BOOKS

...Understanding those facts may help, in the long run, to build a climate in which serious steps toward peace become possible...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Middle East Myths THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan Pantheon...

...The warmth and occasional wry irony go out of the book in these pages...

...He despises the 1960s, reading in the faces of its people (not entirely accurately) his own rootlessness, and his frequent sense of despair is more severe because much of his complaint deserves to be directed at himself...

...Simha Flapan, who died last spring shortly after completing The Birth of Israel, was the founding editor of the Israeli magazine New Outlook, a former national secretary of Israel's Mapam Party, and a leading Israeli voice for a Middle East peace settlement based on justice for the Palestinian people...

...Even the trees...

...The final words of his lyrical last paragraph ("We are all connected, watching one another...

...His book about the drama of the Holocaust will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press this spring...

...After Monroe's death, he imagines himself cut loose from all entanglements, and briefly enjoys the absence of responsibility...

...At the end of their relationship, he comes to grips with what he always knew, that "what we are is what we were, give or take a few improvements if we're lucky...

...he also offers us images of the poor and unknown, his friends and relatives in whose company he experiences the joy of attachment...

...that Arabs have always refused to come to terms with Israel...

...And, to his surprise, he finds an unaccustomed peacefulness in the company of his grandchildren...

...From the beginning, Miller has been our playwright-historian, in both his themes and his dramatic structures...

...Timebends is rich in anecdote and feeling, cautionary, mostly free of selfpleading, and, finally, hopeful...

...In the middle of Timebends, Miller spins dangerously off track...

...The respect he pays with his visit to his Aunt Stella, a manicurist in a lower Manhattan barbershop, to the mother of a dead college chum, to his womanizing cousin Abby, and to his boyhood playmate Sid who, grown up to wear the uniform of a New York cop, rejects him, are expressions of his need for community, for connection with the human family...

...in the language of tragedy and politics, she was both problem and solution...

...There is not a little melodrama in this part of his story...

...His protagonists, beginning with Joe Keller of All My Sons in 1947, struggle to make sense of the past they have lived, to find accommodation and something more than mere survival in their own history and their own country...

...Paula and Lee Strasberg play the villains...

...The occasion is his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and the writing in these sections is astonishingly charged in a way that separates it from the rest of the book...

...The 1930s were a time of solidarity and the 1940s of fulfillment, but the 1950s became his "time of confusion" and the early 1960s, his "time of stalemate...

...And so, in the 1970s and 1980s, he saves himself "by opening out to all things...

...In making the connection, Miller experiences a delight he attributes to "the bending of time," the feeling that life lived with enough passion and thought eventually comes full circle, returning us to the place from which we began...

...Near the end of Timebends, the title's meaning becomes explicit...

...Chained to the rock of history, he is our Jewish Prometheus...

...Monroe, whom he calls his "'feminine blessing," was also his curse...

...Miller is our playwright of philan-thropos, marking time and bending it...

...But Miller was not always lucky...

...In Miller's resolute insistence that history matters, and in America's contrary demand that history be forgotten, lies the cause of their conflict...

...The fact that he has survived to write this lucid and frequently moving chronicle is much to our benefit...

...Told with a retrospection so typical of Miller, it reaches back beyond even ancient Athens to a still more ancient Jerusalem for its special resonance...

...But also like his protagonists, in the manner of those ancient Greek heroes who often occupy his imagination, he is attracted to that which could destroy him...

...Robert Skloot teaches theater and directs plays at the University of Wisconsin, Madison...

...It is an existential tale in that it asserts (again, as the Greeks knew) the value of a life of action and commitment...

...Their presence in the first half of Timebends points to the place he will come back to...

...Miller, of course, has long devoted himself to that same task, and Timebends is the record of that peculiar devotion...

...In these pages, Miller does more than provide brief and exceptionally sharp anecdotes of the rich and famous...

...Miller finds again the strength to oppose with vigor and even shrewdness the loathsome "culture of denial" of our antihistorical age...

...speak of life folding into and out of itself, secure in root and branch...

...This is an overstatement, since Time-bends ignores the influence of much contemporary culture...

...This book is as timely as the latest news reports of anguish and bloodshed in the Middle East...

...Television, Beckett, and the Beatles, for example, are never mentioned in the book...

...that Palestinians fled Israel despite earnest entreaties from Jewish leaders...

...He tells the story of how, on a 1978 European trip, his lost passport was quickly reissued by an American embassy official (himself a victim of a witch hunt that nearly ruined his career), and Miller recalls how a quarter of a century earlier it had been so cruelly and spitefully withheld...

...The myths he examines—and demolishes by persuasive marshaling of evidence—include the most basic rationales for Israeli intransigence: that Zionists welcomed but Arabs scorned the U.N.-sponsored partition of Palestine in 1948...

...Flapan's facts, some of them retrieved from documents only recently declassified, will come as a shock even to many Israelis, but especially to those Americans who have blindly supported every Israeli action...

...he even uses his once-discomfiting celebrity for political advantage...

...Her lure for Miller, apart from her incomparable beauty, was twofold: her struggle with her own incapacitating past and her invitation to escape from those responsibilities (to wife, to geography, to code, to history itself) that became his burden as much as they became his enduring theme...

...But he is also cut off from himself, and from the sense of community that provides a nurturing and hearty refuge from egotism and drift...

...But, in time, he does come to realize that mere attraction to victims or love of the excluded is insufficient cause to live by, and that he, being human, is no stranger to betrayal, given and received...

...Miller has never been a writer of comedy...

...18.95...

...The first half of Timebends is rich in humane description and what may be called the rhythm of return...

...by Robert Skloot Arthur Miller's autobiography Timebends looks back over a turbulent seventy years of personal, political, and cultural history and draws conclusions from the life its author and his country have lived together, occasionally in harmony, almost always in conflict...

...277 pp...