Speaking to Sara Goldfarb, as she comes to retrieve the television, Mr.
Some of the richest Yiddish (or Yinglish) comes from the pawn shop owner, a minor character, Mr. Some of her charm comes from her regular use of Yiddish words, like zophtic (as in having a nice, plump figure), ipsy pipsy (as in everything is just fine, or dandy) or the affectionate term boobala. She is a tragic figure with whom one is simply compelled to empathize. Sara Goldfarb is profoundly lonely, yet is always ready to come to the defence of her good-for-nothing son. Other than watching television, especially game shows, her joy in life comes from eating a box of chocolates in her viewing chair, enjoying a fresh bagel with cream cheese or savouring a danish. She lives largely abandoned by her son, in a modest Brooklyn apartment. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the television is Sara Goldfarb’s life. Rabinowitz’s pawn shop, after her son Harry pawned it for pocket money. The story opens with Sara Goldfarb, a middle-aged widow, having to yet again retrieve her television from Mr.
Without clear breaks and punctuation indicating where one character’s voice stops and the other begins means that the reader must rely on the different speaking styles, slang and accents of the various characters to decipher who is talking. The fact that all of this dialogue is fully embedded in paragraphs, one sliding into the other, and that it lacks quotation marks (as well as apostrophes), can make for challenging and slow reading.
The rich internal monologues and heavily accented dialogues, giving away the socio-cultural background of these Brooklyn residents, are what make Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel Requiem for a Dream such compelling reading. (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2000), 279 pages.
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