A Child of The New World

By Paul Gray

THE BELLAROSA CONNECTION

by Saul Bellow

Penguin; 102 pages; $6.95

Saul Bellow created a lot of excitement last March when he allowed his novella A Theft to appear as a paperback original, thus abandoning the hard covers that might have seemed more appropriate for a work by a Nobel laureate. Scarcely six months later, he has done the same thing again. Whether it makes commercial sense to flood the market with short books by Bellow remains to be seen. But book lovers, as opposed to bookkeepers, have every reason to cheer his decision to come ahead with more.

As taut and stirring as A Theft was, The Bellarosa Connection is even better. Bellow here stands squarely on the ground that he conquered long ago: the dislocations -- wrenching, comic or both -- of being Jewish in America. Bellow's narrator, a man in his early 70s, never reveals his own name, but he engagingly -- and a bit smugly -- displays the trappings of his success: "I force myself to remember that I was not born in a Philadelphia house with 20- foot ceilings but began life as the child of Russian Jews from New Jersey." He had earned his mansion, plus his Wasp wife Deirdre and several million dollars, by founding the Mnemosyne Institute, an upscale think tank designed to help government and corporate bigwigs improve their powers of recall: "As I used to say to clients, 'Memory is life.' "

Retired and a widower, he tries to recollect the odd story of Harry Fonstein, the nephew of his father's second wife. He has not seen Harry and his wife Sorella for 30 years, but he finds them disturbingly memorable. Harry had reached the U.S. through bizarre circumstances. Barely escaping his native Poland ahead of the Nazis, he finally fetched up in Rome, only to be arrested by Mussolini's police. Soon, he was approached by an Italian man and given instructions on how to walk out of jail, go to Genoa and get on a ship bound for freedom. His adviser mentions the name Billy Rose, which Harry hears as Bellarosa. Only later does he realize that the person who has organized and funded the network that saved his life is a famous, indefatigably vulgar and flamboyant Broadway producer.

Harry, newly arrived in the U.S. and married to the American-born Sorella, would like to thank his benefactor. But Rose, a glutton for publicity in all other aspects, will not see Harry or acknowledge his letters. And how does the narrator know all this? Through the confidences of Sorella, immensely fat ("She was biologically dramatized in waves and scrolls of tissue") and enormously dedicated ("a tiger wife") to the well-being of her husband. Harry eventually gives up hope of thanking Rose, but his spouse does not.

Bellow's spokesman happens to be on the scene, at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1959, when Sorella manages to arrange a showdown with her husband's savior. She tells all, of course. Her description of the crucial encounter, both poignant and hilarious, settles nothing except the certainty that Broadway Billy Rose will do anything to avoid receiving an expression of gratitude by Polish immigrant Harry Fonstein.

But the story does not end here; it erupts at the impasse. The old man, recalling these events, suddenly realizes that he has got them all wrong. He had assumed an ironic, detached amusement when listening to Sorella. Surely his classy status has raised him above the agonies of European Jews and the notoriety of glitz peddlers like Rose. Wrong, he understands on looking back. Sorella had consulted him, not because of his cosmopolitan intellect, but because she saw him as a slightly better-mannered version of Billy Rose and his all-American success. "You pay a price for being a child of the New World," he decides. This crowded, unforgettable tale handsomely settles the account.