ROOTS SCHMOOTS

In his fiction (Redback, 1987; Peeping Tom, 1985, etc.) and now with this travelogue/sociologue/personalogue about his semi-Jewishness, Jacobson seems fated never quite to cast off the perception of him as a Philip Roth wannabe perpetually one step behind (both in talent and intellectual plasticity) his American master.

Given a deal by the BBC and PBS to wander Jewish venues such as the Concord resort, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Israel, and his grandparents' Lithuania, Jacobson is ever defensively atwitter, waving the antenna of his jokey skepticism. He detests the religious like the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Hasidim of Jerusalem not only because they no doubt would be scandalized by Jacobson's gentile wife and his own secularism but also on the grounds of aesthetics: "How is it that austerity on matters of religious faith and ritual almost invariably accompanies laxity in matters of art, music, proportion, tact, ethics, manners, civic probity, passing decency and whatever else you can think of that isn't religious faith and ritual.'' Had he spent less time flexing his condescension, Jacobson might have been able to arrive at some provisional conclusions as to why (there are an established few, after all, not all of them anti-Semitic, too)—but, instead, his screed is wrapped inside a Carnegie Deli corned-beef sandwich of wise-guy superiority and overeducated disaffiliation.

Despite some nice miniatures, a snide, rather pointless, lazy book.