WEEP NOT FOR THE DEAD

Sold as fiction, it reads like a tragic human document, and its value rests on its evident authenticity. No more story could pass up the temptation to relieve the unmitigated minor note by an occasional rift in the clouds. The story is told in the first person, the saga of a Jewish singer of folk songs, a story of programs and persecution, of endless terror and bitter suffering, of inhumanity and eternal discrimination, of a hounding from Russia to Roumania to Egypt to France, a heartbreaking round, and an internal breakdown of character. I can't say what the market -- it certainly isn't a book to read for entertainment. Nor -- as a story, a drama -- can it measure up against The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, with which it is almost certain to be compared. Sell as a human document, rather than fiction. There is where its appeal chiefly rests.