Fugitive

ON THIS SIDE NOTHING (192 pp.]--Alex Comfort--Viking ($2.50).

A different kind of hero has appeared in recent European novels. He is a man with a highly developed taste for disaster; he accepts fear as a normal condition and death as less to be feared than the constant flight from it. Usually a disenchanted revolutionary, he feels that only in acts of simple decency can a man retain his humanity. He trusts nothing else.

Such an uneasy fugitive from catastrophe is Shmul Weinstock, hero of London physician Alex Comfort's tight little novel, On This Side Nothing. In dry, sparse sentences Weinstock tells the story of his return to his native North African city the night before its ghetto is cordoned off by the Germans. His narrative, laconic and unsentimental, suggests the quality of life during a war: its urgency and tension, its underside of absurdity.

Why Weinstock went back he could not say, except that perhaps it was simply because he was tired of running and had decided that, live or die, he might as well be home. When he woke up the next morning, he found the ghetto in turmoil, overflowing with hundreds of supposed Jews who had been driven in from the countryside. Peasants who "knew as much about Jewry as a Polynesian knows about the Vatican" camped in other people's houses and in the streets.

Weinstock wondered: What is a Jew? What did this horde of people have in common that caused them to be persecuted together? Nothing, he decided; their persecution was a historical accident. "Jews are not born, but made," he concluded. "Everyone who runs, who disobeys, who prefers living to obeying, is a Jew."

Weinstock's test came when he caught a German deserter slipping into a ghetto tunnel. Should he return the soldier to the Germans or hand him over to the Jewish leader, to certain death in either case? Or should he save the deserter's skin? Weinstock stuck by his belief in the immediate human act; he hid the soldier. Later, when the British came, some former concentration-camp prisoners recognized the German deserter as a guard who had shot helpless men. They killed him.

Was Weinstock right in saving the deserter? Were the former prisoners right in killing him? Author Comfort implies that Weinstock was right, on the ground that an act of human kindness is its own justification and reward. In the end, the harried Weinstock, fearful of being jailed for the deserter's killing, flees the city. Where to? For him it does not matter; "one place [is] as good as another."

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