Books: Enoch

BABER, OR THE LOST YEARS— Jacob Wassermann (Translated by Harry Hansen)—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). The author of Gold and The World’s Illusion towers on the European scene as a very great novelist. His concern is with the spiritual crises of deep, positive natures under the stresses and distortions of post-War civilization in Germany. Here his framework is the Enoch Arden dilemma: a War prisoner home from Siberia after six years, finds his wife married to a charitable cause. She has been transformed from a warm, passive complement to his life into an active self-sufficient woman. The pangs of their readjustment strike deeply into the lives of two women with whom the wife has become closely associated, a saintly semimythical Princess and a courageous widow through whom the husband discovers how irrevocably he belongs to his wife. It is a sombre tale, told with great power and refinement and extraordinary grasp of the inward structure of the characters.