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Book Review  by Ida Nasatir

The Wall by John Hersey
March 10, 1950—Ida Nasatir book review—The Wall  by John Hersey—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 9 : In the Time issue of March 6, 1950, there appeared a review of The Wall. It said, in part, that Author Hersey in writing this book was "working over the cold ashes of Warsaw, on what is, in the news sense, a dead story." It implied more: The whole story of the superb agony of Warsaw was dead, and hence it had best be forgotten. Perhaps this reaction of: "Who remembers now, or who cares to remember?" is an explanation for this age being one of moral darkness and fear.  Fear of the present armament race of atomic bombs and the even more deadly hydrogen bomb—fear of so much, except the SOURCE, which produces this fear—man's inhumanity to man.  The Wall is a monumental epic of a people who lived and died. It concerns itself with the now half-forgotten victims of the Germans, who happed by the luck of life, to be born Jews. At the time the novel opens, shortly after the beginning of the war, some half million of these unfortunate Jews were being confined by a wall, which they themselves were forced to build in the ghetto in Warsaw. It is this wall which makes the title of the book. It is of these inhabitants behind the wall, a people who endured one of the most savage and pervers persecutions in the long history of the mistreatment of the Jews, that John Hersey writes in his new novel. With the writing of this book, the author at the age of 35, leaps overnight, so to speak, to the forefront of our creative writers. For this book is a product of a man who has achieved remarkable scope, and depth and power. He writes about real people—not elements of his imagination—and how these people behaved in the hour of their agony: the nobility they showed, and the human weaknesses. He has an uncanny ability to get under the skins of a group of people (unknown to him) and he catches the flavor of their humor, their customs, their literature, their family life, and their loves and their hates. Through one of the characters of the book, he asks: What is "Jewishness?" And he finds that it is, among other things: "A particular sadness-in-joy, that sense of order-in-disorder, that striving for balance, that loneliness, that wittiness and that bitterness, that subtlety and that broadness, that yearning and those dreams which are such large parts of our faith and our way."  But above and beyond this "Jewishness," it is when Hersey writes of the people themselves that he reaches his heights. Toward the end of the book, as the last remaining survivors of the burned and ravished ghetto hide squatting in the filth of a sewer, they say: "We were all talking about ONE question: What has made our lives worth living?" And that is what this moving and memorable novel is about: the eternal quest for truth and decency of man, the ability to fight when the odds are overwhelming, the measuring up of some men to the supreme test—all this is what makes life on our little planet, putrid as it sometimes is for so many, worth living. The story of those men and women as portrayed in The Wall will never be "dead," the Time Magazine reviewer notwithstanding.