MY NOAH'S ARK

The idea of a Noah's ark handed down from generation to generation holds such promise, and so well suits Goffstein's precise, intimate, quietly unfolding manner, that the fact that it remains tenuous, undeveloped—as do the pictures—is all the more a disappointment. "When I was a little girl ninety years ago," begins the small black-clad figure, "my father made me an ark." And she goes on to describe his pleasure in building it, the figures he carved, her special fondness for the sad-looking smaller gray horse—stroked "until. . . there is not much paint left on her, except for her two little eyes, which look grateful." Her father adds more animals; upon marrying, she takes the ark to her new home; and in time she passes both ark and story along to her children. "Now," with everyone gone, the memories remain: "Our fun and sorrow seem to form a rainbow, and it warms me like sunshine." But apart from the father's booming refrain—"Make it three hundred cubits long"—and the expressed fancy for one horse, the narrative hovers, unsecured; the recollection does not become a shared experience.