Bookends: Nov. 11, 1985

MY FATHER, HIS DAUGHTER

by Yael Dayan

Farrar, Straus & Giroux;

289 pages; $17.95

< The Israeli Cyclops was victorious in the Six-Day War and died peacefully in bed. But before and between these terminals a tragedy unfolded, according to his daughter. Although the memoirs of Yael, 46, are cloaked in raiments of respect (“It was easy to admire him . . . he looked his best in uniform”), Moshe Dearest is remembered mostly for his inadequacies. He posed as a family man, but philandered compulsively (“His choice of bed partners was vulgar and in poor taste”) and complained about Yael’s boyfriends like a jealous lover. In the ’70s other, wider conflicts intervened. After Israel’s near catastrophe in the October War of 1973, the general was maligned by some of his own countrymen as “the architect of military cemeteries.” His 35-year marriage dissolved, he remarried, enjoyed a brief period of rehabilitation and happiness, but then, after great pain, succumbed to cancer in 1981. His coldly worded will left almost everything to his second wife. In death, Yael bitterly remarks, “he shrank to a size I refused to accept.” Perhaps. But this tense, embittered account has taken several more cubits from his stature.

MY FATHER AND I

by Camelia Sadat

Macmillan; 203 pages; $16.95

If Yael Dayan’s memoir is stained with blood, Camelia Sadat’s is soaked in tears. But the daughters are not as dissimilar as they seem. Camelia, 36, also plays out an Oedipal drama: when she is photographed with Egypt’s President, “gossip followed that Father was involved with an attractive young woman whom he intended to marry. I thought it a huge joke.” The joke was not always so funny. In this sad account, Sadat marries off his daughter when she is twelve, to a man 17 years her senior. When she later demands a divorce, her father grows glacially remote. Even when his emotionally distraught daughter attempts suicide, he sends an emissary to her bedside. Eventually, the young woman seeks fulfillment outside her native country, first in Europe, then in the U.S., where she and her daughter live today. In the final chapters she celebrates the statesman and martyr she knows better in death than in life. Yet it is as a man that her father remains most appealing, spending his Nobel Peace Prize money to benefit his birthplace (“The villagers even had color TV before I did in Cairo”) and promoting culture. “You made me cry the other day when I saw your film,” Sadat informs an actor. “You must do that again.”

IS SALAMI AND EGGS

BETTER THAN SEX?

, by Alan King and Mimi Sheraton

Little, Brown; 218 pages; $15.95

“I’m not a cuisine man,” Alan King tells us on page 180 of this book of anecdotes garnished with favorite recipes. By that time his co-author, Food Critic and TIME Contributor Mimi Sheraton, has souffleed the fact a dozen amusing ways. The comedian-entrepreneur likes to be aggressively unpretentious. Celebrity Alan at the world’s best restaurants is still Irwin Alan Kniberg, the heartburn kid from Brooklyn. By turning heavy eating into light reading, King and Sheraton have produced an ideal talk-show book. The old Borscht Belter knows how to drop names and push his material to the limits of good taste, and a pot roast recipe juxtaposed with a story about an enema is really pushing it. But the pleasure King takes in good food, good company and his own stamina is undeniably authentic. Criticism, in his case, would be like complaining about the food and then saying that the portions are too small.

DEPTHS OF GLORY

by Irving Stone

Doubleday; 653 pages; $19.95

Irving Stone’s books include twelve biographical novels, among them Lust for Life (Vincent Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Michelangelo). Depths of Glory takes on a lesser talent, French Impressionist Painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). There are no missing ears or monumental feats of ceiling painting here. Pissarro’s story is one of patient work and cultural politics in 19th century Paris. History is recycled as romantic narrative (“Julie knew that she was not the paramount love of Camille’s life. Painting was, and always would be”). Cliches, weightless characterizations and snippets of the past accumulate like dust balls under a couch. Young Pissarro breaks with his bourgeois origins by marrying a family servant. Struggle, poverty and rejection follow. Eventually, Pissarro and the other graying impressionists are rewarded, a triumph Stone celebrates with the artist “exhilarated by the knowledge that painting played a universal role in the life of the human being.” The banal passage is indicative of the irony that keeps this novel in the depths of glory. To tell his story of an avant- garde, Stone uses a hackneyed form.