Potent Jew

POWER -- Lion Feuchtwanger -- Viking Press ($2.50). The handsome, malevolent features of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer leer through hazy German history. A moneylender, fawning but audacious, he makes himself indispensable to Duke Karl Alexander of Swabia, the peace of whose hairy bosom depends only upon war, wine and women. As finance minister, Suss rises to a cruel, dizzy pinnacle, from which he plunges voluntarily when his duties as procurer for the ducal bed involve his own daughter. He avenges her suicide and atones, with racial intensity, on the execution platform.... The treatment of prodigious figures in a pageantric time is in the grand, kaleidoscopic manner of Dumas, overcast with the mysticism of Jewry. Imported after a wide success in Europe, the book has not been equaled this season as a foursquare, full-blooded, Jehovian chronicle.