I bring you up to believe that nothing is good enough for you, and you grow up to be good for nothing. Thus, Mrs. Bindle, on learning that Ben, her only-begotten son, has decided to be a Rabbi; what is more, a Rabbi in a small provincial town in Scotland. Her anxiety proves to be not unjustified, although Ben's chosen career has its compensations-perhaps Helen, the promiscuous teenage daughter of his housekeeper; perhaps Simmy, the young wife of an elderly parishioner; perhaps the whole incident-prone pace of the pawky Scottish town in which this richly-human story is set. Chaim Bermant's third novel has all the wit, warmth and colour of its critically-acclaimed forerunners.

Part Bildungsroman, part hymn to the city of Glasgow, Jericho Sleep Alone is without a doubt the finest book written about the Scots-Jewish experience. From Bar Mitzvah to an unfulfilling teaching career, Jericho Eli Broock finds himself a perennial outsider and unlucky in love, neither his on-off affair with the flighty Ninna or his financially prudent dalliance with the homely Camilla coming to fruition. Will the sometimes oppressive aid of the Jewish community make all well in his world?

From Publishers Weekly With this first installment in a projected trilogy, the prolific author (The Patriarch) once again depicts immigrant Jews assimilating in Great Britain. A rabbi's son and former yeshiva student who himself emigrated some years ago from Russia to the United Kingdom, Bermant is a shrewd but loving storyteller, and he limns WW II Britain and the Jewish milieu with acuity, buoying a familiar coming-of-age plot with wry humor and deft characterization. Foremost among the engaging, authentic characters is his protagonist Sammy Hoch, or Titch, whose Yiddish-speaking parents, "making desperate efforts to turn native," address him only in English, "with the result that until I was about six we were virtually incommunicado." Short and bookish, and afflicted with the double burden of being Jewish and Polish by birth, Titch enlists in the British army but ends up, alas, in a Polish army regiment stationed in Britain. There he is made acolyte to an apostate rabbi, an immigrant who assumed an ecclesiastic role as a ticket to England (if his sponsors "had asked me to become a juggler, I would have become a juggler, and I would probably have enjoyed it more"). Bermant followers won't be surprised that Titch's "most important experience of the war" is an encounter with a married woman. Readers will be eager to pursue Titch and his adventures in the forthcoming sequels. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This is the first installment of a trilogy by the author of The Patriarch and other novels of Jewish life in Great Britain. In 1925, young Sammy Hoch travels with his parents and sister Sosh from Poland to Manchester, England. Sammyor "Titch," as his sister Sosh lovingly calls himsees himself as too short, too bookish, too Jewish, too foreign. His parents are repressive, his sister Sosh shrewish. After a shining academic career, Titch looks forward to escaping his past with a military career in World War II. Unfortunately, after a stint in the British army, Titch gets called up by the Polish armyand confusion and hilarity result. Titch's attempts at romance are amusing, colorful, and droll, his descriptions of wartime Britain revealing. Bermant does portray Jewish values as burdensome, but then this is only the first of the trilogy. Recommended. Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.