Books Of The Times

View page in TimesMachine

THE DAY IS SHORT. An Autobiography. By Morris B. Abram. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 280 pages. $14.95.

''AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a very treacherous undertaking,'' Morris B. Abram concedes in the preface to his new book. ''A good case could be made that it should be written only for the family and the historical record, for candor opens the pains of the past. A cautious memoir, on the other hand, is not worth the effort of either the writer or the reader.''

But in June 1973, Mr. Abram relates, he learned that he had a type of leukemia that was thought to be incurable. Suddenly there was no need for diplomacy, only for time - enough time to record the story of a small-town Southern Jew who grew to become a fighter for civil and human rights, a successful New York lawyer, university president and leader of the American Jewish community.

''In the face of extinction, I was seeking the meaning of my life, adding up achievements and failures, attempting to strike a balance, unveiling motivations,'' he writes. His imminent death, he says, tended to ''loosen the tongue, removing the constraints that shape most autobiographies.''

Mr. Abram managed, with great personal courage, to overcome his disease, a fight recounted in great detail in this book. With his return to health, however, came some of the familiar pitfalls that mar many memoirs: self-righteousness, egotism and a need for selfjustification. ''The Day is Short'' is more advocacy than autobiography, more a legal brief than a searching look into the past.

The most sensitive and evocative portions of Mr. Abram's book deal with his childhood in Fitzgerald, the small town in Georgia where he was born in 1918. In some ways the community, founded by Northerners, was an anomaly, - perhaps the only town in the old Confederacy with streets named after Grant and Sherman as well as Lee and Jackson. It was a stronghold of Southern Baptism, which left the young Abram isolated but influenced him profoundly.

In addition to being Jewish in Baptist Georgia, Mr. Abram was caught between two strands of Jewish tradition: the Yiddish culture of his father, a Rumanian immigrant, and the German-Jewish culture of his mother, whose great-grandfather had been one of the first Reform rabbis in America. Rushing home to seek solace from the anti-Semitism he often encountered in Fitzgerald, the young Mr. Abram would find his parents, ''two utterly mismatched people,'' engaged in conflicts of their own.

Mr. Abram went to the University of Georgia, and when his Rhodes Scholarship was deferred because of the outbreak of World War II he moved north to the University of Chicago Law School. He returned to Atlanta to begin his legal career. The job he wanted was at the firm now known as King & Spalding, where former Attorney General Griffin B. Bell and the Presidential adviser Charles G. Kirbo now work, but it had never hired a Jew and apparently was not about to change for him.

Mr. Abram writes that one goal -overturning Georgia's ''county unit rule,'' which gave disproportionate weight to rural areas and thereby helped perpetuate segregationist rule - kept him in the South. When he persuaded a Federal court in 1962 that the system was unconstitutional he was ready to move on, and he took his family to New York. He joined the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where, except for a two-year term as president of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., he has remained since, flirting with public office, serving as president of the American Jewish Committee, and heading the Moreland Commission investigation of New York's scandal-ridden nursing home industry.

Mr. Abram seems to have left much of his introspection and fallibility back in Fitzgerald. In ''The Day is Short'' the humility is even shorter; the world it recreates is populated with benighted, weak-kneed, dishonest people, a world in which his is often the only rational, principled voice.

After helping to overturn Georgia's county unit rule, he tells his wife: ''Now, if I die tomorrow, my epitaph can read: 'He restored democracy to Georgia.' '' Though handicapped by his ''irrepressible candor,'' he says, he could have been elected to Congress in Georgia, but only for a term. ''I would have voted my convictions, not necessarily the same as those of my constituency,'' he explains. He was the ''perfect candidate'' to head the American Jewish Committee, while ''part of me had done nothing for years except compile the right sort of resume'' for the presidency of Brandeis.

Mr. Abram lasted at Brandeis only two turbulent years and places all the blame on those around him: his predecessor, Abram L. Sachar, who he says sought to undermine him, and ''conniving'' administrators, unprincipled faculty members and unappreciative black ''radicals.'' The only mistake he concedes to was of loving the institution both wisely and too well.

''My love of the academic ideal and my hatred for the barbarism which threatened it were passionate,'' he writes. ''Perhaps I believed too strongly in Brandeis; perhaps Brandeis needed a compromiser.''

In Mr. Abram's solipsistic universe, there are relatively few photons left over to illuminate most of the names he drops: John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert H. Humphrey, Martin Luther King Jr., David Ben-Gurion. He is extremely circumspect about the dissolution of his marriage of 30 years, and writes virtually nothing about his legal career at Paul, Weiss. ''The Day is Short'' contains references to only two cases he has tried in 20 years there. Both of them, incidentally, he won.