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...

[I Sent a Letter to My Love] focuses on themes of loneliness and deprivation, on the pain of hopes and expectations arbitrarily but surely aborted by circumstance. Amy Evans has lived all her life in a Welsh seaside town; as a child her mother hated her for being the ugly and rebellious antithesis to her crippled brother Stanley…. Now a middle-aged woman, Amy still finds her life circumscribed by Stanley's gracefully passive wheelchair existence. She attempts to break this cycle of failed and ...

One comes away from this grim novel [Favours] reminded of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The resemblance is not stylistic: Where Compton-Burnett tended to use dialogue to achieve her effect, Bernice Rubens employs a rather thick mixture of narrative and stream of consciousness. No, the similarity goes deeper: For the author's characters, as for Compton-Burnett's, life is a sorry business—mere existence—whose strictures are dictated by an uncaring someone or something. Although God is not m...

["Birds of Passage"] almost works as comedy: Bernice Rubens is quite funny, for instance, in her description of the Walsh and Pickering ménages when she describes their sexual and social lives in terms of the ritual care and trimming of the hedge between the two households. She also offers some poignant insights into the heart: "It had been years since anyone had held her, and it frightened her," she says of Mrs. Dove as she is embraced by her daughter. "She thought...

The Jewish mother has been ridiculed and blamed before. In The Elected Member she is savaged—after her death, it is true, though the author still manages to score a bull's-eye by choosing the beloved and precocious son as victim and agent of all the suffering this perpetually "aggravated" mother is responsible for…. Norman is seen as the family's scapegoat, the receptacle all families create to contain their collective guilt and suffering. The receptacle has overflo...

The twilight world of U.N.O. and the W.F.O. and their agents in Java is the setting of Bernice Rubens latest novel The Ponsonby Post. To the Third World, which sometimes appears to be lying fallow waiting for ideological and agricultural cultivation, come the improvers. For the most part cynicism has eroded their commitment to the organisation, which sent them, or to the country which is their host—willing or otherwise. The officials' and administrators' lives are played out in pampered...

When it comes to raising the reader's eyebrows in incredulity,… Bernice Rubens takes some beating. Spring Sonata is the edited journal of Buster, a foetal genius who refuses to be born, evades detection during a Caesarian operation, and lurks in his mother's womb for over three years. While she is accused of indulging in a phantom pregnancy, he makes use of materials sneaked into the womb during the Caesarian—a prescription pad on which to write his thoughts and a violin to expre...

Black farce very often thrives on stock characters and stock incidents. The grotesque needs the familiar to bounce off. Yet the presence of too many such stock elements suggests that the author's imagination is not actively engaged and instead is being towed along by established literary stereotypes. Throughout The Ponsonby Post there is an embarrassing contrast between the evidence of Bernice Rubens's talent—her irony and zip—and the evidence that in this case we are dealing wit...

Spring Sonata is neither a collection of gloomy gynaecological horrors nor a solemn attempt to create a convincing foetal consciousness. Instead it is an exuberant comedy which uses its womb with a view to get a fresh perspective on that old satirical butt, the Jewish family. Our unborn narrator may be unprecedentedly youthful. Naive, however, he is not. (p. 643) Though even the more sombre chapters are peppered with racy jokes, there are some serious concerns. Buster is a musician, a potential violinist, a...

I Sent a Letter to My Love is a short, winning novel, almost an entertainment. (p. 46) Rubens, who has written several other novels, seems a natural fiction writer, an expert at ringing changes on the commonplace…. Rubens's characters are, from the start, stunningly believable, and she is not afraid to let them change, be inconsistent, reverse themselves. Amy's moods are as shifting as Welsh weather. Her slides from brazen action to stiffened shyness are unforeseeable, and usually funny...

Bernice Rubens is one of our finest Jewish writers and The Elected Member fully bears out that claim. She has a large compassion, and an intelligence which makes her compulsively readable. She is deeply committed, yet objectively truthful, about the Jewish world and people she describes, and neither is patronised by her humour. Her theme is persecution; the 'elected member' is the born victim of a family, the butt and scapegoat of relatives' anxieties and concerns. Norman Zweck, a barri...

The characters Bernice Rubens creates in her novels generally feel violently and venomously and on a grand scale. Their emotions are "urgent", "deep", "strange", and their natures divided and contradictory…. [The] principal theme of most of her novels [is] the grotesque contrast between the familiar, predictable surfaces of life and the madness, hatred and suffering underlying them. In Sunday Best there was an effective, chilling tension between the narrator&...

Stripped of the heavy riddles, which it quickly is, [Set on Edge] turns out to be the story of a love-hate relationship between a Jewish mother and daughter somewhere in the provinces and down the years. Long-suffering Gladys is finally found a husband, but he dies on their honeymoon. Eccentric brothers and sisters-in-law nip in and out of the central tangle. No one is endearing in this packed, sharply written novel; in places, the spleen almost bursts its deft stitching. It leaves a bad taste in the head a...

["Favours"] is a study of an elderly spinster who becomes addicted to the services of a paid lover. (p. 28) Bernice Rubens has a firm, brisk style, but she shows a disquieting tendency to shift her viewpoint inappropriately….

There certainly is insight of feeling in Bernice Ruben's novel Go tell the lemming…. The book tellingly pinpoints the cruelties of the situation, the selfishness of the husband's indecision, his bland pretence that all is still well, and Angela's helpless inability to condemn him for it…. Rejection makes Angela destructive in her turn, until she meets complete destruction at the hands of someone whose rejection is even more painful than her own. This is the culmination of ...

Bernice Rubens, a very proper British writer, has written a very proper British novel. Sly and witty, Sunday Best is as entertaining an afternoon's divertisement as has been published in many a day. (pp. 203-04) Ruben's writing is delightful throughout. Wickedly understated and tongue-in-check, she never lets the parody slip away from her and become farce. George is odd, but rapidly wins the readers' sympathy because of his vulnerability and talent for honest appraisal. His dowdy wife, ...

A Five Year Sentence simmers with the brutal. It runs red with the blood of Jean Hawkins's menses and her late deflowering, just as her Five-Year Diary (her retirement present) grows 'blood-red' with obedient ticks. For each of this extraordinary novel's raft of believably grey, lost, wanting-to-be-loved people from the wasteland tracts of outer London, living is a matter (in the narrative's favourite word) of colonise or be colonised. And Miss Hawkins is a colony…....

The scope of [Brothers] is encompassing, impressive, daunting: 150 years of European Jewish history refracted through the experiences of six generations of one Russian family as it undergoes agonies and vicissitudes (exile, pogrom, holocaust) and—for the surviving remnant—the final triumph of diaspora…. Rubens tells the complex tale with persuasive authority, no small feat given the scale and the intricacy of detail, and may be forgiven her occasional lapses into excessive use of archiv...