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E. of Greenfield, Berkley I 548-3650 DAILY LUNCH & DINNER SPECIALS I SQUARE PIZZA ROUND PIZZA I PIZZA - RIBS - FISH HOMEMADE GARLIC BREAD SMALL OR LARGE SMALL - MED - LARGE I ON FOOD PURCHASES I OF $6 OR MORE I DINING ROOM, CARRY-OUT I • 1 COUPON PER TABLE • ONLY ONE COUPON PER PURCHASE • NO SEPARATE CHECKS I •COUPON NOT VALID WITH DAILY SPECIALS • EXPIRES 12-31-99 JN BANQUET ROOMS • BEER • WINE • COMPLETE CARRY-OUT • COCKTAILS I 14- Yeaxs op Good Fxzenas! CeLeipzaTe OUR 14Th AnnweRsaRy on June 27Th ana ToasT 14 years or success ant) you, ouR coot) puenos. CaTer:II/L; nz ► aTe Parmes 6/25 1999 82 Detroit Jewish News SpeciaL Eveirrs 29410 NORTHWESTERN HIGHWAY / SOUTHFIELD (RISTORfltlit qiovsirft I 2 4 8 . 3 5 8. 0 3 4 4 commonly called) Wechsler is an affecting star of her own memoir. Her dramatic story conveys both cinemati- cally and personally that war is hell. Wechsler and her family were inadver- tently caught up in the civil war that devastated Zaire, then called the Congo, in the early 1960s. Although they were occasionally sheltered by extended family and a number of her father's acquaintances along the way, Wechsler and her four siblings, who were accompanied (and very often protected) by Wechsler's stepmother and grandmother, were mostly at the mercy of nature and strangers. It's a journey that Wechsler presents as both traumatic and picaresque. Her spare prose is subtly shaded with observations on politics, family dynamics and a young girl's poignant musings on growing up. Georgette's first visit to the United States turns into a permanent stay. She works for the Zaire mission at the United Nations and meets Howell Wechsler, a young American Jew who has spent time in Zaire as a Peace Corps volunteer. Their.Zairian con- nection eventually gives way to a Jewish one. Like her wartime journey, Georgette and Howell's spiritual pil- grimage begins without a particular destination in mind, yet it becomes a necessary and even urgent trip. With Georgette's encouragement, Howell slowly embraces his Judaism, coming to realize that he wants to bring up the couple's two children as Jews. A lapsed Catholic, Georgette is comfort- able with the idea and by the time her children formally convert to Judaism, she also is well on her way to becom- ing a Jew herself By the Grace of God is a story replete with all of the prerequisite uniqueness and drama. But it falls short. Wechsler is too superficial about her attraction and subsequent acceptance of Judaism. Her book is only the outline of a distinctive memoir, raising more curiosity than it satisfies. — Reviewed by Judith Bolton-Fasman Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov (The Overlook Press; 452pp.; $3795) In this first full-length posthumous biography of Primo Levi's life, Swiss journalist Myriam Anissimov offers plausible speculation about Levi's suicide in April of 1987. However, what comes across in this M 'RT. M AN•ISS I MON' exhaustive biography is that Primo Levi was not defeated by his experi- ences at Auschwitz but by the before- and-after experiences that framed his time there. After reading Primo Levi, first published in France in 1996, a reader may come away disappointed that Anissimov mostly concentrates on demonstrating that Levi's acute pow- ers of observation stem in equal parts from his humanity and his training as a chemist. The young Primo Levi was for the most part able to ignore Italy's encroaching fascism by devoting him- self to his doctoral studies at the uni- versity in Turin. Despite the ensuing racial laws, Levi earned his degree and worked until he was forced to flee into the Piedmont Mountains. There he joined a ragtag band of partisans until he was captured and deported to Auschwitz. Although Levi was an agnostic throughout his life, he consistently said that the Holocaust had made him a Jew. The yellow Star of David on his prisoner uniform was permanently grafted on his heart and he never elected to remove the number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz. Anissimov similarly closes the gap between Levi's life as a career chemist and a weekend writer. She establishes that his clarity of vision was shaped by a primal need to understand life in all of its microscopic detail. Yet after finishing this sprawling biography, one does not come away knowing that much more about the enigmatic Primo Levi. Anissimov's extensive research is largely confined to superficial details such as Levi's shy- ness with women, his love of the