Word: keilson
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...DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY (208 pp.)-Hans Keilson-Orion...
...many Jews go quietly to their deaths when they had a good chance of resisting? Fiction, rather than scholarship, has supplied the shrewder answers. Perhaps the profoundest explanation to date comes from the pen of a Jewish writer driven from Germany in 1936 and now living in Holland. Hans Keilson's novel subtly and eloquently probes the ambivalent relation of victim with aggressor...
...Keilson traces the growth of hatred in his leading character as other writers trace love or self-knowledge. When a small child, the nameless hero gets his first inkling that he has an enemy. In hushed voices, his parents discuss a party leader called B., a thinly disguised Hitler who is rising to power by attacking a minority...
Initial Obsession. Keilson's hero comes to believe that he, like the elks, must have an adversary for his own good. When he first hears one of B.'s fanatical speeches, he is enthralled by the depth of his hatred: "No lover can talk more possessively of the object of his love than he did of me, even though he was cursing me. Surely, he was obsessed by me." The hero is convinced that B. needs him as much as he needs B.: "He was as uncertain and wavering as myself. Gripped by the fear of being...
What distinguishes Keilson from other writers on the Nazi era is his uncanny understanding of the persecutor as well as the persecuted. He realizes that the terrorist is vulnerable as well as brutal. He tenderly describes a nocturnal raid on a minority cemetery by young party recruits : their initiation into Nazi-type brutality. Scared and disgusted, one starts to stutter, another has an attack of diarrhea, a third gouges his eye. An orphan, reminded of his parents' grave, tears up the cemetery more ferociously than anyone else, "as though he wanted to scratch the buried bones...