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WITH COUPON EXP. 12-21-84 LITTON MICROWAVE COOKING- HOLIDAY & PARTIES COOKBOOK Turn even impromptu get-togethers into festive parties with these ideas and your microwave oven. Hundreds of easy recipes with step-by-step details and full color photographs to guide you. Hardbound Cover: 8 1/2x11". $888 I WITH COUPON EXP. 12-21-84 =Ls ow ...e mom= im 4c.t...1, -1 c•At; 4 .• 4 ti • ii. 4 1► it' NI Nom ail a. is ./ VA' L ► 4Ili I' 47 71/1: re. 1 1 1 1 In 1922, the American poet e.e. cummings startled the literary world with the publication of an autobiographical novel entitled The Enormous Room. Maverick in its form, the book vividly de- scribed the three months cum- mings spent in La Ferte-Mace, a notorious French detention camp, following his imprisonment dur- ing the First World War. The significance of cummings' novel was and is to be found in its evocation of the human spirit, its commitment not merely to survi- val in the face of destruction but to love and tenderness and human connectedness. Thumbing his nose at death, cummings re- sponded to the dehumanization of war and concentration camp de- tention not with a cowering whimper but with a full-throated, defiant laugh. Not the least of the virtues of his book is its graphic description. The fine eye of the poet is everywhere at work here, seeing not merely the surfaces of things but probing into their subterra- nean depths as well. The micro- cosm of the poet's prison cell be- comes the macrocosm of the enormouse room, that is to say, of the whole world. In famed Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai's newly published collec- tion of short stories, The World Is a Room (Jewish Publication Sociey), much of the same startl- ing brilliance occurs, only here the setting is not La Ferte-Mace but Israel in its first years of inde- pendence. Israel (with the excep- tion of one story that is set in New York) is Amichai's microcosmic metaphor for the world at large, a room that lacks positive meaning until it is filled with love. With love comes light and sound, neighbors, children, normalcy. The search of the two poets is therefore the same: it is always for love and tenderness and human connectedness in a setting of un- easy peace and the anticipated violence of war. In the absence of love, the sense of loss is pervasive. The figurative language em- ployed by both cummings and Amichai is resplendent, opening up whole universes of nuance, feeling and understanding. To be sure, there are some fun- damental differences between the two poets. As distinguished as cummings was by the time he died in 1962, Amichai's poetic talent is greater. His metaphors and similes in these stories leap-frog one over the other, accelerating and accumulating with an as- tonishing barrage of fresh, fertile and original images that go far beyond the limits cummings set for himself. Where cummings in- variably turned to irony, ribald jests and defiance, Amichai relies upon compassion, empathy and resignation, accepting what cummings sought always to evade, the fact that one could face down death only so many times. Cummings' romantic indi- vidualism gives way in Amichai to apprehension, wariness and a determination to reconfirm the fact of one's existence by repeated acts of love, sensual and compas- sionate. Amichai's ten short stories, masterfully translated, function differently from those of most con- temporary writers. Short fiction depends for its effect upon a criti- cal conflict between two clearly defined opposing forces. That is hardly the case here. In the stories which use the Israeli-Arab con- flict as background, the pro- tagonists' enemies are less likely to be Arabs than they are to be The World Is a Room" by Yehuda Amichai, Jewish Publication Society. immobility, detachment, con- straint, separation, transforma- tion, the erosion of time; and the failure of two people — lovers, spouses, neighbors or friends -- to communicate because of the dis- parity in their subjective in- terpretations of the same realities. Soldiers mobilize and wait, lov- ers pledge fidelity and either sleep with or marry others, a bar mitzvah boy is given compasses which will guide him on his newly initiated journey into the Dias- pora of time and space, two lovers begin their affair at its end and work their way backwards to its beginning, a son recognizes the accumulated deaths of his father, culminating in the final one which separates them forever. In several of the stories, Amichai pays his respects to his muse, an earth-mother figure who turns up in a dozen different women all of whom aggressively bestow and withdraw their sexual favors and maternal benevolence in a confusion of hope and despair that constitutes Amichai's vision of human relationships in our time. - The spirit of Einstein is wonder- fully invoked in these stories: ev- erything is relative, nothing is certain, all things are possible, casuality breaks down. Separa- tion is the only certainty. Trans- formation is the only constant. The centrality of ordinary conflict is replaced by the random and therefore unpredictable move- ment of people as though they were particles and waves moving through the great magnetic field of the world as a room. The under- lying logic behind this movement is all associational. For writers less imaginative than Amichai, this technique poses dangerous risks; in Amichai's hands the stories slip and slide, sing and glide from one scene into the next, leaving us with a conviction that Amichai's metaphorical pyrotechnics are as remarkable in our time as e.e. cummings' were in his time. Joseph Cohen is director of the Jewish Studies program at Tulane University in New Orleans: J ) ) I. 4 /' .0 1 .4. 4, 4'' 4... ti4.41414 t 4%