'The tone of John Lo Strange' sensitive novel "Set Them As a Banner" (Murray, London. 1/8), is taken from lines in Rupert Brooke's Poem "The Great Lover!
So for their sakes I loved, ere T 0
And the high cause of Love's magni-
And to Keep loyalties young, 111 write cence, those names Golden forever, eagles, crying Hames, And set them asa banner..."
No more than Rupert Brooke does this author refer only to love of persons, but to memories and moments of the past, The story, written in the first person, is of Hugh, a sensitive lad of eleven, sent to live with his large family cousins, who at first seemed to him ike a chapter from the Bible: one of those ghastly chapters which "begin: "And™ the sone Kohat, Amram, Mebron sand Uizi and "just about as plain tomy youthful' intelligence.
But from this family emerge several finely drawn characters: strange dark Metal" (Hutchinson, Lon= the latest novel of Naomi Jacob, "As in "Roots," the author depicts the struggles and ambitions hard-working family of low degree, this time the seiting being in the home of London Jews. Coming almost penniless from Hamburg in the eighteen-eighties, the Pardos establish themselves as tailors in the slums of Whitechapel. Young Meyer Pardo scrapes and preseveres, but his overwhelming desire to prosper eventually estranges his simple wife snd Jnvolves him, against his wil, in a public swindle. Years of confinement in an East End shop have left him unequal to the strain of impris~ fonment, and he dies of pernicious anaemia, in the bitter knowledge that his wife has at last yielded to the advances of her lover and that hi children have disowned him. Naomi 'Jacob gives us an intimate picture of London "east of Algate Pump" in a natural, easy style; and there is a pleasingly human touch in the por-tradal of Meyer cherishing ambitions his wite despises, and of Rachel, forcing herself to' serve a husband she does not love—na.c.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.