474
SALLIE SEARS
to amuse through her "objectivity" and detachment, she lacks the vir–
tues of the genuinely disinterested skeptic who would follow where
truth leads him. She does, after all, have a polemical ax to grind. Christ
was forced to choose between the Kingdom of Earth and the Kingdom
of Heaven. Miss Spark, wanting both, leaves us ultimately uncon–
vinced of the glory of either.
L.
S. Simckes's
Seven Days of Mourning
is a flawed first novel about
a family of Lower East Side Jews, the Shimanskys, whose mentally de–
fective youngest daughter has committed suicide before the novel opens,
hurling herself from a window to the paved courtyard below. Varda
Shimansky, the mother, decides that the family must not mourn the
child but forget her entirely. Their refusal to mourn is characteristic of
the Shimanskys' lack of compassion for one another, the ramifications of
which form the subject of the novel.
The family itself is seen both as a group in grotesque interaction
and as a collection of discrete human oddities. Though overly carica–
tured, they are presented with energy and humor: Varda, the mother,
small, plump, and tyrannical, whosc cruelty to her husband is "like the
garden beetle's sudden turning on her mate and eating him through
and through leaving just the empty shell"; Zelo, the husband, would-be
seller of newspapers (people take them without paying) who goes about
the house in his tom green socks and white underwear ("a disgrace to
the family") longing for peace and throwing choking fits when he feels
especially abused; Yanina, the married daughter, replica and rival of
her mother, toward whom she is both hostile and fearful ("Can't a full
grown spider be afraid of its mother?"); Feivel, the son-in-law, the
deaf and half-mute fugitive from Bolshevist Russia who considers noth–
ing a misfortune; Pildesh, their four-year-old son, who is imperious and
loves to pee a great stream out the window, but is given to nightmares
about bugs and has disappearing testicles; and finally Barish, the narra–
tor, Yanina's brother, a self-made cripple (he threw himself down the
family stairs), cynic, observer, and trouble-maker who sees through,
scares, and yet in his way absolves his uncompassionate household.
The weakness of the book lies in the effort to project this lack of
compassion into a quasi-allegoric conflict between the family and a
stranger who seeks
to
reform them. The stranger, who arrives to "make"
the family mourn, is Vossen Gleich, an orange-eyed, hump-chested,
diminutive "Doctor" of dubious credentials. Part lecher-shyster, part
savior-teacher and intrusively sly in both roles, Gleich in his own right
has good comical possibilities as a character. But his relation to the
