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.