WHISTLE ME HOME

This first novel is an intense and sentimental story about a middle class Jewish family from Brooklyn during the years 1946-1953. Presented with the lack of continuity of a home movie, focusing on the salient events of the family's life--the bar mitzvah of the oldest boy, Uncle David's recovery from the war and a nervous breakdown, their move from Flatbush to Westchester, the death of the youngest child--the book appeals primarily but very genuinely to the feelings. Don't probe too deeply into the appropriateness of the Negro maid's identification with the fortunes of the Rockman family to the exclusion of her own; or attempt to justify Rockman's indulgence of grandmother Yetta, installed like a despot in the household, her multitude of enmities including even her three grandsons. What can better be appreciated here is a kind of mystique of the family (they have their own code, the ""Rockman Shibboleth,"" though they are not a closed circuit affair, a la Salinger) which can grow despite inner contradictions and whose members are open to experience and to other people. A warm and vital story assuring a high degree of reader involvement.