November 25, 1984

-regulated tenants in New York City's tight, high-priced apartment market often are confused about the right of relatives to succeed to their apartments after they leave. Also confused are the many investors who hope to gain quick possession of apartments occupied by rent-regulated tenants that the investors have bought in buildings recently converted into cooperatives. Among the questions that keep arising are under what circumstances may a resident relative not named on a lease become the leaseholder when the primary tenant moves out, and are there differences in succession rights between rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments? The situation behind these questions is the desire of tenants to pass their below-market rentals along to children and other relatives. It also is a reflection of the strong demand for apartments, even at high rents, in many desirable neighborhoods and particularly in Manhattan.

ANGELES GLICK travels frequently to Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic from her home in the hills of western Connecticut. Sometimes people tell Mrs. Glick she has no business being in thosecountries and doing what she is doing, which is finding children who urgently need medical care and arranging for them to receive it in the United States. ''They say I should leave those children alone and stay home where I belong,'' said the 38-year-old New Milford resident. Others tell her she should work to help ill children in Connecticut. Mrs. Glick can rarely resist responding to such detractors.

MOSCOW THE dry, official announcement was carried in the Soviet press without commentary: The Soviet Union and the United States had agreed to new talks ''with the aim of achieving mutually acceptable accords on the entire complex of questions concerning nuclear and space weapons.'' Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko would meet Secretary of State George P. Shultz on Jan. 7 and 8 in Geneva ''to work out a joint understanding of the subject and aims of such talks.'' Just two paragraphs under the characteristically matter-of-fact headline, ''On the question of negotiations between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.'' But the impact was instant. That same evening, Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh, the head of the American Department at the Soviet Foreign Ministry, joined John Denver in singing ''We're all in this together'' at Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman's Thanksgiving dinner. A Soviet movie director was optimistic that now he could make an often-postponed trip to the United States. On Friday evening's television news, the usual litany of American warmongering and social injustices was replaced by a report from New York quoting some American businessmen about the need to get Soviet-American trade rolling again. It wasn't, of course, as if detente had broken out all over. Tass continued to churn out attacks on Washington, and there was no guarantee that the movie director would get his visa soon.

Alan Lelchuk's novel, ''In Her Forties,'' will be published next fall. This essay was adapted from a talk he gave at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the series, ''Writers Speak: America and the Ethnic Experience.'' Let me start with two anecdotes concerning Saul Bellow and the varieties of ethnic displeasure he has caused. In Jerusalem in the 1970's, I was sitting in the living room of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism and one of the tribal chiefs of secular Judaism, when the discussion turned to American literature. At the mention of the name Bellow, Scholem, normally cool and relaxed, immediately grew livid, stood up and, striding back and forth, began to downgrade Bellow as a writer and to berate him personally. At the bottom of Scholem's ire, it turned out, was Bellow's remark after he had received the Nobel Prize, that he was ''An American writer first, and a Jew second.'' How could an intelligent man who was Jewish say such a thing, Scholem charged, instead of acknowledging his Jewish identity first and foremost? To Scholem, the claim was either stupid or cowardly, the product of an assimilationist culture and/or personality, and Scholem would never forgive Bellow for it. For Scholem had not come to primitive Palestine in the early 1930's - abandoning his civilized Germany to be mocked by family and assimilationist friends - only to hear a Jewish Nobel Prize-winner de-emphasize his Jewish heritage.

The scenario could be entitled ''The Dream Deferred - Once Again.'' The promise of cable's programming abundance raised some hope among viewers that the producers of American cable fare would try more often to match the quality of such imported gems as ''Brideshead Revisited'' and ''Berlin Alexanderplatz.'' Yet, the production record of the nation's biggest pay-cable operator, Home Box Office, which supposedly has been leading the way for the rest of the industry, has been discouragingly dismal.