Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
Private Fortunes
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Beginners
by Dan Jacobson
Macmillan, 469 pp., $6.95
Tenants of the House
by Heather Ross Miller
Harcourt, Brace & World, 119 pp., $3.75
Black Light
by Galway Kinnell
Houghton Mifflin, 132 pp., $3.95
The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales
by William Maxwell
Knopf, 175 pp., $3.95
It may be, as Henry James once remarked, a complex fate to be an American, but Mr. Jacobson's new novel suggests that it's a great deal more complex to be a South African Jew. The Beginners deals with the fortunes of the Glickmans, the descendents of Avrom Glickman who settled in South Africa at the end of the last century; his two sons Benjamin and Meyer prosper and become respected pillars of Johannesburg society. But this is not, happily, an extended family chronicle: After an initial anecdote about Avrom, Mr. Jacobson skips over the intervening years to 1945, when Joel, Benjamin's eldest son, returns home from service with the South African Army in Italy. The middle section of The Beginners is the longest and, as it were, the fattest, where we are given a panoramic study of Johannesburg Jewish society in the 1940s and 50s, centered on the Glickmans and the Talmons, the family of Benjamin's wife, Sarah. Outside the two families are the many friends of the Glickman children, and there are some vivid scenes of life at Witwatersrand University in the late Forties (when there was more freedom of expression in South Africa than there is today), where the rival ideologies of Zionism and Communism were ardently canvassed.
Review, 1396 words
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