Books: Tour de Force

TO JERUSALEM AND BACK

by SAUL BELLOW 182 pages. Viking. $8.95.

"If all pulled in the same direction" says the Yiddish proverb, "the whole world would topple over." Nowhere is that folk wisdom more apparent than on the acreage of Israel or in the first work of nonfiction by Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Saul Bellow. Late in 1975, when the author was a youthful 60 and the country was a ravaged 27, Bellow visited the Holy Land—his first trip since the Six-Day War.

Despite its geopolitical subject, the result is a typical Bellow production: part meditation, part crank letter, tinged with the doubt of Ecclesiastes...

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