Word: neumanns
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Neumann portrays this heir and his I-saying friends with both sadness and mockery...
...sheer fierceness and talent this latest novel by Robert Neumann (Mammon, The Queen's Doctor, Zaharoff) has few competitors in recent fiction. Like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright's Native Son, it was written with passion called forth by human wrong. But in Neumann's case that wrong is more complex, less local, more profound: it is the story of the Jews of Europe, of whom Vienna-born Neumann is one. By the Waters of Babylon is perhaps his masterpiece, perhaps theirs...
...Then Neumann gives the life story of each of the passengers. He arranges these lives in four groups: "The Heirs," "The Confounded," "The Enthusiasts," "Destruction Through the Brain." Heir to the life of the spirit is the ascetic, The Pale One, Moyshe (Moses) Wasservogel, orphaned long ago in a Carpathian pogrom, named by his saviors after "that other who was picked up out of the stream of life." At nine-and-a-half Moyshe knew the Talmud and the Torah, at 15 he was drafted into the Tsar's Army...
Heir to the blood of the fathers is Meier Borsht, tradesman, the vicissitudes of whose strong-witted life follow the pattern of his dark-bearded ancestors, whose adventures and generations Robert Neumann relates with prodigal invention...
...Destruction Through the Brain" is exemplified by two characters, one the Viennese author Marcus, a fastidious writer who holds himself above the battle until one night he goes to a Nazi book-burning to be amused, and is not amused. Of his subsequent life as a disregarded exile, Neumann provides a psychological study as terrible as anything on this subject yet in print...