THE RABBI OF LUD A Novel <i> by Stanley Elkin (Charles Scribner’s Books: $8.95)</i>

Calling Jerry Goldkorn “The Rabbi of Lud” is only the start of this novel’s ironic humor and absurdist blasphemy. Rabbi he is, but without a living congregation: Lud is the site of a Jewish cemetery in the New Jersey flats.

Goldkorn calls himself “just this pickup rabbi, God’s little Hebrew stringer in New Jersey. . . . If I don’t sound to you like a Rabbi of even Lud . . . sue me.”

Goldkorn suspects that the Mafia is burying its dead at Lud under assumed Jewish names. His 14-year-old daughter, Connie, at loose ends in this strange land, reads tombstones in the cemetery to learn Hebrew. It is there that she believes she sees a vision of the Virgin Mary.

In fact, it is only a middle-aged Jewish woman, whose self-appointed task is to “harrow the graves of righteous Jews.” And Connie helps her do it.

“Nothing could be more offensive to the Jewish faith,” Richard Eder wrote in these pages. And yet “the harrowing scene is the book’s most inspired passage; Elkin at his best.” The novel presents “an image of man alone, or rabbi alone, in an empty and absurd universe.”