After visiting the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto near the end of World War II, the novelist/journalist John Hersey (1914-93) became determined to write a novel about the uprising. His chief problem was that all the available sources at the time were written in Polish or Yiddish. His response was to have the source materials, mostly diaries and personal reports, translated not into writing but spoken into wire recorders. Listening to the voices of the translators proved to play a pivotal role in shaping what became his novel The Wall (1950). He realized that the story had to be told not by a third-person, authorial narrator, but "by a Jew . . . a person who was there . . . imagination would not serve, only memory would serve. . . . I had to invent a memory." In The Wall, that person is Noach Levinson, a composite character of the many diarists who left a record of life in the ghetto.

Levinson's account is a personal history in which he probes the members of his underground group in order to get at the "felt life," the moral and emotional issues, that confront them in the crisis. In effect, his account is a device that enables Hersey to introduce seamlessly into the historical record the material of serious fiction. The result is a gripping, compelling story in which heroism, fear, agony, and rage become daily commonplaces. Two scenes are particularly memorable. In the first, Levinson in the midst of the uprising delivers a lecture in the bunkers on the meaning of Jewishness, as expressed in the work of Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz. In the second, a newborn baby's continuous crying threatens to give away the hiding place of 100 people. Taking the infant from the distraught mother, the leader of the group silences the infant in the only way that seems possible.

Beginning in November 1939, two months after the fall of Poland, and concluding in May 1943, when the remains of the group make their escape to the woods outside of Warsaw, Levinson records the degradation, humiliation, and ultimately the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, while highlighting the individual spirit that somehow manages to assert itself in the face of annihilation. Ironically, no small part of that individual affirmation lies in each member's collective identity as a Jew--as if to say the Nazis' fanatical hatred, rather than exterminating Judaism, gave it a new birth.

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