Word: blankfort
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BEHOLD THE FIRE by Michael Blankfort. 397 pages. The New American Library...
...Author Blankfort, who has a daughter and three grandchildren now living in Israel, has poured his heart into Behold the Fire, his eighth novel. His prose at times is hauntingly Biblical. His description of Jewish farmers battling a locust swarm is so vividly and sparely done that the reader can all but feel the crunch of the crawling vermin underfoot. And his protagonists, growing almost against their will to withstand stresses they never imagined, will not be easy to forget...
Monique (by Dorothy and Michael Blankfort) is a child of the same French novel-The Woman Who Was No More -as the film Diabolique. The two are by no means twins, however. In the stage chiller, when Fernand Ravinel's wife refuses to dissolve their unhappy marriage through divorce, his doctor-mistress Monique suggests dissolving it through murder. As the efficient Monique drowns the wife in a bathtub and then makes her appear to drown in a stream-a Lady Macbeth superintending an Ophelia's fale -a scared Fernand quivers like jelly and wobbles like a tenpin...
...slept in tents, made their own beds. They read the Bible, learned chants and rituals, and rehearsed the religious play which climaxes each retreat. This one, titled The Spaniard, was about the life of Maimonides, 12th century Jewish philosopher, and was written by Film-scripter Michael Blankfort...
...screenplay, Michael Blankfort has wisely lopped away some of the over-melodramatic incidents of his 1952 novel to create a convincing chase story with vivid topographical and psychological landscapes. Kirk Douglas in the title role makes an affecting individual of the D.P. in flight from the law and himself. He is alternately cocky and wisecracking, lonely and obsessed by fears. As Yael, the sabra (native-born Israeli) girl who comes to love the juggler and helps set him on the road to recovery, Italian Actress Milly Vitale is a plumply pretty figure dressed in shorts and lugging a rifle...