THE FISHMANS

A German exile tells in fiction form the story of his boyhood, haunted by terrors of pogroms and anti-Semitism, always in flight. He gives in flashbacks the story of his parents' background and life, his mother sole survivor of a family wiped out by a pogrom, his father and grandparents determined that sometime, somehow, their children and children's children should find freedom. Hunger, hatred, wanderings, separation, fear, poverty -- ending in reunion, with the father on special furlough from the Austrian front, the mother dying in a German hovel. A dreary book, lightened by some passages of real beauty, and giving form to the Jewish heritage. In Central and Eastern Europe. Not so evident in its timeliness as the Schoenstedt book, but deeper in its implications, and should appeal to somewhat the same market.