Word: noach
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...were sealed (in a milk can) and buried at a secret point in the ghetto. Not until 1946 did searchers find them in bombed Warsaw's featureless rubble. The man who originally compiled, wrote and preserved the records was named Emmanuel Ringelblum, a teacher of history; he recalls Noach Levinson, hero of John Mersey's bestselling novel, The Wall, who was supposed to have preserved archives of the Warsaw ghetto. In 1939 Ringelblum was safe in Switzerland, but he went back home to Warsaw to share the fate of his fellow Jews, and to record the manner...
These qualities are embodied in the person of Noach Levinson, the diarist on whose discovered documents Hersey maintains he is basing his book. Levinson is an ugly man who runs around wheedling information from the central group of characters-people who are growing together under the curious pressures of the ghetto...
Wrath & Terror. Unhappily, Author Hersey chooses to tell the story in novel form, and employs one of the oldest and least effective technical tricks for giving fiction the authentic tang of fact: he pretends that he is merely the editor of papers written by Eyewitness Noach Levinson. This gabbiest of notetakers is supposed to have lived out the days of wrath and terror pen in hand, documenting the horror minute by minute, until he had built up a jumbo collection of manuscript and clippings filling 17 iron boxes and a number of parcels. These he buried before slipping away through...
Author Hersey makes a point of his editorial integrity in letting his character Noach have his own say in his own way, but an editor really on the job would have cut the story by a third or quarter to make it that much more direct and that much more moving. As it stands, gabby Noach. too introspective to give a clear account of action, and too intellectual to understand the urgent, passionate movements of the human heart, bores the reader into indifference. An effective criticism of the book and evidence of one character's sound common sense appears...