Attorney Alan Dershkowitz' new novel, JUST REVENGE, published by Warner, is too convoluted and manipulative to be considered great literature. However, he raises questions of moral behavior that simply cannot be ignored. The book is - at once - frustrating and compelling. The former because the characters are so one-dimensional, and so compelling because their thoughts and actions suggest fundamental questions that no society can ignore.

Max Menuchen is a Harvard professor. We learn that he is the sole survivor of his family, a clan that was brutally annihilated in their native Lithuania by a fellow townsman, who gleefully carried out the mandate against the Jews.

By chance, fifty years later, Menuchen locates Marcellus Paradus, the murderer of both his parents, his only child and his pregnant wife. His sister died after forced prostitution. It becomes Menuchen's mission to impose the same pain on the man who killed his family. He seeks revenge and plots to kill Paradus' children and grandchildren, allowing the Lithuanian fascist to remain alive and be witness and survivor of a personal holocaust.

Not that such a plot is impossible, but in Dershkowitz' story-telling, there are too many abrupt jolts and turns for it to be plausible. But as a moral imperative, it is stinging.

Revenge as an appropriate, moral and defensible act is the question raised by Alan Dershkowitz.

The rational response to the old professor is that he devote his life to fight fascism and lessen the possibility of its return. But philosophical logic or political expediency is hardly the direct route to the emotions of a man who has carried around the baggage of witnessing his family murdered.

It is difficult to philosophize rationally or make political choices against the emotions of a victim or survivor. How then does a government not become enmeshed in an eye for an eye, while remaining sensitive to the relentless pain of a victim?

Attorney Dershkowitz raises penetrating and soul searching questions, which transcend the banality of his plot.