Nation Into Exile

ROAD OF AGES--Robert Nathan--Knopf ($2.50).

Time was when Robert Nathan toyed gently and amiably with his congenital melancholia. Always a writer who preferred fantasy to strict realism, he once put his deepest convictions into the mouths of dancing dogs, unwed mice and such philosophical creatures as Isaiah, the stoic horse of The Woodcutter's House. When he was not bringing wisdom out of the mouths of baby tumblebugs and suckling pigs, he was engaged in mild satires on religion (The Bishop's Wife, There Is Another Heaven). But Depression, if it did not quite succeed in bringing him down to solid earth, at least caused him to desert the seraphim and the kingdom of talking brutes. His first real commercial success, One More Spring, followed the fortunes of a group of indigent outcasts who sought shelter in a street cleaner's tool shed in Central Park. Still in the realm of fantasy, this rueful little fable cut close enough to the essence of lean-year reality to please those who detest animals that behave like humans.

With Road of Ages Author Nathan hits a wholly serious, grave note even though he is still technically engaged in writing fantasy. The book's title refers to the path to exile which the Jew has trod in many ages, from the time Edward I drove him out of England down to the latest edict of Realmleader Hitler. When Mr. Nathan picks up the thread of this millennial-long Diaspora, every country on the face of the earth, with the single exception of Mongolia, has ordered the Jews into banishment. Readers first meet the race in Road of Ages as it is wandering across Hungary and through the passes of the Carpathians, some twelve-months distant in time from the allotted refuge in the Gobi Desert. There are banking Jews from the Paris Bourse, London's City, the New York Stock Exchange; pork-eating Jews from Germany; strictly kosher Jews from Galicia and Palestine; liberal Jews from the New York of Temple Emanu-El; Socialist Jews from the locals of the Second International; Communist Jews from the Saar and from Union Square. Although Mr. Nathan names no names, his types fit into the headlines of the daily newspapers of a dozen countries.

As this vast throng moves eastward-- some walking, some riding in oxcarts, some speeding on motorcycles, some sitting back in fast limousines--various stories unfold. The banking Jews plot to make the new state which is to rise in the Gobi into a capitalist nation. The Communist Jews insist that all property be pooled. The Socialist Jews do not know what they want. And the liberal Jews are occasionally wounded in trying to keep the Socialists and the Communists from killing each other before they have even reached the new Promised Land. Mr. Nathan seems to be protesting that there is no such thing as the typical Jew, that as a race they, too, have their class differences and tend to take on characteristics dictated by different environments; that, in short, it is idiotic to set the Semitic nation apart, label it, and try to dispose of it with one gesture.

Another aspect of this fable of many facets is that beauty and comedy and tragedy remain in life, even in the midst of apocalyptic happenings. As the fated people move on past the Urals, the love affair of Raoul Perez, Royalist son of the Paris banker, also moves on to a happy consummation with Leah, daughter of an orthodox rabbi. An old woman dies. Sonia, an infant violinist, insists upon her artistic kinship with Menuhin. Scientists squabble about their laboratory problems. The Passover is celebrated. Mr. Alberg, the Communist, predicts that blood will flow in the Gobi as the brotherhood of man dawns. The bankers meditate upon getting loans from London or even from Nazi Berlin. And David, the poet, marvels at the bravery of Amanda, the New England woman, who has elected to follow her Jewish husband into exile.

The Author is a descendant of Rabbi Gershom Seixas, who came to America in 1710 and helped incorporate Columbia College, a nephew of Maud Nathan, founder of The Consumers' League, and of Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College. But as a Jew, Robert Nathan found things difficult at Exeter and at Harvard. His ancestry supposedly kept him from being president of the Harvard Monthly. As a poet he found the "good bourgeois Jews themselves" against him because he was "a bad business risk." Fear of what the "good bourgeois Jews" might say has made Mr. Nathan sensitive about the sales of his novels, but since One More Spring he has not had to worry about financial success.

Once called by his friends "the Jewish Hamlet," because of his lean, ascetic face, Mr. Nathan now boasts a growing waistline that causes him to toy with the idea of substituting sailing for such strenuous pastimes as fencing and tennis. He will no longer play the cello, for his professional cellist wife, Nancy Wilson, makes him embarrassed about his inferior skill.

The Road of Ages is the February choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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