Word: asch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Sholem Asch, 76, Polish-born Jewish writer of popular Biblical novels (The Nazarene, The Apostle, Mary); in London. An erudite man who always carried a pocket-sized Hebrew version of the Old Testament, Asch was saddened by Jew-Gentile divisions, stressed in his work the common roots of Judaism and Christianity ("For me, it is one culture and one civilization"). He came to the U.S. in 1910, became naturalized in 1920, but left in 1953 "with a broken heart," after some extremist members of the Jewish community attacked an apparent shift in his views toward Christianity ("Intolerance among...
...comes off really well in this disenchanted novel, but if Gunner Asch occasionally shows contempt for Americans both as administrators and fighting men, it is nothing compared to his virulent shame for his own people, who have, he says, "the biggest words, the loudest cries, the most willing hands, the most trusting hearts and the emptiest brains! God save us Germans from ourselves, a race of natural suicides...
...only the lucky who live. Some men, without being cowards, display an extraordinary knack for survival. Such a one is Gunner Herbert Asch, the fictional Wehrmacht veteran who for six years of World War II managed to escape the enemy's bullets and the stupidity of his own commanders. Asch survived, not as the anvil survives the hammer, but as a nimble, highly intelligent fly eludes the clumsy hand that would kill it. For Asch is a true operator, a hepcat of war who knows every nuance of the dance of death and leaves it to the squares...
Strummed Zither. This novel is the last of a fast-moving, often hilarious trilogy (The Revolt of Gunner Asch, TIME, March 5, 1956; Forward, Gunner Asch! TIME, Oct. 29) that carries its hero from his home town in Germany to the depths of Russia and back again. It opens in the war's last days as Germany is crushed between East and West. Asch, who has risen from the ranks to become a lieutenant of artillery, is part of a disorganized unit surrounded by U.S. troops. A stray Nazi colonel named Hauk and his sinister aide, Lieut. Greifer, order...
...follows is a competent black-market thriller which lacks only the zither-strumming of The Third Man. A secret is beaten out of a stubborn woman; a doublecrosser is shot dead in a forest; a valuable convoy of goods is lost, found, lost again. Throughout this tapestry of violence, Asch and his "good" operators -Kowalski, Stamm, Soeft-match wits with the "bad" operators, Hauk and Greifer. Both sides use the naive U.S. occupation forces for their own purposes, and Asch and company even capture a prisoner-of-war camp from its U.S. guards in order to kill the villainous Hauk...