NOTABLE

THE EIGHT SIN by Stefan Kanfer Random House; 288 pages: $8.95

This first novel is commemoration of and tribute to some forgotten victims of the Nazi death camps: the gypsies of Eastern Europe. If the world is touched by the plight of the Jews, writes Stefan Kanfer. "what are we to say to a people totally annihilated or scattered, with no testament or psalms to calibrate the deep well of the past, no compensatory county, no telethons, no bond rallies, no touring orchestras...no prophets except the ones in the store windows who tell fortunes for a dollar."

The question is asked by the novel's vibrant, sorrowful hero. Benoit Kaufman, a Romany who survives the concentration camps as a boy to become a successful protraitist of the rich and famous. Yet, unable to shake his past. Ben finally dedicates himself to avenge all those men, women, and children who were shot, gassed and incinerated. The specific object of his wrath is a fellow gypsy, a former Nazi collaborator who saved his own life by participating in the slaughter of others.

Kaufman as a child may remind readers of the fugitive youth in Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird. Kaufman the avenger is also reminiscent of Kosinski's Cockpit and Blind Date. But there is a crucial difference. Kosinski's fiction is cold, clinical, beyond ideaology or feeling. In the Eighth Sin, vengeance is passionate, even humane. Though the book's structure is somewhat programmatic. Kaufer, a senior editor of time, has given the familiar documentary evidence of the death camps and their aftermath a persuasive and moving life in fiction.

SEIZURE by Charles I. Mee, Jr. M. Evans; 216 pages, $8.95

Kathy Morris, a young voice student at the Manhattan School of Music, developed a meningioma, a benign tumor on the surface of her left temporal lobe; to remove it, her neurosurgeon thought, would be a morning's easy routine in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. But when the surgeon set to work, opening the skull and cutting for the growth, the girl's brain turned into a monster, swelling uncontrollably. Angry and desperate, the surgeon eventually closed her incision, certain that the patient would soon die. But for reasons as inexplicable as its rampage, the brain slowly recovered--damaged, but still eminently serviceable. Although she has had to retrain herself in many routines. Kathy Morris functions well and has retained her gift for singing.

In this richly researched account of the case, Author Charles L. Mee Jr. Kazin (Meeting at Potsdam, A Visit to Haldeman and Other States of Mind) enters the territory of the brain like a 16th century explorer, carefully and vividly explaining the 100 billion neurons, the axons and synapses and neurotransmitters-- all of the brain's intellectual brightwork, an area still so profoundly mysterious as to be almost unthinkable.

NEW YORK JEW by Alfred Kazin Knopf, 307 pages, $10.95

Though his title suggests a sociological treatise or a group portrait, Critic Alfred Kazin's New York Jew is himself. Luckily, the subject is interesting. Kazin has been a member in good standing of the New York intelligentsia ever since 1942 when he published On Native Grounds, a groundbreaking study of modern American literature. The friends and acquaintances he has made since then form an illustrious clan of writers and thinkers, and New York Jew is full of them:

Robert Frost. Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling. Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath.

Kazin's portraits of these people are usually thoughtful and affectionate, often with a redeeming touch of asperity. He visits T.S. Eliot and finds "a man easily cornered and deathly afraid of being cornered." Edmund Wilson is presented as an Everest of intelligence, taste and dedication, but Kazin can also write: "His greatest interest in any subject was his learning it."

Kazin's style is regularly tutorial rather than autobiographical; a succession of wives and mistresses make brief entrances and exits between mini-essays. Those essays, though, pick up nearly all of the slack of the personal narrative. They recreate some of the events that agitated his circle during the past three decades--the post-Holocaust trauma. Red baiting in the '50s. radicalism in the '60s--and show who lined up where and for what reasons. Kazin himself often wound up in the middle and caught grief from both sides. His scrupulous, sometimes pained explanations make his history of some intellectuals itself a kind of intellectual history.

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