Wall Around the Ghetto

In the story of the Great Ghetto of Warsaw under the Nazis there lies enough pathos to sate any man. The systematic slaughter of almost half a million Jews in one year; the fantastic desperation which made less than a thousand ill-armed, undernourished Jews stand up against three times their number of German troops with tanks and flamethrowers in the last days of the extermination-these contain emotion enough to sicken the reader of a novel.

But John Hersey has failed to wallow in emotion. He has lighted his whole book with the light of a rich, humane irony, which rids one of the muddy effect of vast quantities of raw feeling.

These qualities are embodied in the person of Noach Levinson, the diarist on whose discovered documents Hersey maintains he is basing his book. Levinson is an ugly man who runs around wheedling information from the central group of characters-people who are growing together under the curious pressures of the ghetto.

But Levinson is a mere cipher to the main characters of the story-a silver liquid that laps around everything, distributes a subtle irony of understatement to the doings of the group, without doing much itself.

If you want to look at it that way, this books is a study of the effect of terrible danger on the emotions of love and loyalty, and more particularly on the feeling of Jewishness. The most important symbol of the book is used here with the edge of irony. The Wall which the Germans had built around the Ghetto to keep the Jews in-to separate the Jews from the Gentile-has a parallel in the spiritual wall between the Jew and gentile. The irony lies in the fact that the Jews built the physical wall with their own hands in the German labor battalions, just as they are partly responsible for the other wall.

But these rather more formal philosophic ideas take a back seat in the novel to random comments on the motives of various characters by Levinson.

Much more satisfactory than the formal irony of the wall itself, are the individual insights given throughout the book in the ironic or sarcastic passages. Here is a bureaucrat-turned underground-fighter, who has just been captured by the Germans out on the rubble heap that was the ghetto, being questioned-

Clerk:-Your address?

Felix:-Do you mean my residence or may place of employment? Felix, by this ridiculous use of formal language, not only gains a point over the questioner, but provides a satiric framework for his former official use of precisely the same type of phrase.

Hersey has written a very fine novel; he has achieved that delicate thing; an ironic book, in perfect taste, about an ugly situation.