Everyman a Jew

By Melvin Maddocks

IN THE DAYS OF SIMON STERN by ARTHUR A. COHEN 464 pages. Random House. $8.95.

It is one of the most venerable axioms of writing--certainly as old as Moll Flanders (1722)--that novels should be about sinners. Saints are difficult enough to deal with in real life, let alone in fiction.

As the author of a previous religious novel, The Carpenter Years (and non-fiction books on Martin Buber and The Natural and the Supernatural Jew), Arthur Cohen knows all the odds, creative and commercial. Yet he has taken on a saint and a fable in fiction, and won --apparently by sheer moral passion.

Old-fashioned in his rhetoric, old-fashioned in his melodrama, Cohen is old-fashioned in his ethical authority as well. He reasserts here the right of a contemporary novelist to define problems spiritually as well as psychologically, to explore the mystery of the community as well as the ego.

In the Days of Simon Stern is a book possessed by its Jewishness, its particularity (a favorite Cohen word). The reader gradually finds himself watching for signs and portents and, incredibly, patiently awaiting a messiah.

Cohen's messiah is as odd, as unexpected, as much of a stumbling block to credulity as most messiahs. His name is Simon Stern. He was born in 1899, the son of Polish immigrants to New York's Lower East Side. Simon's father works in a tailor shop. His mother tends a vegetable stall. Simon's life is devoted to a most worldly obsession--money.

A boy prodigy in real estate, by 1940 he has branched out to become a multimillionaire buying and selling junk automobiles in Indianapolis and wrecked ships in the Indian Ocean.

Then two catastrophes convert Simon at an even later age than most messiahs. His parents are burned to death in their home: a token of the holocaust that consumes Jews by the millions in World War II. Simon's obsession with the cycles of buying and selling transfers to the cycles of his race: holocaust, Diaspora, and return. The total financier from the Lower East Side becomes just as totally the savior. He sets up a Society for the Rescue and Resurrection of the Jews. In 1945, he recruits survivors of Buchenwald for quite another kind of compound--the society's "fortress," built into the Lower East Side behind the blocks of Simon Stern real estate accumulated like so many walls of Nehemiah.

Particular Good. In a remarkable fantasy-within-a-fantasy, titled The Legend of the Last Jew on Earth, Cohen completes the persecution theme:

the theme of the Jew's enemy-without.

It remains for his main plot to conclude the theme of the Jew's enemy-within.

Janos Baltar, a profoundly sinuous villain, plays the snake in Simon's Garden of Eden: the spirit of holocaust inside the sanctuary.

Arthur Cohen ends his allegory with a new and subtler appreciation of evil.

If evil is universal, good, he insists, is particular. How, he seems to ask, can men come to terms with their enemies and themselves and perhaps even with their God without the promise of a savior? Yet, the world being what it is, how can that savior help failing? The author may not quite make the Jew into Everyman. But in the end he does something even bolder: he makes Everyman a Jew.

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