Books: Hexerei

D Is FOR DUTCH—Thames Williamson —Harcourt, Brace ($2).

In the fat Pennsylvania “Dutch” farming country, around Reading; Lancaster and Bethlehem, passing motorists often goggle at barns with three white circles painted on their sides, wonder what they are for. The three circles, which often have other cabalistic signs inside them, are a form of Pennsylvania Dutch insurance to ward off the evil eye from the cattle within. Like other farming communities, this rich and peaceful land has its dark traditions, its hexerei (witchcraft). Energetic Thames Williamson, author of four dramatic novels about four different sections of the U. S., now publishes what he calls “a last regional novel” about the Pennsylvania Dutch.

To the rest of the U. S. the Pennsylvania Dutch are material for funny-dialect anecdotes, but Author Williamson has skilfully fitted them into his melodramatic formula. In his story, a neat blend of hexerei, psittacosis and the primal appetites, Pennsylvania Dutch dialect throws into ironic relief an increasingly sinister plot. Herman Bauer, good farmer and good husband, coveted his neighbor’s land. But if Neighbor Erdman had not come down with parrot fever, which looked like hexerei, if Herman had not found his mother’s little hexing book, he might not have gone on to covet Erdman’s wife as well. Imagining himself at last a full-fledged hexer, Herman went deviously ahead to get the things he wanted. With Erdman dead, Herman got his land, but Erdman’s wife killed herself from fear of the hexer. Herman found himself condemned to spend the rest of his life with a woman who knew all about it but would never speak.

Author Williamson, dedicating his story to the friends with whom he wintered while he was collecting his material, drops appropriately into its gurgling idiom: “Ach, Mr. Williamson, you should shame yourself to put such things in a book!”