True to Tedium

THE BROTHERS ASHKENAZI--I. Singer--Knopf ($3).

European family chronicles that detail the rise & fall of a great fortune usually follow a pattern that permits little lively narrative, few vivid characterizations.

For the loss of these aids to good reading, such books usually possess an elusive quality that critics call solidity: elaborate documentation on the social background, careful discussion of daily family battles, naturalistic reporting on the details of clothing, finances, property. True to this pattern to the point of tedium. The Brothers Ashkenazi resembles a Polish Forsyte Saga packed into one volume, is dullest in its accounts of its heroes, most interesting in its pictures of the growth of the industrial city of Lodz that flourished before the War, declined after it.

Max and Yakob Ashkenazi were the twin sons of a pious Jew who wanted them to be rabbis. Max was calculating, clever, unscrupulous, ugly; Yakob openhanded, strong, a great favorite first with the girls and then with the heiresses who started him on his way to fortune. Because Max was considered one of the cleverest boys in the city he was selected as the bridegroom for lively, warm-hearted Dinah, daughter of a small manufacturer. But she loved Yakob who was attracted to her. In half-primitive, backward Lodz, periodically split by savage strikes of the Jewish and German weavers, by pogroms that were encouraged by the Tsarist police, the two brothers soon became business rivals. Max coldly divorced Dinah in order to marry a woman whose fortune would aid his plans. Yakob thereupon married Max's daughter.

Before their personal rivalry reached its great climax the War broke. Max made another fortune in Russia, was arrested by the Bolsheviks, saved by his brother, who was killed in an anti-Semitic outbreak. Max returned to Lodz to build still another fortune. But the prosperity of Lodz had depended on the Russian market, and as panic followed inflation the grimy "Manchester of Europe" lost its reason for being, and Max symbolically died as his city began to stagnate.

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