Survivors

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches literature and folklore at California State University, Fresno...

...It's a foreshadowing of disaster to come that Buz has been converted to Christianity and resists Cohn's attempts to give him a good Jewish education and perhaps even a bar mitzvah...

...five more chimps Buz names Mary Madelyn, Esau, Melchior, Luke, and Saul of Tarsus...

...God explains: "The present Devastation, ending in smoke and dust, comes as a consequence of man's self-betrayal...

...Malamud simply needed more time to subordinate the plot and its ideology to a dramatic rendering that would have done justice to the* humor as well as the dark underpinning of his fable...

...More Freud—sexual repression results in the Oedipal lust for the mother and murder of the father...

...If I hadn't wearned to speak and understand human speech, I would have already presented myself to every mawe on the island...

...Later some baboons show up too...

...Thus Cohn had aimed his arrow at God and was invisibly aimed at...

...Cohn, a former rabbinical student and the son of a rabbi, knows very well that as a priest (Kohan) he is required to abide strictly by all ritual, especially the laws governing marriage—not to mention bestiality...

...a gorilla Cohn names George...

...Now that I have, I am different than I used to be...

...From the beginning, when I gave them the gift of life, they were perversely greedy for death...

...But Mary Madelyn (who speaks with a fetching lisp) insists, "You wanted us to wearn your language...

...Malamud's fable is heavy-handed but interesting...

...His latest book, God's Grace, tells the story of Calvin Cohn, the only survivor of a thermonuclear war between "the Djanks and the Drushkies...

...But despite his fine insights into the Jewish puritanism which Calvin Cohn epitomizes (it is a recurring pattern in American literature from the Seventeenth Century to the present), God's Grace is a disappointment...

...It never fleshes in all the therries that are presented, and the narrative framework keeps calling attention to itself...

...Kaddish also refers to the son who will perform the duty for the parent...

...It wouldn't have been all that hard...

...Cohn, a paleologist working at the bottom of the sea, was saved by an error, but God gives him a little extra time, and it is clear from the "faded rainbow" which appears next morning that humankind could have another chance...

...to have endowed [man] with a little more control of his instincts...

...He organizes a schooltree for the animals whom Buz has taught to speak (except the gorilla, George...

...With apologies to his audience, Cohn explains that man "never mastered his animal nature for the good of all" and promptly proves the point by impregnating Mary Madelyn while the young beasts lust in vain for the lady chimp that Cohn reserves for himself...

...At first it appears that there are no other survivors, but in fact God's wrath has missed a number of other creatures: Buz, a chimpanzee that has been taught to speak through the means of an artificial larynx...

...It is, as predicted, the fire this time, and the holocaust is followed by a Second Flood...

...the Passover Seder on Cohn's Island (it becomes more like Coney Island...

...as for God's grace, there simply isn't any...

...Buz's persistent memory of Jesus: "He preached to the Chimpanzees...

...Cohn attempts to organize his group into a decent society with himself as "adviser and protector" in hopes of starting evolution on another track that might produce a better species than the one just annihilated, a "homo ethicalis...

...But as his namesake foretold, Calvin blows it...

...For good measure, the revolt of the apes is accompanied by a virulent anti-Semitism...

...and a poignant ending in which George ("wearing a mud-stained white yarmulke") recites Kaddish in memory of Cohn...

...Like Job, Cohn complains: "Why hadn't the Almighty—in sum—done a better job...

...Like the old Adam, Cohn is seduced by the female, and in a parody of Freud's theory of the primal sin (and a reversal of the story of Abraham and Isaac) the animals sacrifice him to gain access to the sexual pleasure that has been denied them...

...There are some incomparable scenes: Cohn's lectures to the beasts on the animal nature of man...

...At last I thought, I will give them death because they are engrossed in evil...