Lost Magic

FATHERS by Herbert Gold. 308 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Herbert Gold's "novel in the form of a memoir" is nostalgic enough to revive the lost magic of the 1930s for all who grew up with "Ovaltine Birthstone & Good Luck Rings . . . Joe Louis . . . black Fords with NRA stickers . . . tops from Ralston boxes to send away as a mark of esteem for Tom Mix." Novelist Gold (Therefore Be Bold) writes with fine irony, a strong sense of the absurd, and at times with the cynical insight accumulated by a perceptive man in 43 years of watching the shell game.

Then why is the sum total of Fathers considerably less biting than its component parts promise? First, Gold's immigrant-in-America story has been overworked in the past; it is almost a tedious commonplace, for example, that yet another nice Jewish girl breaks tradition and marries a goy. Second, the author sees his characters through a nostalgic mist so thick as to preclude more than a fleeting glimpse of evil. Even racketeers emerge as loving family men who take hard candies home to the kiddies.

Ghetto Gold. The narrator is but one of several fathers--and the least successful in that role. The most heroic is his father, Sam Gold, who took his name from what the streets of America were reportedly paved with and left his native Russian village against the will of his own father. Sam Gold is traced from the pre-World War I ghetto in New York to Cleveland; from water boy to cigar maker to pushcart vender to greengrocer to successful real estate speculator. A prodigious worker, he conquers the New World through the marketplace and adjusts to the traumas of his family's assimilation. He emerges tough, pragmatic, and optimistic beyond the comprehension of his sons.

How did the father--and the fathers before him, afflicted with czarist terrors and pogroms--endure? Not merely endure, but possess the heart and the will to make "something that extends further than time, that weighs more than fate"? Those fathers were better men than he, the narrator says. Divorced, he reflects that his own children "are left to find their own security and their own definitions of success, as my father did, out of the indecision and cripplings which fate has given them. Fair enough; they are back in history, true to their fathers."

Basis in Fact. The author's childhood years, with their moments of naked understanding and their eons of illusion, come across best. The character sketches are deft and pleasing. The narrator says about his mother: "While she was thinking she wept a little, just so the thinking shouldn't go to waste." And about Sam Gold's lieutenant in the shop, Myrna, a great robust woman who tempts the boss into carnal misbehavior: "Two husbands had already died under her, and one had fled." If that isn't pure gold, it is at least pure Gold.

"This is a book I have been writing all my life," the author says. "Like all novels, this one has a basis in fact, and perhaps more of a basis in fact than some. Like the name 'Gold,' which is an imaginary name, this is an imaginary story. And real. And twice imaginary." And, it might be added, worthwhile despite its sentimental shortcomings. For even if similar tales have been told, few have been told with Gold's skill, his sense of personal involvement, or his understanding of the vagaries of history that shape fathers and sons through the generations.

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