The Dead Leaves

In her biographical first novel, Mexican author Jacobs writes with dreamlike detachment about her father's peregrinations and passage from youth to old age as a stubbornly idealistic communist. Born to immigrant parents in Manhattan in 1909, ``Papa'' traveled to Moscow in 1934 as a correspondent for a fledgling magazine, joined the Communist Party on returning to the U.S. and then left to fight in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. After he returned to the U.S. during World War II, he was classified as a subversive and later migrated to Mexico, where he lived with his family and ran a hotel until his retirement. Jacobs convincingly tells the tragic story of a man who eventually withdraws from a world that views him as ``undesirable and dangerous,'' someone who reads all day at home and ``little by little covers himself up with the dead leaves.'' While this novel works as a salute to an unusual individual, its impact is weakened when the author dwells on the pathos surrounding the father rather than letting his character reveal himself through dialogue or fuller descriptions of the incidents in his life that make him so memorable. (July)