42
Friday, November 8, 1985
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
RENT A SIX FOOT LAWN CREATURE FOR ALL OCCASIONS
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G.G. Warren Co.
IS WORTH
1,000 WORDS
Fashion Jewelry & Accessories
Jewelry Repairs and Custom
Design Service available
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located in the
Daniel J. Salon
29777 Orchard Lake Rd.
Farmington Hills
Michigan 48018
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STORK EXPRESS 435-0148
THE MICHIGAN REGION OF
WOMEN'S AMERICAN ORT
invites the community to celebrate
ORT Sabbath with us
FROM THE PAST ..
A FUTURE
Temple Israel
Friday, November 8, 1985
8:00 P.M.
Al\
Beth Achim Synagogue
Saturday, November 9, 1985
9:00 A.M.
RIME
N'IP'
live productive lives, to fulfill their
ORT schools hove helped hundreds and thousands of children and adults to
in every language, ORT
thirst for knowledge and to keep their pride in their Jewish heritage. In any language,
symbolized hope, opportunity and freedom.
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Hall
Presented by
HALL FINANCIAL GROUP
HAMILTON PLACE
Atitt„,•,sh!'el?5ia 1 Club 646.8990
(between 12 and 13 Mile)
BOOKS
Rona Jaffe
Continued from preceding page
Reunion, sales of Class Reunion
are expected to soar once again.
Even though Jaffe says she
wrote the sequel with the inten-
tion that someone could read the
two books in either order, the
probability — and the hope — is
that someone who picks up (and
likes) the sequel and had never
read its predecessor will beg,
borrow or even buy Class Reu-
nion.
The "reunion" in the Reunion
books occurs at Jaffe's old col-
ground,
stomping
legiate
Radcliffe. The centerpiece of the
first book is the 20th reunion of
the Class of 1957. The cen-
terpiece of the second book is
the 25th reunion of the same
class. In both books, the same
four women chase men and are
chased by them:
• Emily, a "dishrag" of a nice
Jewish girl whose future hus-
band's medical practice in Be-
verly Hills leads him to beauti-
ful women and illicit drugs;
• Annabel, beautiful and
promiscuous, saddled with a rot-
ten marriage to an alcoholic
lawyer;
• Chris, incisive, witty and
obsessed with Alexander, a
Harvard dreamboat whom she
finally discovers is a homosex-
ual; and,
• Daphne, the "Golden Girl"
of the Class of 1957, lovely and
mannered, with a "charmed" life
based on deception.
If this sounds like the stuff of
a mid-day soap opera, you're not
far off. Emily finally drops her
stoned, philandering husband,
has a face lift, starts a business,
and moves to a Fifth Avenue
apartment overlooking Central
Park. Her life, writes Jaffe,
"was still unresolved, unfinished
..." So much more wiser," than
in her college days, "but still ex-
cited, Emily looked forward to
the future . . . When it came,
she planned to be ready."
Annabel leaves her husband
the day after she accidentally
sets fire to her home, opens a
boutique in New York, and
cavorts with a dozen men, most
of whom were too young for her
even when she was in college.
She finally falls in love with a
(relatively) mature film director,
with whom she has a bicoastal
commuters' romance that makes
both her and the airlines ex-
tremely happy.
And the saga continues. Frus-
trated but still obsessed, Chris
decides she can't live with her
gay husband. But she can't live
without him, either. They con-
tinue to share their apartment,
but not their bed. Chris has a
semi-permanent "arrangement"
with a married man, her hus-
band continues his homosexual
assignation and they still say,
almost like clockwork, that they
are each other's "best friends."
Hold on, we're not done yet.
There's dear, sweet Daphne, the
belle of every dance and the
heart's desire of every Harvard
man, ca. 1957. Fed up with her
life of secrets and duplicities,
Daphna dumps her husband
whose quest for perfection drives
her batty. A little on the late
side, she tries to give her life
and the life of her children some
honesty. She eventually takes
up with Michael, the sort of guy
she never would have dated at
Radcliffe because, for goodness
sake, the man's a Jew.
Each of these women had the
same dream: Love and Marriage
and Mr. Right and a life with a
golden sunset every evening. It
wasn't so. It couldn't be so. Gol-
den sunsets are the stuff of Hol-
lywood. One a month? Maybe, at
least in real life and half-way
decent fiction. But one every
night? Never.
"Many of the men and women
who were brought up in the Fif-
ties," said Jaffe, "didn't think
much beyond that glorious wed-
Rona Jaffe will
speak at 1 p.m.
Monday, Sisterhood
Day, at the main
Jewish Community
Center for Detroit's
34th annual Jewish
Book Fair.
ding day. They didn't under-
stand that life goes on. The Fif-
ties was a time of togetherness.
And what these four women
found out, among other things,
was that they had married men
who wanted to succeed and who
wouldn't be around very much."
For each of these women,
their four years at Radcliffe are
their eternal touchstone, their
constant reference point. They
constantly compare themselves
— and each other — to their
days in Cambridge. College,
Jaffe told me, is so important for
most people because "it's the
last time you're ever going to be
a kid again before you have to
go out into the world and work.
You're very aware of that, espe-
cially as time goes on. and it's
also important because you're
still a kid. You have your
dreams. After you got out of col-
lege in the Fifties and you had
made your decision about what
you were going to be, you usu-
ally thought you had to make
the best of it. You felt stuck.
You didn't feel that choices were
still open to you."
Jaffe said, a bit ingenuously,
that After the Reunion is "about
good surprises and people
changing their lives and not
being stuck." Well, maybe so.
Those famous 'Cliffies — Emily,
Annabel, Chris and Daphne —
sure do change. Emily ain't a
dishrag no more, Annabel ain't
promiscuous, Chris begins to
flower (no pun intended) outside
of her sexual riddle of a mar-
riage to a closet homosexual and
Daphne realizes that there is
more to life than being perfect,
that even "Golden Girls" tar-
nish.
All the women have a field
day changing. Or, in the
psychobabble of days recently
gone by, they have a field day
"growing." But all the insights,
all the wisdom, all the sensitiv-