Heelmarks

THE ENEMY CAMP (561 pp.)--Jerome Weidman -- Random House ($4.95).

In this embattled novel, the enemy is the gentile world, and its hostile camp is made up of all the hotels, clubs, schools and residential areas that Jews find "restricted." To Jewish George Hurst, raised on the lower East Side by pathologically fearful Aunt Tessie, the goyim are a barbarous yet crafty race who corrupt whatever they touch. His best friend, Danny Schorr, begins palling around with gentiles and soon he has got into trouble with the police, changed his name to Shaw and become the most triple-dyed villain since East Lynne. And one of his schoolmates, pretty Dora Dienst. listens to the. siren song with the seemingly inevitable result: she becomes a boozy prostitute and a monument of perfidy.

With these ghastly examples before him, Hero Hurst is naturally nervous when he goes out on his first date with a gentile girl and is only partly reassured to discover "how little difference there was between the" feel of a Jewish girl's thigh and that of a shickseh." He capitulates completely in his next encounter with a shickseh, marries her, fathers two sons and moves to a broad-minded suburb to live in the material bliss that is the reward of the truly assimilated. But the past will not down. A great deal of complicated, coincidental plotting brings back Dora Dienst, villainous Danny and a conspiratorial political boss for a tumultuous weekend that Hero George appears to believe can destroy his tidy life.

Author Weidman, best remembered for his acidulous portrait of a diamond-sharp Jewish businessman in / Can Get It for You Wholesale, can still stamp the imprint of a heel on the printed page better than anyone else. But, though he knows his way around the jungle of a conniving city, he gets swiftly lost in the desert of the human soul. George Hurst's redemption is so pat and implausible, the world he aspires to so trivially empty, that readers may wish that Weidman's heels had no need to become heroes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.