Books: 13th-Century Tapestry

BLESSED ARE THE MEEK — Zofia Kossak — Roy($3).

This book is called a novel about St. Francis of Assisi, but it is not so much a religious tale as a picture of the first two decades of the 13th Century. It is an historical tapestry into which is woven the story of how Francis, by his fabulous simplicity, got what he wanted both from the Pope in Rome and the infidel Sultan of Egypt, of how a tough and worldly French knight became King of Jerusalem against his will, of how thousands of the children of Christendom strangely vanished from their homes forever (on the Children’s Crusade), of how a Cardinal fought a war in Egypt and because of his obstinacy lost instead of winning back the Holy Land.

Compared to most novels, Blessed Are the Meek is in fact much like a tapestry set against easel pictures. It is not realistic in its drawing; except in a formal sense it is not dramatic or emotional. It gets its effect as a decorative spectacle of strange times and strange places when men were more brutal and unprincipled than they are today, and at the same time more intimately aware of God. As such, it carries its own peculiar kind of conviction, especially in its engaging central figure, whom Author Kossak draws as gay, fey and disconcertingly sincere.

Until the Book-of-the-Month Club chose Blessed Are the Meek, Mme. Kossak was unknown in the U.S., though famed in Poland for her historical novels. Now that her husband, a colonel in the Polish Army, is in a German concentration camp, her whereabouts is hidden from the world, but her publishers, refugees in Manhattan, have republished in English her latest novel. Translator is Rulka Langer, Polish author of The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt (TIME, Dec. 28, 1942).