Arts

ertamment

Books To Get Away With

Paul's and Chester's places in the
patriarchal scheme plague Paul. He
hopes that by deciphering his father's
writings, he will illuminate their rela-
tionship and his own pain.
The novel explores all that as it tells
the story of a man in midlife crisis.
The themes of Sacrifice are complex;
the pace is fast and direct. Aware from
the first page of Chester's violent end,
we read the novel with a sort of reverse
suspense; ,like Paul, we know what
happened. We just need to know why.

— Reviewed by Rebecca E. Kotkin

The Law of Return by Maxine
Rodburg (Carnegie Mellon Press;
152pp.; $15.95)

FICTION from page 74

Sacrifice by Todd Gitlin (Metropolitan Books; 229 pp.; $23.00)
Chester Garland's life had always been a mystery to his son Paul. What
would make a man at a conference in Paris suddenly abandon his wife, son and
profession as a psychoanalyst? What would make him return to his family after
a considerable absence only long enough to divorce and change his career focus?
Finally, many years later, what would make that man suddenly jump in front of
a subway train and end his life?
Within days of his father's suicide, Paul receives Chester's journals and
becomes privy to his distant father's private thoughts. Sacrifice, Todd Gitlin's new
novel, follows Paul as he traces his father's past and tries to understand its impli-
cations for their own relationship. The novel consists of extensive diary entries
laced with Paul's struggle to comprehend what happened to his father many years
before.
The story is an agonizing one. Chester, having found himself on the wrong
train, meets an exotic woman and her child and impulsively moves in with
them. His journals reveal his spiritual and psychic confusion and his efforts to
reconcile his life with his faith. As events transpire that shock Chester back to
reality, he returns to his former life, forever altered.
Written as a long narrative without chapter breaks, the novel evokes both
Chester's and Paul's inability to reach closure on an episode in their past. Paul
ultimately divines that Chester's suicide was a conclusion to a story begun many
years before.
Along with the journals, Paul for the first time reads Chester's book, a psy-
chological study of the paradigmatic relationships of fathers and sons in Genesis.

6/25

1999

7S Detroit Jewish News

It is not easy to write about the
Jewish-American family, particularly if
you have any affection for it. It can be
almost impossible to resist the seem-
ingly requisite atmospherics attached
to it — the nostalgia, the heavy-duty
irony, the Jewish mother. And yet
Maxine Rodburg wholeheartedly
embraces such a family.
Through that brave gesture, she bril-
liantly brings the Jewish-American fam-
ily to life while ably using their famil-
iarity as a way to capture American
Jewish identity in flux. This collection
of interconnected stories narrated by
Debbie Tarlow, from her youth to mid-
dle age, is one of the most notable
achievements in Jewish American letters
since the fiction of Philip Roth.
Like Roth, Rodburg is a Newark
native and her attachment to the place
makes it not only a point of geogra-
phy but also its own distinctive emo-

IP,NRNITSIMANIMIEVAMM.PWW•N

tional terrain. However, that is where
the comparison should end.
Hers is not the post-World War II
fiction that shed Jewish life for WASP
culture. Nor is it exactly accurate to
compare Rodburg to writers like
Cynthia Ozick, Rebecca Goldstein or
Allegra Goodman, whose love of Jewish
tradition and knowledge of Jewish
learning has been integral to their work.
Rather, Rodburg's work, a powerful and
artful blend of these two literary trends
showcases an American Jewish culture
that is recognizable yet intricate.
Debbie Tarlow's complicated inner
life, which remains accessible even as
she animates the particulars of the
world around her, illuminates this cul-
ture. Her Jewishness is a conceptual
framework that highlights phenomena
like white flight, monogamy, family
ties and aging parents.
The spirit of Israel's Law of Return
is inherent in each of these subjects
— a law rich in metaphoric applica-
tion guaranteeing every Jew in the
world Israeli citizenship. As in life, the
Law of Return is malleable. Debbie
encounters the physical properties of
this law at its most extreme when her
parents begin to age.
Experiences like that reflect the myri-
ad ways that the pieces in this collection
mimic life. And as in life, by telling the
same story over and over from various
angles and focal points, Rodburg gath-
ers quiet moments that collectively have
a life force of their own.
"Write as if you were human cam-
eras," a writing teacher once advised.
Maxine Rodburg does that with great
wit and uncanny instinct. The results are
clear-eyed stories that are also high art.

— Reviewed by Judith Bolton-Fasman

From a Sealed Room by Rachel
Kadish (Putnam; 266pp.; $25.95)
Reading Rachel Kadish's first novel
brought to mind an old graduate
school dictum that one has to give a
novel at least 60 pages before deciding
to abandon it. That is not to say that
From A Sealed Room starts out slow
but rather that it presents the reader
with complications that call for imme-
diate rather than gradual context.
In the arresting first scene, Tami, an
Israeli woman, makes detached love to
her husband in a room originally sealed
off to survive a potential chemical
attack during the Gulf war. The sealed
room is a strong image in Jewish histo-
ry — an allusion to Jews who sealed
their windows throughout the centuries