The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 96

Crash Program to Right America's Broken Vows IIP SSmfiWm By Richard J. Walton Special to The Inquirer and Book World 6-H Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972 scale, all of its major problems at once: poverty, bad housing, racial injustice, unemployment, inadequate education, the environment, the whole works. His argument is, and history bears him out, that America's domestic problems are so totally intertwined that anything but a comprehensive attack can only fail. He does not for a moment underestimate the complexity, difficulty, terrific expense, and divisiveness that such an attack would encounter.

He writes the Republicans off as hopeless, declares third and fourth parties are vain, romantic hopes, and contends that only the recapture of the Democratic Party by vigorous, liberal forces offers any hope. He would get rid of Democratic conservatives, not by purges but making the party so liberal they would voluntarily leave the new coalition of the poor, the blacks, the young, the labor movement, and liberal elements of the middle class. There's much more in this slender book that stimulates the kind of innovative political thought we need. Rirhtir'i .1 W'nlton is 1he author of 1hr forthrormv'l hook "i'olil War at.d-C.ranytPrrryohtl ton The Fotuj Policy ol John F. Kennt rhj.

The Downtown Jews: Informal History of Beople in Transition I1 THE 40-ODD YEARS between the early 1880s and the mid-1920s, when immigration into the United States was fi-. nally restricted, almost 2,800,000 East European Jews came to this country. They had been preceded by the Sephardic Jews who had been here long before the Revolution and by the German Jews who arrived in the mid-1800s. These two groups, the "Sephardim and the Germans, are the subjects of two books by Stephen Birmingham, "The Grandees" and "Our Crowd." Now the Russians have their own spokesman in Ande Manners herself the grandchild of East European immigrants, who has written a lively social history-commentary about them called "Poor Cousins." i Poor relatives, that's how By James MacGregor Burns UNCOMMON SENSE Harper Row. $6 95.

kept the promises it made 200 years ago. Not only is he thoroughly revolted by the war but he wants the "categorical abolition of poverty," full justice for black Americans, and the preservation and restoration of the environment. And he wants them in a hurry. Basic to Burns's proposals, and the only basis for any hope that they might succeed, is his conviction that America as a nation has higher values then do most of its constituent parts, whether defined geographically, ethnically, economically, etc. He proposes that the United States attack, on an enormous New York's old East Side, where many East European Jews- settled during period of high immigration ending in the mid-1920s.

The story of these Jews is the subject of "Poor Cousins," reviewed at left. The Outlook for Computers WHAT COMPUTERS CAN'T DO: A CRITIQUE OF ARTIFICIAL REASON By Hubert L. Dreyfus Harper Row. $8.95. the Middle Class David Appel bot can be digitally programmed to play Ping-Pong.

I find these doubts unfathomable. A computer may never write a good poem, feel love and hate, be amused or sad, or wonder why it exists, but playing chess, translating Chinese, and playing Ping-Pong are exactly the kinds of tasks a computer can learn to do well. Dreyfus is right in chiding the experts on artificial intelligence for their early euphoria. He is right in saying that their quick early progress leveled off as formidable difficulties were encountered. He may be right in predicting painfully slow future advances.

But his pessimism about computer simulation of certain kinds of human problem solving and acting is supported by arguments which impress this reader as peevish, murky, and unconvincing. life that had been carefully built. They generated a so-calleld "tsitterdick" syndrome, a nervous defensive embarrassment. They had to be quickly absorbed into the mainstream. So the uptowners set about to achieve from their religious kinsmen conformation through educational and social projects, only to meet the kind of resistance that could make the melting pot boil over.

And in times of religious ferment and change even basic religious ties could be strained. The East Europeans wanted to adjust in their own way. Eventually they and their children comprised 85 percent of the American Jewish population. Told on an informal, chatty level, "Poor Cousins" often accents the anecdote but not not plan moves in the same way Fischer does. (No one knows how Fischer's brain or anybody else's brain works.

We don't even know how it remembers anything). But neither ddes a tick-tack-toe machine calculate the same way as a 10-year-old who plays an unbeatable game. Nowhere does Dreyfus make clear why MacHack could not learn to play master chess by its own electronic techniques. Dreyfus praises (faintly) Minsky for developing a robot that perceives and picks up blocks, but he doubts if a ro Computer and hoy firif- ffi'T 'T, 1T1 mi urn at the expense of vital background. Especially illuminating here is the bitter record of Jewish life under Romanov rule, of the ruthless efforts to force conversion carried on by such Russian imperial ministers as Uvarov, Pobyedonos-tzev and Ignatiev, making Jewish life in the Pale an endless misery.

