SOURCE: "Creative Forgetting," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 230, No. 23, June 14, 1980, pp. 730-31.

In the following excerpt, which offers a mixed review of Zenia's Way, Ceplair argues that while the novel's narrator is intelligent and observant, the title character remains flat and one-dimensional.

In his fourth novel, Zenia's Way (his first in thirty years), Polonsky explores the effects on two people, Ram and Zenia, of participation in six decades of political history. He juxtaposes two political events widely separated in time and place—a Palmer raid episode in New York City and a Palestine Liberation Organization raid in Israel—as a means of viewing where he started and where he has arrived.

Polonsky has discovered, as a result of the many forms of political terror he has witnessed or been told about, that no matter how inhuman the raid appears, human connections grow between captors and captured. He...