Books: Child Witch

THE TRIUMPH OP YOUTH—Jacob Wassermann—Boni& Liveright ($2). Bishop Philip Adolph of Wurzburg has a sister-in-law, Baroness Theodata of Ehrenburg and a nephew, her son, Ernest. It is because of Ernest’s remarkable propensity for inventing fictions that his uncle, personifying the credulous cruelty of the early 17th Century, supposes the youth to be inhabited by evil powers. The child is clapped into a dungeon, made to watch his erratically lovely mother undergo tortures, urged like Joan of Arc to confess sins of whose existence he is unaware. The triumph of youth is achieved when thousands of children who have listened to his stories with love and wonder flock to prevent his execution.

A dancing and delicate wit inhabit Author Wassermann’s mediaeval romancing to a far greater extent than his sombre psychological studies of modern Germany (Gold, Faber, Wedlock). Translator Otto P. Shinnerer puts no strings across the bright lawn of prose on which Author Wassermann’s imagination whirls in a dexterous Bergamask.