John Hersey's The Wall
Published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York in 1950, John Hersey's novel The Wall is far less well known than Leon Uris' Mila 18, but is in many ways the better work. Written in the form of a rediscovered journal, it gives a remarkably convincing impression of life in the Warsaw Ghetto for a work of fiction written relatively shortly after the events it describes by someone who was not there. The Wall offers a far more downbeat view of the Ghetto Uprising than Uris' book.
Uris' novel is of course named after the bunker where the headquarters staff of the Jewish Fighting Organisation committed suicide, while Hersey's is named after the wall that surrounded the ghetto.
Hersey had won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for A Bell for Adano (1944), and had published Hiroshima (probably his best known work) in The New Yorker in 1946.
His main character, Noach Levinson, is clearly modelled on Emanuel Ringelblum.
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A British paperback edition of The Wall from 1962
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Review from Atlantic Monthly, March 1950 "I feel as if I had been living for a long time in this book, although actually my reading of it consumed less than ten days. I find it a searching, heroic story, and so will others if they approach it as a story of humanity transcending horror." Edward Weeks |