"To the student Twirckoff, Yom Kippur was always a day of dread." Thus begins Mark Mirsky's short story, "Lukshin Kugel" (in English that's noodle pudding). Twirckoff's dread--What does it mean to be a Jew?--sets the tone for this second issue of Mosaic, a literary magazine published by the Hillel Society.

Mosaic includes three articles on religious subjects, a number of poems and stories, and two book reviews, but Mirsky's story is easily the most interesting piece. Harvard student Twirckoff (no first name) is Jewish, a senior in Eliot House; he wears Brooks Brothers clothing, professes agnosticism, and scorns his bourgeois antecedents (he won't even eat his mother's noodle pudding). In all these matters Twirckoff reminded me of Richard Amsterdam, the socially ambitious protagonist of Remember Me to God, the best-selling Harvard novel of a few years ago. But the basic difference between Richard Amsterdam and Mirsky's Twirckoff is more important than their surface similarities. Richard Amsterdam was a product of the class-conscious '30s; his pudding is Hasty Pudding. On the other hand, Twirckoff is an authentic Problem Child of Our Time. He is a sort of Jewish Holden Caulfield worried more about who be is than where he is climbing.

Mirsky's story, a humorous parody of the recent space of identity crisis fiction, unfortunately is marred by most of the major flaws of recent American Jewish fiction--not to mention a few offenses that are uniquely Mirsky's. "Lukshin Kugel" is sloppily sentimental, affecting an uncritical nostalgia for the ghetto, and is narrated in a shoulder-shrugging Yiddish tone that is not maintained consistently. In one moment, the narrator sounds like a much-oppressed peasant from the Russian Pale ("Myself, I say, you never know when a pogrom is going to come along. One minute you're in Minsk licking a herring, the next minute you're running for your life."). In the next, he is commenting in the voice of a social historian (The Ladies' Home Journal replaced the Tanach as the authority in household affairs."). Throughout "Lukshin Kugel" the reader is puzzled to determine who is telling the story.

Mirsky's inordinate use of Yiddish words; his extraordinary stress on Jewish self-abasement, passivity, and lamentation in Twirckoff's response to crisis; his condescending attitude toward his protagonist; and the intrusion of a phony mystical hallucination at the end to get Twirckoff off the spiritual hook--all of these flaws keep "Lukshin Kugel" from creating any unified effect.

Judith Kegan's article on "Hasidism and Neo-Hasidism" seems to me to overestimate contemporary student interest in and enthusiasm for this 18th century Jewish religious-mystical movement. As in the pietistic Protestant sects, Hasidism's adherents were commanded to pray to God with enthusiasm, joy, and ecstasy ("More pleasing to God is the stammering of a whole soul than learned prayers said in pride, or without heart.").

When Miss Kegan warns Jewish students against their tendency to appropriate only the mystical, irrational, and sentimental aspects of Hasidism without integral belief, it seems to me that her criticism is more relevant to Mirsky's story than to the general Jewish college population. In addition to Miss Kegan's article, there is a translation of a historical essay on Hasidism.

Annette Robinson reviews The Trial Begins, a novel of Russia's New Class by Abram Tertz that was smuggled out of the Soviet Union early last year. Perhaps because the subject is non-Jewish, Miss Robinson's writing is restrained and modest, avoiding the self-indulgent, sentimental egotism of some of the writing in Mosaic.

Of the poems in Mosaic, two are especially appealing, one an excellent translation of a Yiddish poem, "The Prayer of Ivan the Drunk," the other a delightful short poem by George Blecher, a junior in the College.

Hopefully, in future issues Mosaic will devote less space to translations of already established Jewish writers and more to creative writing on Jewish themes by undergraduates. Also, the editors of Mosaic should guard against a tendency toward parochialism. Some of the writing in the magazine, most notably Miss Kegan's essay on Hasidism and neo-Hasidism, reads as if written primarily for Mosaic's editors and writers, rather than for the general Jewish audience. Only self-indulgence by the editors can justify the magazine's almost exclusive concern with the Yiddish, eastern European aspects of Jewish life, feeling, and culture. Not all of Mosaic's readers will sympathize with this flight back to the ghetto.