Books: Anatomy of Hatred

THE DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY (208 pp.)—Hans Keilson—Orion ($3.95).

Since Adolf Hitler, an outpouring of writing has tried to explain the violence that human beings do to one another. Nagging questions persist: Why did so many acquiesce in Hitler's evil? Why did so many Jews go quietly to their deaths when they had a good chance of resisting? Fiction, rather than scholarship, has supplied the shrewder answers. Perhaps the profoundest explanation to date comes from the pen of a Jewish writer driven from Germany in 1936 and now living in Holland. Hans Keilson's novel subtly and eloquently probes the ambivalent relation of...