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THE BATTLE DONE by S. Leonard Rubinstein

THE BATTLE DONE

By

Pub Date: Sept. 8th, 1954
Publisher: Morrow

A first novel is presumably autobiographical in its derivation, more certainly sincere in its intentions, but at best a proving ground for its author- as well as for Sgt. Ben Hoffman who is stationed with a German prisoner-of-war unit in South Carolina. Ben, a practising man of good will and liberal faith has been conditioned to compassion by the fact that he is a Jew, and he is sensitive to discrimination in any form, that of the local plantation owners against the Negro, that of the Nazis under him, and that of his own men. In some scattered sequences here, he is unable to check the aggressive inferiority of a subordinate which leads to a courtmartial; he shows a German that a less stringent surveillance is not necessarily stupidity; and he finds that the battle is by no means done when after a night (quite a night) with Anne, a local girl, he confronts anti-semitism at home.... An insubstantial narrative, this puts no flesh on its concepts and convictions- valid as they may be. Limited.