts on her jacket and her hat and walks out absent-mindedly, lost in thought. She is unaware of her destination. She really wants to cry. It becomes difficult for her to postpone it any longer. She couldn’t cry anywhere, not at home or on a park bench. She couldn’t cry in the gentleman’s flat. She couldn’t find any location where she could be alone and cry. There is nowhere for Ma Parker to cry. It starts to rain, and she has nowhere to go. The rain can mask her tears, and she no longer has to hide and find a place to cry.

 

SOME REFLECTIONS

The story mixes the past with the present. The past is not a separate entity. Another literary device that Mansfield employs is interior monologue like “Why must it all have happened to me?” The most important, themes are social position and isolation. On the one hand, we see the literary gentleman who does not seem to understand how hard Ma Parker’s life is. He accuses her of stealing and discredits her as “a hag”; on the other hand, we have Ma Parker, a poor, uneducated woman. She pities the poor young gentleman for having no one to look after him.

QUESTIONS

-What are the things we have to say in a funeral? Do we have to tell only how nice the dead person was, or you can also talk their dark side?

-Why do you think the literary gentleman doesn’t have a name?

-In the paragraph “The result looked like a gigantic dustbin. […] or dark stains like tea.” There is a mixture of ideas: the dirty room next to the sad-looking sky. What is the relation between these two pictures?

-The literary man makes a “product called Life”. When do you think literature is Life?

-Katherine Mansfield died of consumption. What do you know about consumption and literature? Can you give us more examples of writers?

-What is the meaning of this sentence: “Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her”?

-Do you trust in the remedies appeared in newspapers? Do you have any anecdote?

-What kind of invalid are you: patient, angry, worried…?

-What would have to be the master’s attitude in front of an ill servant?

-What deeds do you consider that you have to do in private: crying, laughing, coughing…, but also brushing one’s teeth…?

 

VOCABULARY

parding, huskily, hobbled, marmalade, twinge, squashed, deadened, pail, roller towel, hag, area railings, chimley, range, beedles, sold up, loaves, chock-a-block, putting it on, bottils, postal order, stifled, counterpane, fitting by, as like as not

AUDIOBOOK

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

SUMMARY

WOMAN WORK, by Maya Angelou

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