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• THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
68 Friday, September 2, 1983
40—BUSINESS CARDS
LOST—LARGE BLACK CAT
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Specializing in:
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REC ROOMS
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45--LOST & FOUND
40—BUSINESS CARDS
WALL PAPERING
WALL WASHING
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352-0345
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Chair re-glueing
Caning and Rushing
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K. KENT
__ •
474-8953
GIL RABIN
CUSTOM PAINTING
KIRK POOL SERVICE
Interior - Exterior
Exterior Specials
Complete Pool Care Service
Ranches $199-Colonials $299
Free Estimates—References
552-0488
669-9245
Closings $125 inground pools.
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TOBIAS
Plastering - Stucco - Texturing.
Specializing in plaster & drywall
repairs, water damage.
REUBENS PAINTING
Interior - Exterior
Exterior Specials
Ranches $195
Colonials $295.
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559-2585
ROOFING
Gutters
Reputable and Licensed
- 937-8374.
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Quality Work
References
S uperior el ectric
569-2407
LANDSCAPE
Comp any
OF
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DETROIT
Free
Estimates
SERVIC•
Design & construction.
Quality -plant material.
Decks, patios. Refer-
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552-7225
COMPLETE ELECTRICAL
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MICHAEL GOLDENBERG
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Exterior & Interior
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" 528-2180
646-9531
NY Task Force
NEW YORK (JTA) — A
group of 30 elderly Jewish
members of the Bronx
House Senior Activities
Club, who organized them-
selves as a Social Action
Task Force in 1981 in reac-
tion to cuts in federal pro-
grams for the elderly, has
decided to intensify its ef-
forts because of continued
talk about cuts in Social Se-
curity and other entitle-
ment programs.
Expensive Time
.*
BERNIE
BENKOFF
:0(
Custom Painting &
4. Wallpapering, Inc.
original and competent ta-
lent and let it go at that.
Practically no one has
raised the question whether
51—MISCELLANEOUS
she deserves a niche in the
panoply of recognized con-
NEW CREDIT' CARD! Nobody
temporary American-
refused! Also Visa/Mastercard.
Jewish
writers. I confess I
Call (805) 687-6000, ext.
have never thought of her as
C-3069.
being one.
SUKKOT IS COMING!
Indeed, she only came to
BAMBOO (Schach) and my attention when her
prefabricated SUKKAS "Looking for Mr. Goodbar,"
(wood or canvas) new this with its tragically destined
year. BAMBOO ROLLS Catholic protagonist, be-
from Israel. Wholesale came a runaway best-seller,
and it was not until after-
and retail.
ward that upon investiga-
tion I discovered she was
YAKOVANS, INC.
Jewish and had used her
921-4822
New York Jewish back-
ground for the material of
53—ENTERTAINMENT
several of her novels, in-
VERSATILE sophisticated party cluding her first one, "To
The Precipice," published in
music. Call 893-9667.
1966. Like that one, her
TWO piece orchestra. $10. hour.
newest novel, the seventh
542-3359.
she has published, "August"
CARTOONS
(Houghton Mifflin) is about
CARICATURES
middle-class Jews in Man-
BY
hattan. Well, it is and it
JULIUS
isn't.
Reading "August" I was
2q3-1723
FOR ANY OCCASION
reminded of the way I re-
sponded to Joseph Heller's
BIRTHDAY PARTIES
"Catch-22" when I first
And other Special Occasions.
encountered it. Not that the
273-6716
two books have much in
Clowns, juggling, magic, common, other than an at-
music dance, Puppets, mosphere of cliff-hanging
neuroticism; it was rather
balloon sculpture.
an awareness that in Hel-
ler's novel a Jewish state-
COLE PORTER, IRVING BERLIN
was being made with-
At your next party. Vintage ment
out any Jews ostensibly
piano/vocal stylings in the being present, whereas in
BOBBY SHORT manner. Rossner's book the reverse
Need a piano? I'll bring is true.
543-0984 or
546-8862
Texturing of Walls. Repairs.
Free Estimates
*
In the biggest heist in
Jerusalem's and possibly Is-
rael's history, $5 million
worth of rare and precious
clocks and watches were
stolen in April from L.A.
Mayer Memorial Institute
for Islamic Art in West
Jerusalem's residential
area of Katamon.
♦ 'Specializing in foils, flocks, *
Victory in UN
* grass cloth, cork, graphics, *
*
* vinyls, material, suede.
After some three weeks of
threats, speculations and
intensive diplomatic ac-
tivity, the General Assem-
bly last year approved Is-
rael's credentials to the As-
sembly, when it voted 75-9
with 31 abstentions not to
support Iran's bid to sus-
pend Israel.
Free Estimates *
•
Insured
•
Licensed
*,
*- 353-0030
*
. * ***********
4(
Despite Good Writing, Rossner
Novel 'August' Found Lacking
In Huntington Woods. No
By JOSEPH COHEN
claws, 13 years old,
Sooner or later, we will
green-gold eyes, hair loss have
to take Judith Rossner
on fore-paws, neck and seriously. Up to now, it has
head. No collar or tags.
been easy to recognize an
353-3112
477-2039
•
Though "August" is fil-
led with Jews, no Jewish
statement of any kind
emerges. Of course,
there's no law that says
the two have to go to-
gether, but where you
find one, you usually find
the other.
