Books: Jew into Germany

MR. EMMANUEL—Louis Goldinq Viking ($2.50).

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Grapes of Wrath, novels whose characters make social problems look alive have been surefire bestsellers. Right down this fictional alley marches stoop-shouldered old Isaac Emmanuel, drawn to shed much heat and some light on Nazi methods, Jewish refugees.

Bruno Rosenheim, brought to England a child exile after his Jewish father’s murder, heard nothing from his mother feared she was either dead or in a concentration camp, tried to drown himself. That made mild-mannered Mr. Emmanuel angry. Armed only with pince-nez, attache case and British passport, he went to Germany to find out what had happened to Frau Rosenheim. Instead, he found himself held on a trumped-up charge of political murder, escaped the headsman’s block only through the intervention of a Nazi higher-up’s mistress, the daughter of his old Magnolia Street friend Sam Silver.

Whether he is describing the sick terror in a Berlin Jewish apartment, twilight in the New Forest, or a Gestapo going-over (“Mr. Emmanuel was not a very satisfactory subject, for he fainted almost at once, and twice again during the proceedings. But on each occasion a jug of cold water revived him, and they got to work again”), Novelist Golding works for the reader’s sympathy with practiced skill. He has that sympathy in full measure long before his battered but indomitable hero gets safely home again.