Atonement*

A Jew Writes Out of His Bones

The Story. She it was that had brought the wrath of Yahweh upon her kind little father. She, Leah, an outcast from Israel. The mark of the beast was upon her for meeting a vast shaggy moujik (Gentile peasant) with strong arms and tender lips in the willows where once he had come upon her bathing naked.

Before the nodding copse, tangled in its phylacteries, her cry of guilt was the hollow hooting of a nameless bird in a field of desecration. The Kravno women of Israel lamented her madness. That such a year should come upon Serra Golda, her popular grocer-mother !

None so humble and strict in her pieties as hollow-breasted Leah, penitent Jewess. The wicked willows saw her live black hair hacked off. Come Yom Kippur, she fainted with fasting. After a year, pale, pious Eli from the yeshiveh (seminary) brought her to peace.

In the smoking pogrom of Kravno, her flesh-guilt cried out at her again as the demoniac moujik smashed a Jewish child on the wall before her face.

They fled over the waste world to Doomington. Leah made good ingber (candy) as Serra Golda had taught. Children of English Israel came buying. Soon there was a modest grocery store. Eli, turned carpenter, could pore over his Scriptures late evenings and during the long strikes, still tracking down the far-to-seek revelation of his God. The Lord blessed such piety with a solemn little son, Reuben, content to, learn his catechisms and caress Miriam, his kosher white hen.

Under the hypnotic taunts of Dovvid Pollock, cynic, Eli had to face the Apostles and refute, as became a fearless Jew scholar, the hated Christ. The Apostles made Eli Christ's man. In a Catholic woman's house where Eli, his lungs crushed by a lorry, his veins running morphine, hung in bandages, the Christ hung upon an alabaster crucifix. On the sixth day, the curtains of the niche opened to the sick man, Christ's wounds bled miraculously and Eli was recruited, another carpenter, to strengthen his brethren.

Such was his end: the pious Jew apostate preaching salvation in Israel. They stoned him at street corners, kicked his body and head. Dovvid Pollock saw his handiwork and hung himself on a stout hook.

On the Day of Atonement, Eli the

Unclean entered the wailing place, full synagog. They listened thunderstruck to his blasphemy. They growled. They arose to rend him. Leah, whose beloved life he had had to break and to whom he was "dead," cried them from defilement, cried their thumbs to their ears to defeat his sacrilege. After the fast she saw the face of her guilt a last time, calling her Yahweh's Avenger, by night to go to Eli with a knife and at dawn to the police station. Little Reuben was left to cry in the wilderness, to hate Christ and Yahweh alike, to cleave to a bust of the beautiful Apollo.

From Reuben, Sicilian goatherd, Author Golding had this history.

The Significance. Channeled and sped by a masterful artist, the intense lives of Leah and Eli deepen into profound currents that bear all the sorrows of their tragic, ritual-fed race. The rocks that split them, darkly inevitable, grip into the beds of their courses with roots that were when first men and women searched their souls. Told in fierce words and gentle, dull words and shining, words sweet as wild honey, words bitter as black gall--here is a Book.

The Author. In famed Manchester ("Doomington") Grammar School, Louis Golding was precocious among prodigies. At Queen's College, Oxford, he was an ostentatious aesthete, a mincing pedestrian with yellow hair all abroad and much thin-piping, decadent erudition. His poems and essays of the period (1919-22) run salt and shallow. Then he settled in the Tyrol, wandering north into Germany, south to Capri and Sicily. Seacoast of Bohemia (1924) gave evidence of a poseur shedding his false skins. Now, at 29, he seems to have written out of his bones.

Galsworthy

CARAVAN--John Galsworthy--Scribner. ($2.50). Novels, especially the long, sober kind Mr. Galsworthy writes, are stately vehicles riding by the public view. Here is a more informal procession of tales and sketches in which, for a very modest fare indeed, one may go forth on 56 different excursions, in many directions and at the many paces that a writer hits up between his crisp youth and reflective middle age.

Happy Endings

THE GOOSE WOMAN--Rex Beach-- Harper ($2.00). A goose-raising, gin-drinking onetime prima donna nearly earns her son a hanging by inventing evidence in a murder case just to see her name in the newspapers again.

A Michigan school kid soaks the town plutocrat in the ear with an iceball, is forgiven. Years later, in Yukon goldfields, he succors the old man, wins daughter.

An amiable vagrant plays Nick-Carter-to-the-rescue of a nearly-swindled oil heiress in the cactus belt.

Marcel the valet took cruel punishment in an Alaskan camp until he innocently shot four huge bears and taught the foreman la savate (pedal boxing).

Grand yarn-spinner though he is, Author Beach never on any account saves a tart twist for the end.

Glossy Puppets

THE PLEASURE BUYERS--Arthur Somers Roche -- Macmillan ($2.00). The creatures of Author Roche step right out of the more lustrous cosmetic, hosiery, neckwear and tobacco advertisements of our day--glossy-skinned puppets gliding through syncopated situations with all the smooth perfection that the Roche trade-mark guarantees. Herein the plot clots around a Palm Beach super-sheik with four yachts (named for the four winds), a pugilist-butler and a string of seductions that would put Casanova back in the kindergarten. Also present: a wronged War hero, a guileless moth, a seasoned misconductress. Who daggered the super-sheik

*DAY OF ATONEMENT--Louis Golding-- Knopf ($2.50).