DEAR ONCE

Dear Once"" is the way Reuben Springer always referred to his sisters (also adding the affectionate diminutive ele to their names) when he came to the New World and settled with his family or rather Family since it would be a lifestyle only slowly dissolving through the years. The real break comes when sister Ada's daughter Millie--she tells this story--goes to ""Barney's college"" and meets Jake Barrymore Bernstein who will become the actor Jay Bums. They marry and from then on Millie must put up with her family who has little use for him (she too has cause to wonder--his joblessness, his debts) until he makes it on a fairly successful scale in Hollywood. At the end, in the late '40's, he finds himself on that Red blacklist and he dies soon after, in another woman's apartment, although Millie, who has learned to accommodate through the years, is still intact, with her faith in herself and the half-a-loaf life and love she led with and without him. Drek-ele, in a way, but one of those sincerely, sentimental books that other landswomen will enjoy.