
DATE: Wednesday, July 9, 1997               TAG: 9707080066

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   70 lines

AMBITIOUS BOOK IS RICH IN DETAIL, PROSE

ALAN ISLER, a retired English professor who lives in England, has written two novels - ``The Prince of West End Avenue,'' an acclaimed comic work about a group of nursing home residents who put on ``Hamlet,'' and ``Kraven Images,'' a less successful portrait of a dissolute academic.

In ``The Bacon Fancier,'' Isler offers a far more ambitious undertaking.

In a series of four stories spanning different centuries and countries - and teeming with literary and historical allusions, from Shakespeare's ``Merchant of Venice'' to Jewish folk tales, he attempts no less than a chronicling of the sometimes bleak Jewish world experience. Never lurking far in the background is the fierce specter of anti-Semitism. The result is far richer than his previous two works - richer in meaning, richer in language.

``The Bacon Fancier'' starts with ``The Monster,'' in Venice's Jewish ghetto of the 17th century, where an unnamed moneylender dodges frequent Christian conversion attempts.

The title tale focuses on Ben Cardozo, a one-eyed violinmaker who leaves his native Venice for England.

The clever title refers not to his dietary proclivities, but to his propensity to quote the writer Francis Bacon. Yet it's no coincidence that Cardozo strays from the kosher laws of his ancestors, given the freedoms - relatively speaking - he finds in his new life.

``In England,'' Cardozo recalls a relative saying, ``a Jew could breathe free. There were a few restrictions. I could not complete a university degree, to be sure, or become a member of Parliament, but apart from that, I could ply my trade unfettered.''

Next comes ``The Crossing,'' about David Gladstone's sea journey from England to America in the 1800s. Gladstone is the model of the Jewish rise to respectability. Handsome, prosperous, magnetic to women, he was born to dirt-poor parents in London but was adopted by a wealthy Jewish family.

Yet he's still ill at ease in gentile society. And with good reason. He loses a run-in with a shady general, Jack Barth, who threatens: ``You may be sitting on a pile of . . . Jew-gold right now, but by the time I'm through with you, you'll be begging for a . . . handout.''

Finally, there's ``The Affair,'' set in modern-day New York. Bruno Sorge, who has made his fame as a Chaplinesque non-singing player in operas, has devoted his life to writing about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer from France falsely accused of treason. The idea is stolen by a smarmy colleague, who turns it into a campy musical. (``If a foreskin's not for him, it's most certainly not for me/My, what a singularly brave young man, a brave young Jew must be.'') Bruno grouses that the musical is a ``tissue of cliches,'' yet after declining to act in the show, Bruno relents. It becomes a Broadway hit.

With parallels to the commercialization of the Holocaust, the message is that things Jewish are now in vogue; anti-Semitism, in the guise of the Dreyfus affair, easy to mock. The irony, of course, is that for all his freedom and distance from prejudice, Bruno is more cut off from his heritage than his predecessors.

Occasionally Isler's message - beware the gentiles; remember the faith - is writ too large and too obviously. But ``The Bacon Fancier'' - with its deft prose and ambitious scope - should make most readers Isler fanciers, too. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

JERRY BAUER

Alan Isler's new book is richer in meaning than his last two works.

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BOOK REVIEW

``The Bacon Fancier''

Author: Alan Isler

Publisher: Viking. 214 pp.

Price: $21.95