46
Friday; October
1PO4
TFM ,DERPIT JEWISH iND4 -
" " "' '8615erior '""" c ' - " m
OAK-LEAF PLAITZA BROOMS
(baysomes)
6°° each
el Mt C
r
BOOKS
available
Probing the Jewish psyche
Discounts on wholesale orders
BY JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
call
"THE BROSal 6 CLOSET"
The Greater Detroit Chapter of Hadassoh
and
The Midrosha College of Jewish Studies
present their 1984 Morning CY Evening
FALL LECTURE SERIES
MORNING LECTURE SERIES
WEDNESDAYS • OCTOBER 24, 31 and
NOVEMBER 7 10:30-12:00 NOON
Myth and Meaning:
New Insights into the Bible
Dr. Tikvah Frymer-Kensky
Biblical Scholar Assyriologist
$15.00 - This includes a bonus lunch on October 24th.
EVENING LECTURE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21 • 7:00 P.M.
The Prague Jewish Community -
Reminiscences and Reflections
Dr. Saul Friedlander
Tel Aviv University
Open to the public at No Charge
13 MILE RD .
RADRASHA
352-7117 or 354-1050
a 21550 W. 12 MIRO.
.c•
Midrasha
•
12 MILE RD
I
3
COLLEGE OF — JEWISH STUDIES
Located In the Sigmund
and Sophie Rohlik Bldg
21550 W. Twelve Mile • Southfield, Mich. 48076
SEIKO
4,
a:Tx
A
• "lima"
mrs
4Ct.
—
, a
- ••
ff OIN/12-4-I---
S
I
„
'
,
/FA
Time and Motion at Tapper's
Some Seiko clocks are swingers and some are just bystanders,
but either way they make a great impression. Watch the
skeleton movements as time glides by on these gold-tone
clocks. Because they're Seiko, they're as accurate as they are
attractive, with battery operation for cordless convenience.
Come see the whole collection of Seiko clocks we have waiting
to impress you.
ORDER
BY PHONE
357-5576
Tapper's
gL.)
Among the brightest stars shin-
ing in the American literary fir-
mament these days is Joyce Carol
Oates. Prolific, with an imagina-
tion that astounds in its kaleidos-
copic velocity, she produces
novels, short stories, poems, plays
and essays ceaselessly and, one
would believe, effortlessly. In-
creasingly, she is challenging
John Updike in versatility, prod-
uctivity, moral suasion and clar-
ity of insight into the character of
the contemporary American.
Oates has much in common
with Updike. Both came out of
moderately comfortable, small
town middle-class, eastern
Catholic backgrounds, she from
Millerport, N.Y., he from Shil-
lington, Pa. Both have a passion
to explain us to ourselves, to tell
us what America is all about,
what is absent, artificial, hypoc-
ritical, indeed, lethal, in our
human relationships and family
lives, what our options are and
our limits, and what we must do to
gain the kingdom of heaven.
If Oates and Updike share
much in common, they also have
some significant differences.
Among these is an attitude about
American Jewish life in terms of
its usefulness as grist for their
flourishing mills. On the one
hand, Updike has been in hot pur-
suit of the American Jewish liter-
ary renaissance for a decade and a
half; he has entered into the re-
cord the character of the ubiquit-
ous Henry Bech in Bech: a Book
and Bech is Back as Exhibit A in
his case for a place next to Philip
Roth in the pantheon of American
Jewish mainstream writing. No
doubt, a third Bech book is al-
ready fermenting in Updike's fer-
tile brain (Bech is Bach, Bech's
Bad Bucks, Bech Beckons, Flip
Bech's Bic, etc.)
On the other hand, Oates,
though she ranges across the
entire topography of the Ameri-
can experience, has never been
compelled to carve for herself a
slice of the American Jewish
literary pie. She is much more re-
laxed that Updike despite the fact
that the Jewish family dynamic
continues to be a tremendous lure
to contemporary writers. Up to
now, it has only been the rare oc-
casion, the exception rather than
the rule, that has brought Oates
to employ Jewish characters. Ibis
true that very early in her, career
she turned to the Old Testament,
and her copy always seems to be at
her elbow. Her first novel, With
Shuddering Fall, (1964) used the
Akeda, the story of Abraham's
near-sacrifice of Isaac, as a
structural springboard; the
mythical setting for most of her
fiction is Eden County, N.Y.,
hardly a paradise; and another
novel, The Garden of Earthly De-
lights (1967) plays on the Edenic
theme in its title.