In a sense they were all fiddlers on the roofs. The Pale was a 300-mile wide western corridor running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, comprised of 15 gubernias or states in which were located shtetls, townlets, where Jews could live but under all manner of harsh, restrictive AMES MacGREGOR. BURNS is one of that growing number of mid dle-aged, New Deal liberals who have come to recognize, with something close to anguish, that liberalism has failed, that this nation is perilously close to collapse. With a hint of possible apocalypse unexpected in so judicious, a man, Burns attempts no less a task than trying to figure out what went wrong with America and what can be done about it. One couki even suggest that Burns, a pillar of the liberal Establishment Williams college professor, political pal of the Kennedys, and best-selling Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author has been radicalized.

By My Lsi and Attica, by the experiences of his and his friends' children, by his own political frustrations. Abbie Hoffman might disagree with some of Burns's prescriptions for change but he could hardly question the depth of Burns's despair. Burns says, and who could argue, that America, with tragic consequences, has not Mirror on IERS PAUL READ con cocts an engaging, even compelling, plot with the distillation of America's most salient political types of the last decade: There is the Harvard professor who advises liberal politicians, his daughter who escapes to Berkeley, turns hippy and marries the endemic West Coast breed of hippy; the earnest, idealistic revolutionaries who populated the Ivey League before politics absorbed most of their attention; and the college-educated minorities whose stature as racial militants entails some guilt for the past they leave behind. The novel is one that no American could have written, but particularly suits a young Englishman like Read. He handles with seriousness and sufficient distance characters that Americans still react to with the kind of set responses that make Charles Reich's fatuous posturings so popular in "The Greening of America." Read conceives of people with that fine English appreciation of eccentricity, a quality that enriches English literature and in the past two decades has turned appropriately CARS By Harry Crews Morrow.

$5.95. metal suitcases that earn them Sll each. There is Easy Mack, owner of the Auto-Town car dump across the river from Jacksonville, and father to a thousand wrecks. He is also father of twin sons, Mister and Herman, and red-headed Ju-nell, who wears black motorcycle racing leathers and who collects recent wrecks with her truck called Big Mama. A happy family preying together, as it were.

But Herman is "a dreamer of mad dreams" and not "willing to let mad dreams remain just dreams." He observes that everything in the country during the last 50 years "has happened in, on, around, with, or near a car." He wants to get closer to the TRIDENT PRESS NATIONAL BEST SELLER! imrt'rf i S. The Ultimate in Worship of Automobiles laws running trom the conscription of 12-year-old boys to special taxes on Sabbath candies and kosher meat. All this was climaxed by the government-generated pogroms of the 1880s when despite wide protest and intercession by such important men as Baron de Hirsch and Baron de Gunz-burg, the repressions and outbreaks continued and a massive migration began. Before it ended over half the Jews had, despite every obstacle, escaped from the Pale. By Martin Gardner Sprrial to The Inquirer and JSook World A RE DIGITAL COMPUT ERS capable of simulating human thinking? If so, will they ever develop to the point at which it is legitimate to'call them persons? Hubert L.

Dreyfus, who teaches philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, answers both questions with resounding nos. The most he will concede is that digital computers can imitate only the most trivial aspects of human thought and behavior. Over and over again he quotes with high glee the over-optimistic predictions of Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and other pioneers of what is now called artificial intelligence: A computer will in 10 years be the chess cahmpion of the world (Simon, Computers will soon be translating languages in a useful way, recognizing complicated patterns, discovering significant new mathematical theorems, and so on. Such hopes, Dreyfus is persuaded, are foredoomed. Why? i Because, he contends, human reasoning is so different from computer reasoning that it cannot be simulated to any important degree until we learn how to build an artificial person, with something like a human body, capable of growing, perceiving the world by gestalts, interacting continuously with its environment; in short, until we build a humanoid.

The brain, Minsky once declared, is only a computer, made of meat. Dreyfus seems to imply that no computer, not made of meat, will ever calculate in a way that deserves to be called "thinking." This view sprouts prophecies as gloomy as Simon's were rosy. No digital computer, Dreyfus is convinced, will ever play grandmaster chess. Bobby Fischer just doesn't think digitally. It is true that MacHack, the famous chess program at Minsky's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T, does not play even master chess.

