Word: adler
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...Crimson fell behind the Tigers early, trailing 6-3 after the first round of bouts, and only once looked capable of catching Princeton. When the score went to 7-3, sabre fencer Richard Gillette edged Princeton co-captain Steve Adler, 5-4, shook his fist and marched back to his teammates with a look of intense determination...
...dockside in a suit that is too hot for him, wondering cheerfully what is going to happen next. The waterfront in this sturdy and sometimes impassioned novel is that of Savannah, Ga., in the year 1878. The young man who has just disembarked there is 17-year-old Seth Adler, lately of New York City...
...Adler is Jewish, and a Jew in this rural, tribal and fiercely Christian heartland is a wanderer indeed. There were Jews in Savannah well before the turn of the 19th century - George Washington's letter of good wishes to the city's Jewish congregation dated 1789 is the book's epi- graph - but most of those Adler meets feel that they remain in Georgia on the most precarious kind of sufferance. Their prudent rabbi has eliminated Hebrew from most of the ritual, and their new temple, Adler notes wryly, lacks only a cross to make it indistinguishable...
...backbone of the novel is Seth's tenacity in holding to this view. He suffers the slights and cruelties that might be expected as he works his way up from dry-goods clerk to successful lawyer. But Adler's faith in America is severely tested when he defends a young Jew accused of murder. The victim is a 14-year-old Christian girl, and the defendant is the plant manager of a new soft-drink firm that strongly resembles Coca-Cola in its formative years. Deep and violent prejudice shows itself as angry crowds clog Savannah streets during...
Members of the Tribe has its awkwardnesses. The long courtroom section, which might be a novel in itself, requires a new narrator, Adler's daughter. A concluding chapter introduces a contemporary Adler descendant who hastily ties the book to the present. The author makes no pronouncements about why Christian tribalism periodically festers with hatred of Jews. He merely holds to his story of an American Jew who believed, despite agonizing evidence to the contrary, that this hatred was an aberration, and not a basic part of his country's character. Kluger's novel makes this point with...