THE FEW AND THE MANY

A moving account, in fictional form, of a man who believed in human rights and wrote to uphold them is told in the story of a German-Jewish writer ""exiled"" to New York City in 1940. This brings to light still another facet of Nazi war experience-- the trials of the intellectual few, not the racial minority, through Georg Kobbe's fragmentary excerpts and diaries. Intellectual persecution, mass escape from Hitler's fragmentary excerpts and diaries. Intellectual persecution, mass escape from Hitler's tyranny, and the following exile, which becomes a spiritual way of life for him, are described, not with pathos, but with a documentary sobriety that emphasizes the breach between Kobbe's response and the helplessness of the many. Unlike his German friends, he remains unwilling to subscribe to communism or socialism, or to political ignorance. His sole cause was the general human one for which the Bill of Rights hanging over his desk served as a continual reminder. Such dedication did not make him a hero, he claims, but only one of the few shipwrecked men who could still utter true thoughts. The plot avoids triteness through a wide cast of characters and a variety series of experiences and vignettes set in a smoothly translated, almost journalistic, style by the Winstons. Whether or not one agrees that the style of modern life is really as fragmentary as his story or that only intellectual endeavors deserve the accolade of true individualism, still the novel retains one's interest in the terse erudition of the German ""exile"".