Dixie Diaspora

By John Skow

MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE by Richard Kluger Doubleday; 471 pages; $10

English novels, a traditionalist feels, should begin with old men in armchairs, yarning about far places, and American novels should begin much as this one does, with a restless young man standing at dockside in a suit that is too hot for him, wondering cheerfully what is going to happen next. The waterfront in this sturdy and sometimes impassioned novel is that of Savannah, Ga., in the year 1878. The young man who has just disembarked there is 17-year-old Seth Adler, lately of New York City.

Adler is Jewish, and a Jew in this rural, tribal and fiercely Christian heartland is a wanderer indeed. There were Jews in Savannah well before the turn of the 19th century -- George Washington's letter of good wishes to the city's Jewish congregation dated 1789 is the book's epi- graph -- but most of those Adler meets feel that they remain in Georgia on the most precarious kind of sufferance. Their prudent rabbi has eliminated Hebrew from most of the ritual, and their new temple, Adler notes wryly, lacks only a cross to make it indistinguishable from a church.

He himself is no zealot, nor is he especially religious. But his father Aaron won a Medal of Honor in the Battle of the Wilderness, and young Seth is passionately idealistic about the U.S. The Jewish virtues (as he sees them) of intelligence, industry and warmth are precisely those of the American character, Seth feels. The anti-Semitism that persists is a dwindling residue from the Old World, and what is important is that Jews can take their part in U.S. society with out apology or fearfulness.

The backbone of the novel is Seth's tenacity in holding to this view. He suffers the slights and cruelties that might be expected as he works his way up from dry-goods clerk to successful lawyer. But Adler's faith in America is severely tested when he defends a young Jew accused of murder. The victim is a 14-year-old Christian girl, and the defendant is the plant manager of a new soft-drink firm that strongly resembles Coca-Cola in its formative years. Deep and violent prejudice shows itself as angry crowds clog Savannah streets during the trial. Here Kluger (author of last year's widely praised Simple Justice, an account of the Supreme Court's 1954 anti-segregation decision) borrows from history by making inventive use of the Leo Frank case. Frank was an Atlanta Jew -- the manager of a pencil factory -- who in 1913 was convicted of murdering a young female employee.

Although the evidence against him was shaky, an impatient mob dragged Frank from his cell and lynched him.

Members of the Tribe has its awkwardnesses. The long courtroom section, which might be a novel in itself, requires a new narrator, Adler's daughter. A concluding chapter introduces a contemporary Adler descendant who hastily ties the book to the present. The author makes no pronouncements about why Christian tribalism periodically festers with hatred of Jews. He merely holds to his story of an American Jew who believed, despite agonizing evidence to the contrary, that this hatred was an aberration, and not a basic part of his country's character. Kluger's novel makes this point with an impressive measure of good sense and strength. --John Skow

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