Word: asch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...REVOLT OF GUNNER ASCH (311 pp.) - Hans Hellmut Kirst - LH-fle, Brown...
...story is as old as reveille. In a prewar barracks town, Gunner Asch and his friend Vierbein run afoul of discipline and authority in an artillery battery. The trouble with Vierbein is that the mere sight of a corporal or a sergeant is enough to reduce him to terrified obedience. He is an unsoldierly-looking fellow with a built-in knack for getting into trouble (when he is detailed to beat carpets for the sergeant major's wife, she offers herself to him on a carpet just as her husband comes along). Inevitably, he is a butt...
...PROPHET, by Sholem Asch (343 pp.; Putnam; $4) is the work of an expert at making a good thing out of the Good Book. As the high priest of the Neo-Apocrypha or Bible-improvement school of writing, Sholem Asch, 75, has racked up sales of more than 1,000,000 by gilding such subjects as the lives of Christ (The Nazarene), St. Paul (The Apostle), Mary and Moses. This time Asch has raided the Bible for the story of the second Isaiah, who roused the Jews out of their Babylonian captivity.* The book's religious message is swaddled...
...Beaten and spit upon, the visionary nonetheless convinces a hard core of the faithful that Babylon will be overthrown and the Jews restored to their ancient homeland. At novel's end, the first of the Jews are on the homeward march. Occasionally moving in his hours of trial, Asch's man of God often seems less the eloquent, God-intoxicated psalm-singer of the great Biblical text ("Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion . . .") than a bearded positive thinker doling out pep talks to the dispirited...
...girl friend Alena had long dreamed of escaping. A year ago, all three had made a pact to flee their Communist land together. Then on a day that seemed at first like any other, Zdenka left the schoolhouse in Eger and climbed aboard the 2:09 train for Asch, the border town where she lived. Instead of stopping at Asch as it always had, the train roared on into Germany, and Zdenka suddenly found herself free. Thinking of Pavel, Alena and their pact, she climbed meekly into a bus with the rest of the 77 and headed home again...