Beginnings

Has Isaac Bashevis Singer, this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature, ever written a more improbable story than the story of this year's Nobel Prize for Peace? Singer writes of ghosts and goblins, of...

...Meanwhile, Bloomingdale's announces that in its thirteen stores, this May, there will take place a major promotion of Israeli merchandise, under the rubric "Israel, The Dream...
...Send the names and addresses—zip codes, please—to moment at 462 Boylston Street, Boston, 02116...
...As Menachem Begin himself said to Anwar Sadat when they spoke about the prize, it is peace that is the real prize...
...A group which calls itself Hashevet Ha'avud—The Lost Tribe—asks our help in opposing Proposition 6 on November's California ballot...
...Odds and ends: The mail just came, today's reminder of the diverse concerns and activities of Jews...
...And yet, and yet...
...For those of us who have sweated through the first three volumes, Thanksgiving will be especially meaningful this year...
...Blessed be the (improbable) peacemakers...
...innocence is not destroyed...
...We hold our breath, still, hoping that the value of this prize will not prove on a par with that awarded Henry Kissinger and Le Due Toh several years back...
...Hashevet Ha'avud is a coalition of lesbian and gay Jews, and Proposition 6 would permit school districts to fire homosexual teachers...
...And remember, Chanukah is coming...
...And our felicitations to our colleagues at the Jewish Daily Forward, where most of Singer's work has first appeared...
...We hold our breath, hoping that they have come far enough from where they were to seize so firm a hold on this new opportunity that nothing will shake it loose...
...If you can't sign them up yourself, just lend us a list of the names and addresses of those you think would like this magazine, and we'll send them subscription information, telling them that it's your recommendation that has prompted us to do so...
...With luck, by the time the Prize is awarded the real prize will have been reached...
...Interns for Peace, a new human relations program between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel, has begun a program which will see twelve North American interns together with eight Israeli Arab and Jewish interns spend two years in Peace Corps type activities in Arab neighborhoods of Haifa...
...Now we have this new unlikely world offered us by the Nobel people...
...Being chosen really keeps us busy...
...If, as we hope, others of you want to lend a hand, let us know...
...That prize is still hidden from full view...
...There, for children, the same ghosts and goblins lead to happy endings...
...In this issue, Curt Leviant offers us an introduction to the fascinating world of I. B. Singer's children's stories, and perhaps it is to them that we should look for a sign...
...May your Thanksgiving overflow...
...We enter his world by suspending our belief...
...And to all our readers who have responded to our request that they introduce moment to their friends and neighbors, whether by the giving of gifts or by the selling of introductory subscriptions, a special thanks...
...We make no special to-do anent our anniversary in this issue, but there is one place where attention is subtly called to it...
...The curtains part unsteadily, but now we know, as we did not a year ago, that there is something real behind those curtains...
...A prize to two men who may not be on speaking terms by the time they arrive to claim it, a prize to Menachem Begin, he of the Irgun, to Anwar Sadat, he of Nazi sympathies...
...We added almost a thousand new subscribers last month (not including the moment College Program, which we report on elsewhere in these pages), and we're pleased as can be about that...
...It is the Begin and the Sadat, and, if all goes well, next year the Jimmy Carter, of Camp David, men who could not be more different each from the other, men who have come to where they are from very far away, men who are as distant as can be from the ethereal saintliness that prizes for peace suggest...
...Surely no group of Jewish journalists has ever worked with more devotion against such heavy odds, and we know how pleased and how proud they are that one of their own family has been so signally rewarded...
...This is Volume 4, Number 1 of moment...
...To the first ten readers who correctly identify the place, a free gift subscription to anyone of their choosing...
...Singer writes of ghosts and goblins, of Eros and Satan...
...And Richard Dreyfuss will narrate, this month, a new musical work commemorating the murder, on August 12, 1952, of 24 prominent Jewish writers in the Soviet Union...
...No, it is not Begin of the Irgun and Sadat of darker times who share the prize...
...For in his children's stories, Leviant informs us, Singer's world-view is rather different from the one he offers in his tales for adults and other lost souls...
...Yet here they are, on the verge...

Vol. 4 • November 1978 • No. 1


 
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