So unconcerned has Oates been
in the past about Jewish subjects,
I know of only one story which
uses them. "In the Region of Ice,"
now recognized as one of her mas-
terpieces, from The Wheel of Love
and Other Stories (1970), de-
scribes the anxieties of a Catholic
nun over her conflicting feelings
for her star college student, a
bright, emotionally over-wrought
Jewish boy who tried intellectu-
ally to coerce her into "a human
relationship." Already a bride of
Christ, she resists. Her student
goes mad and commits suicide.
While suicide and other forms
of human destruction are com-
monplace in Oates' fiction, it is
curious that she returns to this
specific context for her title story
in her new collection Last Days
(E.P. Dutton). These last days are
those of Saul Morgenstern (a
troubled morning star) who is
brilliant, cynical, self-righteous,
at war with his parents and the
rest of humankind as well.
Believing himself to be the
messiah, Morgenstern laments
his already-too-late arrival to
change the world. But disturb the
universe he will! He will show the
hypocrites and the evil-doers the
folly of their ways. He plans his
attack as though it were a media
event, ruminating on it fore and
aft. On a Shabbat morning he
mounts the bimah during services
waving a pawn-shop pistol, deliv-
ers a ringing denunciation of the
congregation of which 800 mem-
bers are present, fatally pumps
three slugs into the rabbi and a
fourth into his own brain. He said
he would show them, and he cer-
tainly did. Or did he? The story is
narrated so cleverly that the
reader is left to ponder whether
this shocking murder-suicide ac-
tually occurred (with its similar-
ity to the death of Rabbi Morris
Adler at Cong. Shaarey Zedek in
Southfield) or if it is merely the
continuing Oedipal execution
fantasy of a deranged mind.
Among a • whole series of
Kafkaesque-inspired stories in-
volving Americans behind the
Iron Curtain, there is a second
Jewish one entited "My Wars-
zawa: 1980," about a sophisti-
cated, thoroughly-assimilated
famous American writer of
Polish-Jewish ancestry who,
while attending a cultural confer-
ence in Warsaw, is forced finally
to c'nfront her Jewish identif,y.'
She comes close to suffering a'
nervous breakdown, but he --
catharsis is redeeming and she
willingly embraces it. In lincs,
that Sylvia Plath might have
written, the protagonist Judith,
Horne says at the moment she
comes to accept herself, "A Jew; a
woman, a victim — can it be?"
While there is nothing unusua,
about non-Jewish writers doing
stories about Jews, it is of mde
,
"Last Days" by Joyce
Carol Oates, (E.P.
Dutton).
than passing interest when a
novelist of Joyce Carol Oates' sta-
ture undertakes to examine the
American Jewish psyche. A lot
may be gained from it. Becaus
she is so accomplished, we might)
learn, if she pursues the subject
far enough, more about the ways
in which American non-Jews pre-
sently perceive and react to Jeers
We may also come to a better defi-
nition of what American Jewis!-,
writing is by observing what it is
not: there is no Yiddish lilt in h:T
prose rhythms and no attempt as
in Updike's writing to fabricate
one.
By comparing her prose style on
Jewish subjects to Cynthia,
Ozick's or Saul Bellow's we may`
determine precisely how and why
Jewish writing in English
different from non-Jewish writ-1
ing. We now less about these
tinctions thatn more people sup-
pose. Unquestionably, we can
learn more about these matters!
from Joyce Carol Oates than we
can from John Updike who, a
talented as his imitations of
Jewish writing are, has nothing +_c
tell us we don't already know.
Copyright 1984, Joseph Cohen.
NEWS
The first international Chocolate Festival will take place in Israel Feb. j
26-March 2, 1985. Participants will engage in a number of events,
including a sculpture contest. Pictured is a model of the walls of
Jerusalem's Old City, and the Dome of the Rock mosque, made with
white and dark chocolates.