Volume 32, Number 14 · September 26, 1985
Jews, Have Pity!
By D.J. Enright
A Perfect Peace
by Amos Oz, translated by Hillel Halkin
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 374 pp., $16.95
Women and Angels
by Harold Brodkey
Jewish Publication Society, 157 pp., $30.00
The true hero of A Perfect Peace—something which, we shall be unsurprised to hear, doesn't exist—is a kibbutz, Kibbutz Granot, populated largely by ex-Russians and ex-Poles, and looking 'as if it had been built out of blocks by an intelligent child.' The problems arising in this 'place-in-progress' are listed in documentary fashion: the youth (or native-born) problem, the elderly (or settler) problem, the Arab problem, the Diaspora problem, the housing problem, the soil and water problem, the sex problem. Given the principled insistence on personal freedom, the last-named problem is unlikely to find a communal solution; it is where the elderly problem (those horrid old godfathers hugging power to themselves) overlaps with the youth problem (those long-haired feinshmeckers hooked on 'murderous Negro sex music' and what old Yolek jeeringly calls 'self-fulshmillment').
Review, 2953 words
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