Word: childhood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...finest story in the issue is by Kurt Blankmeyer, a piece called Saturday Burial, which describes the narrator's childhood experiences with a mad widow, and her dog Siegfried. The widow is a powerful Teuton transparently called Edda Norse, and the story has a conscious Germanic flavor and a fine not to say exciting Wagnerian ending. Saturday Burial is written in the same half-understanding, wide-eyed manner as Blankmeyer's Victory Over Japan, but less skillfully. The development is somewhat mechanical, and the events which should happen spontaneously seem to be plotted by an all-too-visible hand...
...wonder that our mental hospitals are not only kept full but are brimming over when children are subjected to public terror and humiliation that they are too inexperienced to cope with and to rationalize the way adults have to. Have we delivered American childhood from the sweat shop only to turn it over to such Romanesque pastimes as the terrors and tensions of the Ottawa, Kans. brand of peewee baseball...
...from playwriting. Act One (Random House; $5) in a sense is still a play. It is a collection of fascinating characters whom the author parades before the footlights of his wit and warmth. There is first of all the character who dominated Moss Hart's poverty-ridden Bronx childhood: a grandfather, whom a casual neighbor might well have regarded as simply an embittered, ill-tempered old cigar maker, pathetically attached to his past friendship with the great labor leader, Sam Gompers. But in Moss Hart's telling, he becomes "an Everest of Victorian tyranny," the black sheep...
...Shanti's quest for his uncle. The mystery is eventually solved by a document written by the uncle himself. But by this time, Shanti and the reader are both well beyond the simple curiosity that began the search. Shanti is back in his village and back with his childhood sense of rapture at the sun and the sea. When his share of the treasure he found is sent to him there, he casts it into the sea. He has climbed from action to contemplation, and from that height realizes that both are their own rewards...
...respondents, however, was the religious tradition of their childhood a "very marked" influence. Most claimed that its effect on them was only "moderate," in the case not only of present Christians and Jews, but also with those now in no faith. Curiously, 40 per cent of those now belonging to no religious group wished to raise their children in the faith in which they were raised. On the basis of this data, we are encouraged to believe that the tradition in which these students were raised neither made them feel bound to it nor did it make them so resentful...