Bernice Rubens has written eleven novels, most of which have been well received by the critics. Her fourth, The Elected Member (1969), won the Booker Prize, Britain's most important and most coveted literary award. While her first four novels earned...

Bernice Rubens has enjoyed a long and varied career as documentary film writer, director, and novelist. She has received many awards, including the 1968 American Blue Ribbon Award, the Booker Prize in 1970, and the Welsh Arts Council Prize in 1976. Her...

There is a story that Picasso accompanied a colleague to an auction to reveal which of the paintings attributed to him were forgeries. As example after example of the great artist's work was held up, Picasso muttered "fake" to each. At the end, his...

BERNICE RUBENS'S fiction has always been preoccupied with the psychopathology of everyday life. In her early novels, in the 1960s and 1970s, children are condemned to partial lives by their parents (especially mothers) and are unable to function outside families. One of her protagonists...

It is 1835. Reuben and Benjamin, both aged ten, uncle and nephew though they have been brought up as brothers, are in peril of forcible 25-year conscription into the Russian army. Jakob Bindel, their father and grandfather, tells them how they must try to live: 'There is no cause on earth worth dying for, no God … no country … no principle … Only in the name of love is Death worthy. And friendship.' They must survive, he says. And, as generation of brothers succeeds genera...

Miss Rubens, no new literary figure, has written ten novels; she won the Booker Prize in 1970, and was short-listed for it in 1978. You would think, then, she was bound to be a household name like Bainbridge or Murdoch. For some unfathomable reason she is not. As Miss Rubens's most active fan I have been conducting a one-woman promotion service on her behalf for many years—converting, I like to think, dozens of readers to her entire works. I even wrote a panegyric on her for the World Service,...

In her 12th novel, Bernice Rubens has abandoned the small canvas for the large. Discarding the relatively modest yet always human situations that previously have been her subject matter, in "Brothers" the English novelist follows six generations of a Jewish family as they suffer through 150 years of unrelenting European oppression. The awful guilt that accompanies survival is a price nearly every character in this novel pays, over and over again…. Throughout, we are presented not so muc...