Moreover, MacHack does Ordeal of A COMMUNIST himself, Bela Szasz was denounced by fellow party members in Hungary as a foreign spy, subjected to almost unbelievable tortures in an attempt to extract admission of guilt, tried on fictitious charges and sentenced to prison for 10 years. He was released during the ill-starred Hungarian revolution of 1956. After the failure of the uprising, he fled to London. His ordeal, pictured in shattering fashion in his book, illuminates a truth which needs frequent emphasis: that in a totalitarian society no one can be free from fear. Until 1949, only persons like Cardinal Mindszenty who had openly opposed the Communist government in Hungary had been brought to trial.

In 1949, however, when Szasz suddenly found himself in the hands of the secret police, Communists were swept up in what came to be called the Rajk affair, after the main target of the coup, Laszlo Rajk, a party leader who was successively minister of the interior and head of the Foreign Ministry. Szasz had joined the then-illegal Communist Party during his student days in Budapest. In 1939, before the outbreak of the war, a cinema contract took him to Argentina where he edited an anti-Nazi Hungarian weekly. When he re- BOOK OF THE WEEK: FICTION THE PROFESSOR'S DAUGHTER By Piers Paul Read Lippincott. $6.95.

macabre in the hands of accomplished young writers. At bottom, Read also has the English penchant for making individuals the appendages of families, but that is as much a quality as a fault. And Read has one other endearing English literary trait: conversation, especially in small groups of intelligent people, conveys the plot, and, as I was amused to see, the more embroiled the plot becomes, the more frequent the chats. Time present is fall, 1967, when a young who turns out to be Louisa Rutledge, the professor's daughter, saunters onto Boston Common, picks up a stranger, seduces him in her apartment, then jumps out the window. A balcony below breaks her fall, she recovers, and she and her father have separate bouts of soul ultimate dream.

Very close. Become part of the dream. He decides he will eat a car "because it's there." The car his choice happens to be a 1971 Ford Maverick. The game plan is that he will eat half a pound a day in bite-sized, half ounce pieces Gf metal "burned with a torch so there's no jagged edges." The show builds. Mister demands a new contract.

ABC's "Wide World of Sports" picks it up. Herman becomes a superstar. He becomes, psychically, a car. "A superbly car." Crazy? No, just a part of the American Dream taken to a logical if nutty extreme. I loved it.

Just one thing: Would you please pass the Alka-Seltzer? Richard Fuller Axsoriate ed.tor. Colloquy magazine. MANIACS levy frN- llMGlALLACE i THE 1 MMPHO AWL I OTHER they were regarded as they arrived on Manhattan's Lower East Side, especially by the well-established uptown Jews who thought of themselves as "Israelites," but who felt the need to assume responsibility for the newly arrived downtowners, who appeared to represent a challenge to a way of BOOK OF THE WEEK: NOXFICTION By Ande Manners POOR COUSINS Coward, McCann Geoghegan. $5.95. GENERAL 1.

Eleanor and Franklin. By Joseph Lash. 2. Tracy and Hepburn. By Garson Kanin.

3. Jennie, Volume II. By Ralph G. Martin. 4.

Honor Thy Father. By Gay Talese. 5. Wunnerful, Wunnerful. By Lawrence Welk.

6. The Defense Never Rests. By F. Lee Bailey. 7.

Wreck of the Penn Central. By Peter Binzen and J. R. Daughen. 8.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. By Dee Brown. 9. The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. Portola Institute.

10. Recollections at 80. By R. Sturgis Ingersoll. ONCE UPC American Car and, UPON A TIME, looked upon lo, he found It good and coveted It above all things and took It unto him for three-year periods, loving It and polishing It and adoring It just short of putting It beneath his pillow.

And after the three-year period had passed and Car 'was no longer good, he went in search of another to cuddle and fondle. And the searching. The result, which brings father and daughter together for the first sympathy they have ever really shared, is participation in a political plot hatched by students of the professor. Through a long series of flashbacks, Read pinpoints the kind of pressures and fissures that undermine the bedrock of family life, though he imputes to Pro. Rutledge a temporary lust for his daughter which is not necessary for the other-( wise impeccable portrait of upper middle-class America.

On the West Coast, Louisa goes through an experience that is replete with drugs, communal sex, and evil-eyed poets, but ends up sounding a little shrill and unconvincing. As opposed to oversentimen-talizing the 1960s, Read may well have too little sympathy for it, a condition that was probably necessary to tackle the subject now, but one that has its drawbacks. The plot is exciting until the last page, which is rather conventional, and one is left with the feeling that Read has consummate skill observing America and manipulating the characters he finds here, but too little commitment to the environment he is playing with. Frank Lipsius Philadelphia cntir now in London uith the Daily Telegraph. $10.00 LITTLE.

BROWN t'4 ir BOOK $1.50 a Disillusioned Red Martin (iardnpr Uior to SrifJitfir author of "The verse." iv rrqular rotitrh-A iie i'i ffi and the A minder trout Vni- playing tick-tack-toe. evele continued and he was happy. Harry Crews knows all about our ongoing love affair with the species called automobile. He has gotten it all, miraculously, into a slim, tight 152 pages of wit, irony, exaggeration, humor, poetry, fable. It is called "Car." Of course.

It is about a family that crushes old cars into Rajk was executed, among others who confessed to deeds they did not commit, but Szasz believes that the purge based so obviously on lies and torture actually reacted against Stalin and helped spur later "revisionism" in the Soviet regime. Having once extracted himself from Hungary, he has again left his native land for the free air of England, a scarred and disillusioned Communist. Harold J. Wiegand "Extraordinarily readable." Book World At all bookstores, $12.50 i Norton 55 Fifth Ave.N.Y. 10003 AFTER CASTLE GARDEN and Ellis Island, Mrs.

Manner takes us to the East Side, to the tenement-pushcart scene of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, to study a people in transition, seeking to build a new way of life, seek-the answers in the areas of politics, education, labor. There were those uptowners who sought to remake the newcomers in their own. social image with projects and plans of every stripe. But apparently without too much success. Most intriguing among such plans were projects for utopi-an-type agricultural communities intended to reshape the newcomer from the shtetl worker into an American farmer.

These encompassed a variety of ideas and spread from Ararat near Niagara Falls to Sicily Island in Louisiana, New Odessa in Oregon, Cotopaxi in Colorado and Beersheba in the Cimarron territory. Added to these was the Industrial Reform Office which, bypassing the Eastern seaboard cities, took the immigrant through Galveston to jobs in the West and Middle West. TMrs. Manners has provided the narrative with a fascinating gallery of key figures including such personalities as Jacob H. Schlff, investment banker who was a force in many projects ancf plans and who harbored a deep feeling for his fellow Jews; Louis Marshall, prominent lawyer who fought vigorously against anti-Semitism in any form; poet Emma Lazurus who wrote the lines for the Statue of Liberty pedestal; editor Abraham Cahan; religious leaders including Rabbis Isaac Mayer We, Judah I.

Magnes and Solomon Schechter. "Poor Cousins" is continuously lively reading. Mrs. Man-nefi has spiced the narrative with scattered Yiddish phrases, adjpng to the evocative nostalgic quality. jTiere, then, is the way so many "fiddlers" came down from throof.

BEST SELLERS 'il4jLi' 1 -Mf i YOLUNTEERS FOR THE GALLOWS: ANATOMY OF A SHOW TRIAL Bv Bela Szasz Norton. $6.95. turned to Budapest in 1946 to find the Communists in control he was appointed to tne "press departments first in the Foreign Ministry and then in the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1949 Stalin determined to strike a blow at Tito by linking to his espionage service a number of Hungarian government officials headed by the foreign minister, Rajk. Having nothing against these persons except invented charges, Stalin's agents in the Hungarian secret police resorted to time-honored tactics of forcing confessions under torture.

Szasz was accused of entering the British secret service while in Argentina and, on returning to Budapest, of blackmailing Rajk into giving hiin confidential documents which he turned over to the British. Despite torture which included clubbing, the breaking of five ribs, near starvation and such refinements as standing in one position for 10 hours at a stretch, he refused to sign a confession. FICTION l.SWinds of War. By Herman TWouk. 2.

'Wheels. By Arthur Hailey. 3. of the Jackal. By Frederick Forsyth.

Cthe Betsy. By Harold Rob-Ttins. 5. 'The Exorcist. By William 'Blatty.

6. Our Gang. By Philip Roth. 7 Rabbit Redux. By John Updike.

Peaceable Kingdom. By Jan de Hartog. 9j Girl, 20. By Kingsley Amis. Message from Malaga.

By Helen Maclnnes. Compiled from reports given by Philadelphia honkntoyfn: (i mbets. Ijts, eSe.ler, StrawhritT'n and Clotmer, Wwamaker U7'tw, Wmnratn ail Mid-City. Candid stories of more than thirty women who defied the socfal standards of their times sexually, politically, intellectually to go their own marvelously varied way. NOW A POCKET 1-.