In her 12th novel, Bernice Rubens has abandoned the small canvas for the large. Discarding the relatively modest yet always human situations that previously have been her subject matter, in "Brothers" the English novelist follows six generations of a Jewish family as they suffer through 150 years of unrelenting European oppression. The awful guilt that accompanies survival is a price nearly every character in this novel pays, over and over again….

Throughout, we are presented not so much with real characters as with names to whom action and lines of wooden dialogue are attributed. One after another, Bindels are born, bar mitzvahed (if they are male) and married, often in the space of a few pages. They then have children (two sons, usually) and begin their marionettelike march toward death. Miss Rubens seems determined to let nothing get in the way of the long span of recorded history she has set out to cover. Unfortunately, the first casualty of her intent is the quality of the writing.

At times, "Brothers" reads as though it had been written in a foreign language and awkwardly translated into English….

Miss Rubens uses phrases like "Bindeldom" and "Bindelhood" as though they referred to states of being. She creates compounds that have never before been introduced to one another, as in "the Jew-fear" and "The mighty Czar would brook no Christ-refusal." Certain incidents of plot challenge all laws of probability, as when one Bindel laughter, a Welsh-Jewish suffragette who has served time in jail for sabotage, just happens to meet an American naval officer wandering the streets of Cardiff before World War I. The officer is not only looking for her father, a tailor, but is named Saul Weinberger. Naturally, they soon marry and move to America.

The few vivid sections of this novel are overshadowed by long and barren stretches of writing that numb even the most patient reader long before the end. Miss Rubens's fourth novel, "The Elected Member," about a Jewish family in the East End of London, was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker Prize in 1970…. Perhaps Miss Rubens will soon return to the smaller frame she has proved herself better able to fill, leaving this sort of novel to those who regularly grind out such soap operas.