But also read the book. When I came upon it in my final year of high school in 1961, the characters, the settings, the prose, its total rural atmosphere held me undistractably engrossed.

And if, as Roz Tarszisz writes, there is some Thomas Hardy kind of misery in it from which she would wish to be spared, meileh! Azoy is does lebn! Cosi la vita! C’est la vie! Kakha zeh!Its misery is more than made up for by the sheer narrative, visual, musical and performance wealth of the whole.