No Grace from God

MEYER MEYER by Helen Hudson. 189 pages. Dutton. $4.50.

Far der velt muz men mer yoytse zayn vi far Got aleyn, says the Yiddish proverb. "The world is more exacting than God himself." It is a maxim that runs like a black thread through the fabric of American Jewish literature--from Henry Roth's Call It Sleep to Saul Bellow's Herzog. In Meyer Meyer, Author Helen Hudson follows the pattern by providing a translation of her own. In the secular cities of the earth, grace is granted not to those who reach up to God, but to those who reach out to man.

For proof, she offers the story of Meyer Benjamin Meyer and his only crony, Mendel Berg. Middle-aged and resolutely unglamorous, they cower behind their jobs as history professors, publishing judgments on the past, but utterly unable to embrace the present. They wander aimlessly through the narrow corridors of New York universities and the narrow-minded cocktail parties of the city.

To his surprise, Mendel escapes by courting a deeply disturbed woman. When he marries her and takes on fresh responsibilities, he finds himself free. Given the same sort of opportunity, Meyer remains trapped. He falls in love with Lena, a middle-aged sculptor, but when the time comes to declare himself, he retreats into his customary caution--waiting, watching, chary before choice. Then at last Lena does him a favor--she dies. At her funeral, Meyer surveys her friends. "Terrible people," he tells himself later. "Terrible. I should never have gotten involved." He never will again.

Odd Pieces. A bleak story, surely, and an old one. But Helen Hudson, who cast a cold eye on college professors in an excellent first novel, Tell the Time to No One, has a pitiless yet imaginative gaze. To one of her subjects, Sunday in the city is "a great gap surrounded by walls, emptied of one week and not yet filled with the next." To another, "Christmas is a hateful time; the bunting was pretending to tie up a whole city into one cozy bundle. But the string was too slack. Odd pieces like Meyer kept falling out."

In the end, examined by a professional, the characters of Meyer Meyer become, like the novel itself, minor and monochromatic, but touched with small ironies and large truths.

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