Roots

By Stefan Kanfer

"Each land shall be full of you and each sea; and every one shall be incensed at your customs." So the Apocrypha prophesies, and so Marek Halter's enormous novel echoes with the unfurling of Jewish history from the sacking of Jerusalem to the anguish of the Warsaw ghetto.

Following the fortunes of one family for nearly two millenniums requires an epic of biblical dimension. In another writer's hands such a project might seem an unholy wedding of hubris and chutzpah. But Halter is an extraordinary contributor to the post-Holocaust literature of lament. The author is the son, grandson and greatgrandson of printers and publishers in Warsaw. As a child, he was smuggled to safety through the sewers of the city's ghetto as the Germans closed in; after wandering in the Soviet Union, he found his way to France. "Somewhere along the line," he recalls, "I lost the sense of Jewish identity. My family's history, my people's history receded. I was preoccupied with my own life, my own affairs." He became a successful painter, an occasional novelist and human rights activist. "But some time after the death of my father," the author admits, "I realized that I had not truly known him, or his tradition." Halter began to sift through the evidence of World War II, then ransacked ancient volumes, diaries and letters, scouring Europe and the Middle East in a frantic attempt to recover the past: "After six years, I found that the story of my people fills a great library. I have simply added one more book." But what a book: 80 generations of the descendants of one Abraham of Jerusalem are traced as they wander in exile across the oceans and the earth. Each is sustained by his family's faith, represented by a religious and biographical scroll handed on from one generation to the next.

The first Abraham escapes Roman soldiers. He flees to Alexandria with his sons, who thrive until a civil war inflames the population. His grandson ventures to Rome, where persecutions resume; a few chapters later, a descendant is in North Africa, courting the daughter of a Jewish Berber. The holders of the scroll move to Spain, to Narbonne, to Italy and Salonika, Holland and Paris and Poland, where the final chapter is inscribed in ashes.

Although a sense of dread permeates each chapter, there are many instances of kindness. The family prospers for a time in France and Holland; members help to produce the first printed Bible and mix with the burghers of Amsterdam. While there is never a lack of assassins ready to throw the first stone, almost every generation encounters righteous gentiles without whom Jewish survival would have been impossible. Halter becomes an actor in the drama, much as Alex Haley did in Roots, piercing the narrative with his own meditations: "We are periodically asked to choose between the Land and the Book, as if our presence [in France] did not show that one can be faithful to both at once." These artless interludes serve to remind the reader that the sufferers may be fictional but the suffering is not, and that no matter how febrile the imaginings of an author, the truth is far more unsettling.

The Book of Abraham, like its cast, is hardly flawless. Famous historical figures too often behave like cutouts in a Michener mini-series: " 'Your dream, young man, is also ours,' said Gutenberg. 'But wood engraving isn't the solution.' " " 'You've changed,' the painter Rembrandt van Rijn told Herschel a few days later. 'Your face is less luminous.' " The novel fulfills its mission when it leaves the famous and concentrates on the lives of the obscure--the uncelebrated and faceless figures who make history happen. Furnished with voices, the long silent tribe of Abraham reiterates the observation made by Playwright Tom Stoppard 20 years ago in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: when neglected characters move to center stage, Hamlet himself is only a walk-on. --By Stefan Kanfer Best Sellers

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