Fiction's Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey's <em>The Wall</em>

Abstract

In 1950, John Hersey, a Pulitzer prize-winning American author, published The Wall, an immediate best seller and one of the first English-language novels of the Holocaust. Quickly superseded by literature written by Jewish survivors, The Wall nonetheless deserves reconsideration as a major work of Jewish ethnography that introduced the English-reading public to Polish Jewish culture in the immediate postwar years. This article gauges the public's adoring and grateful reaction to The Wall through an analysis of the scores of letters penned to Hersey while also examining the American English-and Yiddish-language presses' criticism of Hersey's novel. The book's success was assured by Hersey's sensitive interlocution into a culture not his own, illustrating the significance of the author's gentile provenance and philosemitism in the postwar years.