A SIGN UPON MY HAND

From Russia to America, from the West Side to the East, from the Jewish faith and an attempt to cross over into the Gentile world, this is a familiar hegira- but freshly told, and it accents once again that so-called upward social mobility is not only a step away but a step down. At her father's death and funeral, Marianne looks back on all the discordant distinctions, evasions, re-ections she had made from the time when she had first refused to accept her father's dictum- ""stick to your own people"". In the articulate, associative recap here, she goes back to her school years first in New York- where she learned to segregate the Russian Jews from the German, then in New England where to be any kind of Jew was undesirable. Then from casual associations, there's her first love affair with a non-Jew; her marriage to Gordon, who takes her to the mid-west, where again she turns aside from his family, and the thought of a child of her own an abortion). Until finally here she makes a penitential return to the religion the now needs and wants, having learned that in trying to assimilate and accommodate on false terms she has almost lost her own identity... This is the Marjorie Morning-star country, and even if it is not quite as zealously explored, Marianne's story has warmth and in the fallout of impressions and reactions an autobiographical sincerity.