Books: The Survivor

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD by Thomas Wiseman. 442 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Any novel concerning a. Nazi and a Jew would seem to offer about as much chance for originality these days as a cowboy-and-Indian movie. Nonetheless, the Austrian-born English author of Czar and Journey of a Man has managed to produce an extraordinary book about that very relationship. Thomas Wiseman's study of two Austrians—Stefan Kazakh, a half-Jew, and Konrad Wirthof, a wholehearted Nazi—is a brilliant tour de force of rare psychological depth and complexity.

The novel begins in 1967 with Kazakh, a rich London-based survivor of World War II and of three...