▪ _ • THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 68 Friday, September 2, 1983 40—BUSINESS CARDS LOST—LARGE BLACK CAT BRAD CARTER CARPENTER Specializing in: BASEMENT REC ROOMS (By Machine) We clean dirt cheap Special discounts to senior citizens. WELLS 368-5322 GUTTER CLEANING From $25.00 And CUSTOM WOOD MAIL BOXES 45--LOST & FOUND 40—BUSINESS CARDS WALL PAPERING WALL WASHING Insured 352-0345 David's Plastering & Dry Wall Call VICTOR LOUIS FURNITURE REPAIR & REFINISHING Complete bedroom & dining room sets Chair re-glueing Caning and Rushing EXPERT MOVING & STORAGE INC. Low Local Rates. Check our rates to Florida, Arizona, and Israel. Eves. 589-0682 362-2350 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. Free estimates — Satisfaction Guaranteed. References in your neighborhood. TOBIAS Plastering - Stucco - Texturing. Specializing in plaster & drywall repairs, water damage. REUBENS PAINTING Interior - Exterior Exterior Specials Ranches $195 Colonials $295. FREE ESTIMATES 559-2585 ROOFING Gutters Reputable and Licensed - 937-8374. 422-9384 Quality Work References S uperior el ectric 569-2407 LANDSCAPE Comp any OF GREATER DETROIT Free Estimates SERVIC• Design & construction. Quality -plant material. Decks, patios. Refer- ences. Insured. 552-7225 COMPLETE ELECTRICAL SERVICE MICHAEL GOLDENBERG PAINTER Exterior & Interior Free Estimates SID FELDMAN STUART WEISBLATT 398-5100 711_ E. !Mk Rd. Ferndale GARAGE DOORS & ELECTRONIC OPENERS NEW INSTALLATIONS • SERVICE • REPAIRS • ALL MAKES • ALL SIZES • ALL STYLES mine. 541-2128 EXPERIENCED YOUNG PAINTER needs work. Lowest prices, highest quality workman- ship. Wallpapering, windows and janitorial services. Free esti- mates. 545-7049 GARACif. ,100?S. CHECK THE CLASSIFIEDS FREE ESTIMATES For All 355.2742 DELET Your Needs RESIDENTIAL • COMMERCIAL GARAGE DOOR SERVICE MOVING? BERNIE IS BACK Local and Long Distance • Household • Apartments • Office Low Independent Rates Modern Equipment Insurance For a Free Estimate Call ADVANCE TRANSFER & STORAGE " 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.