Briefly Reviewed: October 1983

July’s People

By Nadine Gordimer

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 160

Price: $10.95

Review Author: Karen Winchell

A 400-year fuse has been burning in southern Africa, and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People tells a story of the coming explo­sion, once the blacks take con­trol. Without explanation of the particulars of a black revolution, she immediately plunges us into her novel of one family’s flight from the mindless anti-white vio­lence of Johannesburg. The fami­ly’s escape to the bundus — or the “sticks” — hinges on the knowledge and co-operation of their “boy,” July, who has serv­ed them for 15 years. Although the host, he maintains the ser­vant veneer, serving them tea in their own cast-off chipped tea cups.

Gordimer gives us no cures for current South African prob­lems, for there are no easy solu­tions: even her “white heroes,” the Smales family (who stand ad­mirably against apartheid) fall short because of their own inept understanding of blacks. What Gordimer does point out is that while the well-intentioned, more liberal whites want a softer, more equal relationship between races, they don’t realize that to achieve such a relationship, pain and blood are inevitable. Pendulums do not stop abruptly in the mid­dle. This pendulum has been on one side for so long, it will swing against the whites before the cherished balance is attained. Gordimer’s insight is keen and makes the book a valuable warning: do not fight the process, but be ready for it when it comes.

Y’shua: The Jewish Way to Say Jesus

By Moishe Rosen

Publisher: Moody Press

Pages: 149

Price: $2.95

Review Author: Stuart Gudowitz

Moishe Rosen, chairman of Jews for Jesus, is one of the most prominent American Christians of Jewish parentage actively en­gaged in the evangelization of Jews. This book, a consideration of a number of Messianic texts of the Old Testament and whether Jesus fulfilled them, is aimed at the ordinary Jew (though non-Jews may profit by it as well). Rosen is obviously in command of his material and, by writing a book of modest length and in an informal, straightforward style, he has produced an approachable avenue for many people, with God’s grace, to realize that Jesus Christ is the Messiah promised of old, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”

There are a few places where Rosen’s argument could have been made tighter without adding unduly to the length of the book, and one regrets the ab­sence, in the section of the bibli­ography entitled “Books By or About Jewish Christians,” of any books by Jewish converts to Ro­man Catholicism, such as Before the Dawn by Eugenio Zolli, one­time Chief Rabbi of Rome.

Still, all in all, this is a good book. May it help to draw the Lord’s own to Himself.

©1983 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved.