A Good, Protected Life

The author, a former student of John Gardner and Bernard Malamud who is now a Talmud scholar in Israel, opens his first novel with a bang: ``In November 1980, I, Murray `Muz' Orloff, abandoned my father Charlie in the Sahara Desert because he'd turned from a simple pest into a dangerous man.'' Murray and Charlie had set off from Israel for Africa in search of Charlie's brother Daniel, against whom the older Orloff committed a great wrong nearly 20 years earlier. In the first half of the book, Murray details the family history that led to this strange, ultimately tragic trek. Murray loses his father, but in the process gains a renewed sense of himself as a man and a Jew. The plot builds to an encounter with Daniel, whose revelation isn't much of a surprise: the rift between the brothers grew not from a business dispute or the death of Daniel's daughter, but from an earlier romantic entanglement involving Murray's mother. Even Murray admits its ``surprising inevitability, a shock stripped of its raw ability to awe,'' but Kaufman's acutely judged voicing of Murray's inner states gives the twist a certain emotional charge, and the final disposition of the family's problems is entirely believable and appropriate. Lacking the larger mythic resonance of works by Kaufman's two famous teachers, this is a slightly thin but not unsatisfying debut. (Aug.)