It is 1835. Reuben and Benjamin, both aged ten, uncle and nephew though they have been brought up as brothers, are in peril of forcible 25-year conscription into the Russian army. Jakob Bindel, their father and grandfather, tells them how they must try to live: 'There is no cause on earth worth dying for, no God … no country … no principle … Only in the name of love is Death worthy. And friendship.' They must survive, he says. And, as generation of brothers succeeds generation, the Bindels survive, or try to survive. Five hundred pages' worth of accidents of history (though also of contrivances of plot) visit upon them a pogrom in Odessa in 1871, a Welsh mining disaster in 1908, incarceration at Buchenwald—where a Bindel brother is driven to assist in murder so that he himself can survive—death in Auschwitz, and torture at the hand of Soviet 'psychiatrists' in the 1970s. Yet each generation manages to pass on to the next the original life-preserving injunction of Jakob Bindel. And Bindel brothers continue to survive.

Bernice Rubens's Brothers, a different sort of novel from any she has written before, is a brave, almost defiant statement of the philosophy that protecting oneself and those one loves is more virtuous than defending principles or beliefs; the latter she sees as a kind of baptism. Yet survival is surely only one aspect of the Jewish inheritance, which has also seen its martyrs, idealists and fighters. And in any case, isn't Jakob Bindel's injunction too vague to offer real guidance? What are 'love' and 'friendship', and what counts, or doesn't count, as defending them? Historical accident ensures that no Bindel brother is conscripted into the Allied armies to fight against Hitler: would that risk of death have been justified in the name of 'love', or would it too have been a kind of baptism?

This book is written with passion—rather depressingly, all the marriages of Jews with non-Jews are made to come to grief—and its subject-matter cannot help, as always, being both unbearable and stirring at once. Yet is also remains curiously colourless, as though it has been translated from another language. Conversations and situations often either seem anachronistic or belong to no particular time or place. If the effect sought is the simplicity of epic, the price (for all the considerable research) is a loss of historical authenticity—which isn't, anyway, helped by things like a reference to 'Leningrad' in the 1870s or reports of talk about Auschwitz among German Jews as early as mid-1940. And what Jewish tailor, in South Wales in 1903, would speak of teaching as a 'prestigious profession', however much he meant it? One is left wondering: would the book's passion, and its wholesale defence of the Bindel principle, themselves have entirely survived a profounder application of the historical and novelistic imagination?