Exile and Zion

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON -- Robert Neumann--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

For 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.

Structurally it resembles Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey, opening with a scene at the border of Egypt and Palestine. At dawn British guards see a grey bus racing wildly over the desert.

One guard gets the passenger list over the telephone, reads out ten names. "Jews," says the sergeant, "Jews from all over." The guards try to halt the bus, but it careens past them up a hillside toward Palestine--and toward a dangerous cliff.

. . . 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.

Fainting and left for dead on a forced march, saved by peddlers, living among the scribes in a Jewish village, growing old in poverty and unworldliness, Moyshe was miraculously spared in the great pogrom by which in 1919 165,000 Jews in Poland were painfully done to death. It was a sign. From then on his eyes turned toward Jerusalem.

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.

Meier kept a shebeen in Leningrad until political misfortune befell his son.

Heir apparent is blond young Henry Melvale, nephew of Samuel, Lord Melvale, banking power in the City of London.

Young Henry was about to leave Eton when the Star of David over the door of his uncle's town house in Berkeley Square began vaguely to mean something to him.

Neumann portrays this heir and his I-saying friends with both sadness and mockery.

"The Confounded" are also three: one the devoted, discarded mistress of a Balkan prince, one a huge, insensate prize fighter from Manhattan, one a tense, French Catholic Jew who betrayed his race. Each goes through shattering experiences, each suffers the wrath of the exacting God.

"The Enthusiasts" are two: quiet Mr. Smith, an engineer of London, exposer of the Protocols of Zion, tenacious fighter in many curious circumstances for justice to the Jews; and Liselotte Lewy, rich Viennese, sufferer by accident with Socialist workers shelled by the Heimwehr in 1934, convert to Communism, zealot of a happy collective farm, who even in the New Order fails to escape the old persecution.

"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.

But the peak and most furious pitch of his book is reached in the life of Schlessing, a gross, uncontrollably brilliant Viennese financier, seducer, Superman, whose power is built on blackmail and near-diabolism. This story, like most others in the book, shows a virtuosity in action narrative that few detective story writers could match; its significance is that Schlessing, the tenth character, and The Pale One, the first, are the two spiritual poles of Jewry.

The epilogue in which all ten come together in the desert has an eloquence that proves Robert Neumann, for all his irony and sometimes mannered facility, has wept by the waters of exile. His last symbol: though it is Schlessing who drives the fated bus, it is The Pale One who sees the land of Zion.

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