Franklin Library: SIGNED 60: JOHN HERSEY: THE WALL: JEWISH WARSAW GHETTO: WW II

Description: Franklin Library leather edition of John Hersey's "The Wall," a Limited edition, Illustrated by Luba Krugman Gurdus, one of the SIGNED 60 series PERSONALLY SIGNED by JOHN HERSEY, published in 1982. Bound in an elegant hunter green leather, the book has matching silk end leaves, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, a satin book marker, hubbed spine, gold gilding on three edges--in near FINE condition. John Richard Hersey, who lived from 1914-1993, was a Pulitzer-Prize winning American writer who was an earlier practitioner of the so-called new journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. In 1945, Hersey saw Warsaw for the first time; he met and spoke with survivors. Hersey recalls: "I knew the nightmares of shock I now came into possession of night after night, were privileged: waking, I knew I had not been touched. . ." Hersey’s intent in "The Wall " is to relate in fictional form the martyrdom of the Jews who lived in Warsaw during World War II, and the text of the novel is purported to consist of selections from a very extensive diary originally written in Yiddish that was kept by a historian named NOACH LEVINSON. Even though the diary and the historian are equally fictive, the novel reads very much like an authentic historical chronicle. The diary begins with the German occupation of the Polish capital in the fall of 1939 and concludes with the razing of the entire ghetto by Schutzstaffel (SS) troops as part of the suppression of the revolt that occurred there in the spring of 1943. So assiduous was Levinson in his role of chronicler that the almost daily entries recorded over this period of three and one half years reached a total of more than four million words. At the time of the German conquest of Poland, the area of Warsaw that was to become the site of the ghetto was inhabited by 240,000 Jews and 80,000 Gentiles. In the fall of 1940, the Nazis ordered the Gentiles to leave the area; at the same time, some 140,000 Jews from other sectors of Warsaw were compelled to move in. The ghetto was then sealed off by an eight-foot wall, and the death penalty was decreed for any Jew who ventured outside as well as for any Gentile who dared to harbor or assist a person of Jewish ancestry. The number of Jews residing within the ghetto eventually grew to 430,000 as an influx of deportees from different regions of Poland and from other European countries more than replaced those who died from hunger and disease. The ghetto’s inhabitants were told that they were to be resettled in the East, but the journey turned out to be a short one: a trip of some fifty miles to the gas chambers set up in the death camp of Treblinka. By 1943, the total number of inhabitants had dwindled to 60,000. 579 Pages. I offer Combined shipping.

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Location: Walnut Ridge, Arkansas

End Time: 2024-11-25T03:31:27.000Z

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