42 Friday, November 8, 1985 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS RENT A SIX FOOT LAWN CREATURE FOR ALL OCCASIONS a C A 1. A P /1 P 1 T 1 IIAPPT 111TEDAY S CREATURE G.G. Warren Co. IS WORTH 1,000 WORDS Fashion Jewelry & Accessories Jewelry Repairs and Custom Design Service available te j%1 4 • located in the Daniel J. Salon 29777 Orchard Lake Rd. Farmington Hills Michigan 48018 I 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. v\ci v 0 \,0 tv' \•= ti • V 000\- N\sOs \Isl x-\\,kv • ot \•K• , s eP.o s 0\4' N v‘Nss N A O \-‘ _ lk,1 0. 05 k \•4‘ \ A O 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-