[The] first few pages of "The Reckoning" convinced me that in Mr. Elman we have a born biographer of the bourgeois animal.

Significantly, his Newman Yagodah is a father, not a son, not an American but a European. I could almost say "naturally a European," because there's never been a true American bourgeoisie. (p. 5)

He makes a very moving character, this sinner in search of meaning, disclosing (beyond his place or time), the decay of a value system. Mr. Elman has textured his mind beautifully….

Toward the end of the book, it becomes plain that Yagodah and his family are destined for the gas oven. Yagodah can't absorb the prospect. What troubles me is that whenever Yagodah glimpses his fate, his humanity vanishes. Relatives, friends, enemies and lovers live richly in his journal. But the executioners, when they arrive, never emerge from behind a personal pronoun. "Already they are placing armed guards around the houses of some of our neighbors…." That is all we see or hear of them, and the reverberations they cause in an otherwise vital mind are curiously mechanical.

Strange Yagodah's middling triumphs and modest sins are wonderfully alive. His great agony remains abstract. It's like Eichmann in reverse. An ordinary burgher, a semi-intellectual, career-minded, "normal" and perfectly comprehensible until the moment of his collision with history. In Eichmann we must accept the enigma. But in a novel, especially such a good one, we want to be ignited into rage, into panic, into some sort of incandescence that will melt the ice off the enormity.

Mr. Elman doesn't bring it off. His art ends with Yagodah's doom. The failure defines, almost paradigmatically, the limits of the realistic novel. It can express the bourgeois psyche in all its convulsions (for which, as a matter of fact, it was invented as mirror). It turns impotent before the holocaust which might announce the post-bourgeois age. "The Reckoning" is comic and heartbreaking when it renders the Jew as a sort of Portnoy, European-papa style. With the Jew as apocalyptic victim, it can do nothing. At its climax, this book demands not a storyteller like Mr. Elman, but a forger of myths, like André Schwarz-Bart; demands a surreality which will speak the unspeakable. (p. 20)