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xi Foreword Peter Pitzele et me give you a paragraph from Bill Kaufman’s story “Grandfather and the Poretz.” May I ask you to put aside for a moment your question about what a poretz is and your concern that you don’t know Bill’s grandfather. I just want you to listen to a man playing an instrument he loves and has played a long time. The instrument is called prose. Pop loved all fruits equally—with one exception. Plums. He hated plums, despised them. All varieties, shapes, sizes, colors, girths, feels came under his ban. It was an aversion of long standing, a primordial enmity. He even loathed its alter ego, the prune, which is virtually an act of heresy in Jewish households. His animosity to the plum dates back to his boyhood in Russia. To a sunny, gently sloping orchard located only a stone’s throw from the tiny shapeless house in which my father was born. What happened? How did it begin? Now prose, like people, comes in all shapes, and almost anyone, of whatever shape, can be moved to dance if the music is right. But of course not everyone is equally graceful. We have all seen the grace of the gifted ballerina, or the young man with the music in his heart fairly flying. And too we have seen portly men light on their feet, and the elderly surprisingly spry at a wedding. Everyone can dance. A little. And everyone can write prose. So the question is how we, the readers, are moved by prose, to what thoughts and feelings in what manner and intensity. xii | Foreword Let us reread the paragraph above. By its end you will confess you want to read the next paragraph. By its end you will have seen with your inner eye the “sunny, gently sloping orchard” (from a technical point of view, one wants to point out that this sequence of four words all have a stress that rocks them forward, as if rolling down a slope.) You will have smiled at the indispensable prunes in the Jewish household ; you will perhaps have admired the choice of nouns that proceeds from shapes, through girths; and you may have remarked at the somber hyperbolic “primordial envy” which takes an alert reader all the way back to the garden of Eden and the first fruit story of them all. But by the end of this paragraph and without being able to tell quite where or how, I wager you will have been completely lulled out of your critical faculties and been put in the mood of a child at bedtime who only wants to read, or hear more. Prose has done that to you, supple, serviceable, mischievous prose. And there’s a whole lot more where that came from in Bill Kaufman’s new book. ...

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