Word: asch
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...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...
...spires of Prague, thousands of white paper leaflets fluttered down. Each night for four nights 2,000 plastic balloons spilled out 2,000,000 leaflets. That was the way the people of Red Czechoslovakia got the real story last week of how Locomotive Engineer Jaroslav Konvalinka raced his Prague-Asch "freedom train" across the Czech border into Germany (TIME, Sept...
Moses has one major flaw. By page 505, the waxy, unctuous prose with which Novelist Asch has Simonized the King James version will leave many an eye glazed, not with sanctity but with sleep...