In "Catch22" the pro-
tagonist Yossarian's origins
are veiled. He's different
from his fellow Air Force
officers, an outsider, the ob-
vious candidate for victimi-
zation by a global paranoid
conspiracy which he must
recognize and develop the
capacity to resist. Without
being identified as one, he
functions clearly as a Jew,
that is, one "who suffers" to
use Malamud's definition
from "The Assistant." One
can make a strong case for
arguing that "Catch-22" is
more of a "Jewish book"
than is "August."
Yet Rossner gives us a
picture of a Manhattan that
is so Jewish everybody in it
can be presumed to be Semi-
tic, including the WASPs.
Middle-class Jewish life-
styles may well be perva-
sive on New York's upper
West Side, but to remove to-
tally from the scene people
of Irish and Italian extrac-
tion, blacks and hispanics is
to build in a significant de-
gree of distortion.
Moreover, it is difficult to
conceive of a person leading
a life in Manhattan as nar-
rowly circumscribed as is
that of Rossner's pro-
tagonist, a middle-aged
clinical psychologist, Dr.
Lulu Kagan Shinefeld, who
has had two marriages and
one affair, all of them disas-
trous, and is, as the story
opens, embarking upon a
five-year long
psychoanalysis of Dawn
Henley, a client half her
age, half-Jewish (as we
learn later), and half-
suicidal, a blonde New
Englander WASP-type who
was orphaned as an infant
and reared by two lesbians,
one a WASP aunt, the other
a granddaughter of East
European Jews who settled
in Brooklyn.
Half of the book is de-
voted to Dawn's analysis
— we are all right there
with her on the couch —
which gets under way
just after she has had an
abortion and a near-fatal
automobile accident. The
analytic sessions are
sometimes fascinating,
and nearly always in-
teresting though much
too drawn out, with the
lives of a half dozen
people filtered only
through Dawn's
traumatized conscious-
ness.
In the end, her demons
appear to be exorcised and
patient and analyst part
happily, one richer in spirit,
the other in banknotes. The
pangs of lifelong separation
and loss, for Dawn at least,
have been temporarily
stayed.
Rossner's writing is
spare, incisive and usually
restrained, although it is
characteristic of her that
she can with equal aplomb
produce anything from a
clever insight or a charming
"bon mot" to an exasperat-
ingly banal platitude. For-
tunately, there are more of
the former than the latter,
but still enough to make the
reader wonder where the
devil her editor was.
Page 87 contains one of
each in close proximity.
Rossner describes Lulu's
parents' attitude to her re- -
turn home at age 18, pre-
gnant and abandoned by
her worthless husband of a
few weeks, as follows: "Her
parents were actually very
good about it. None of that
special Jewish Water Tor-
ture, an endless drip of
`I-Told-You-Sos; " Im-
mediately afterward we
read, "The days and nights
ran into each other, equally
unreal, although it was easy
to tell the difference be-
tween the two because in
the day time you didn't need
electric lights."
The presence of more
good, solid writing than
poor doesn't excuse
Rossner's pawning off on
us as real a group of
Jews, entirely comforta-
ble with their Jewish-
ness, highly professional,
mobile, who do not give
any evidence of ever hav-
ing been exposed to a
Jewish value-system.
Jewish holidays, rituals,
and ceremonies are to-
tally non-existent, ig-
nored to an extent im-
possible in Jewish Man-
hattan either by the most
avowedly secular Jews
or, for that matter, non-
Jews.
In the light of the rich
portraits of New York Jews
we have in the novels of Hel-
ler, Malamud, Bellow,
Philip Roth and I.B. Singer,
and their characters' fre-
quent interaction with the
Irish, the Italians, the
blacks and bonafide WASPs
in such novels as "Mr.
Sammler's Planet," "The
Tenants," "The Assistant"
and "Good As Gold," Ross-
ner's "August" suffers con-
siderably by its narrowing
of a rich slice of life to
opaque thinness. Her char-
acters for all their appear-
ance of being well-fed,
might be said to be suffering
from ethnic anorexia.
Nonetheless Lulu
Shinefeld is particularly
well-drawn and appealing,
her own human foibles set-
off neatly against her pro-
fessional expertise in re-
building her young charge's
damaged image of herself.
.
She engages our sym-
pathy despite her
willingness to pursue an
affair that is obviously
destructive. When she
decides to end it because
her lover's wife is griev-
ing over it, we get a first
glimmer of moral con-
cern, one that is long
overdue. Lulu isn't Mrs.
Goo djew. Looking for her
in a Rossner novel is, at
this point, an exercise in
futility.
Still, I'd be willing to
hazard a-guess, that, inevit-
ably, she'll surface, all in
Rossner's good time. I say
inevitably, because she
seems headed in that direc-
tion, much as Heller was
when he wrote "Catch-22."
Nazi Deported
Hans Lipschis, an admit-
ted former SS-
Rottenfuehrer (corporal) at
the Auschwitz-Birkenau
death camp complex, in
April became the first Nazi
war criminal in the U.S. to
be deported in more than 30
years for concealing his war
crimes. He was sent to West
Germany.
Warsaw Uprising
Some 300 delegates froth
Israel joined with more than
100 delegates representing
world Jewry to attend the
week-long commemoration
in Poland in April of the
40th anniversary of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Propaganda Back
Nazi literature and prop-
aganda, banned in Argen-
tina three years ago, re-
turned to the newsstands of
Buenos Aires in April, ac-
cording to a report in 0 Es-
tado Sao Paulo by its
Buenos Aires correspondent
Hugo Martinez.