THE LIMITS OF LOVE

The Lippincott Prize novel is Mr. Raphael's third, and it focusses at some length if with consistent interest on an Anglo-Jewish family from 1945 on. Although the author intends this particularized sphere to be representative of the human community in general, still the condition of being a Jew is predominant and provides the breakaway from one generation which belongs too much, to the next which seems to belong nowhere. In detail, this deals with the Adler family of Cricklewood- the parents who have their delicatessen and home gefillte with the traditional folkways of Jewish life. In greater detail, it deals with their three children: Susan, who married the Communist Ben; Colin, an architect, who settles for (but eventually chafes at) a protected job and somewhat better class suburb; and finally Julia, the youngest, who falls in love with Paul Riesman- Paul, who goes through the Jew-baiting of a Christian public school, on to Cambridge, on to write, and who cannot quite accept the painful lesson of Jewishness he learned- enough to hand it down to another generation... If much of this is not new the portrait of just this kind of Jewish family life, the ""limits"" (here intended as ""limitations"") of love as the Jew tries to find acceptance in himself, in the world, still it is handled with substance, insistence and conviction.