Books: Miriam & Yeshua

MARY (436 pp.)—Sholem Asch—Putnam ($3.50).

For 30 years Sholem Asch has enjoyed international popularity for the novels and short stories he has written out of his vast knowledge of Jewish life and history. Mary concludes his most ambitious work, a trilogy on the beginnings of Christianity that already includes bestselling lives of Christ (The Nazarene) and St. Paul (The Apostle). In both earlier books Asch had a dramatic lifeline to follow, and he followed it skillfully, feeding in a fascinating mass of scholarly wrinkles, though often he enlarged on Gospel truth. On Mary's life...