12 Friday, December 21, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS MAX'S WINDOW CLEANING Happy Chanuka affordable art gifts from The Print Gallery • prompt quality service • Large selection of fine art posters and prints • Picasso & Erte silk scarves & handkerchiefs • Art nouveau lamps & porcelain dolls • Sculpture, books & Jewelry "OUR BEST RECOMMENDATION IS OUR LIST OF SATISFIED CUSTOMERS" for a S potless job et my pric e Best of all ... a warm atmosphere and friendly staff to make your holiday shopping enjoyable. Visa & MasterCard • Gift Certificates call: 29203 NORTHWESTERN AT 12 MILE SOUTHFIELD • IN FRANKLIN PLAZA 356-5454 Mon.-Thurs. 10-6, Thurs. eve 'til 9 460 • IP ► . 968-1145 houses & apartments our specialty!!! 4,••••••••••••••• • OVER 5000 PAIR ON SALE iky .4.••••••••••••••••••••••••••-•••....•00., LOOK . AT THESE FAMOUS NAMES: ANDREW GELLER • • • • • AMALFI EVAN PICONE ALLURE VANELI BAN DOL. I NO • • • • • BERNARDO ROSINA FERRAGAMO MIGNANI PALIZZIO GAROLINI • • • • • • ANNE KLEIN BEENE BAG SESTO MEUCCI NICKELS De LISO LIZ CLAIBORNE SELECTED GROUP OF FLAT CASUAL SHOES SPECIAL $ 19 99values to $36. "WE SELL THE BEST FOR LESS!!" zrmin9ham ,„gesi9ner (511oes 163 N. Woodward • Birmingham Across from Crowleys • 642-3255 Open Mon. thru Fri. til 9 p.m., Sat. to 5:30 p.m. BOOKS Doctorow the poet BY JOSEPH COHEN Special to The Jewish News The diversity in the fiction of American Jewish writing never ceases to amaze me. Bellow's work is philosophical, Roth is into corn- edies of manners and sociological stereotyping, Malamud has emerged as a master of fantasy, Heller is a master of satire, Singer is the great modern kabbalist, Mailer is the polemicist, Potok dramatizes the struggle of Jewish theological concerns against the overwhelming attractions of sec- ularism, and Ozick concentrates on the plight of the Jewish artist in America, who, having aban- doned Hebrew, is constrained to express him/herself in a foreign language, English. And then there is Doctorow who is different still. How does Doctorow differ? For one thing, he is emerging as a poet. He has, you might say, just come out of the fictional closet. He's been in there for a long time, though he's opened the door occa- sionally in the past, most notably in his previous best-seller Loon Lake (1980) where his lyrics ably encapsulate his themes. He has some similarities with these other Jewish writers: he holds in com- mon with Bellow a fondness for pitting evil against good in an old-fashioned context, with Heller a penchant for satire in comically lamenting our century's inversion of values, with Mailer an obses- sion for political justice, and with Ozick a perception of the universe in terms of Einsteinian relativity and a need to storm the barricades of language and create new forms of expression. Yet he remains fundamentally different in his being driven by the poet's passion to capture all the meaning of life in a few cen- tral metaphors. At one point in Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella (Random House), Doctorow, speaking to the reader through the voice of his protagonist, says in discussing an 'adulterous bet- rayal suffered by a friend, "Think of it as a metaphor and it will begin to work for you as it has worked for me." The function of metaphor in Lives of the Poets is analogous to the function of the lake in Loon Lake: it is a mirror reflecting and objectifying all human experience. In that reflec- tion and objectification, the mean- ing of life is made clear. The actions which comprise much of human experience are often destructive and dishearten- ing. The novella from which the book's title is taken is a prolonged compendium of marital and sex- ual discord, confirming re- peatedly that writers never end up with whomever they start out with (Doctorow's own marriage seems to be the exception!) and here, because Doctorow is more the poetic craftsman than the fic- tional narrator, his observations about the vicissitudes of life are pearls of wisdom which must be prised by the reader from between the locked shells of his oyster-like metaphors. The locked-in metaphors in Lives of the Poets remind me of Yehuda Amichai's recently re- leased _collection of translated short stories, The World Is a E. L. Doctorow: A poet in prose. Room. Not much happens in them either, but they are filled with metaphors which work effectively as substitutes for narrative ac- tion, binding their images to us by a remarkably impressive lyri- cism, as spectacular as it is consis- tent. The same poetic qualities of imagery and lyricism are present in Doctorow's stories. It is the poetry that counts, not the tales. This is Doctorow's most Jewish work since The Book of Daniel. The opening story "The Writer in the Family," is set in the Bronx in the 1950s. Jonathan, the pro- tagonist, is a Jewish adolescent mourning the death of a sales- man, his father, a lovable failure "Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella," by E. L. Doctorow, (Random House). who has left behind his own aged mother in a nursing -home. She is not told of her son's death. Jonathan is coerced by an aunt into impersonating the father through letters until, as a young writer, he refuses to compromise his integrity further and rebels against the perpetuation of the lie. Jonathan is obviously the young Doctorow who early in his career came to grips with the question of a writer's integrity. It continues to be a major issue in his thought. (Another story, "Willi," is peopled by Jews living in Galicia in 1910 and is indebted to Henry Roth's Ca lat Sleep.) The novella again gives us Jonathan the writer, now in his 50th year in a mid-life crisis, forcing his per- sonal world to crumble, hoping to recover his youth before the last goodbye. It isn't so much Jewish char- acters or settings, however, that make this book Jewish. Much about it is far more American than it is Jewish. I have a hunch it was influenced substantially by Eileen Simpson's Poets In Their Youth, published in 1982, an