The Enemy Camp Author:Jerome Weidman It was a single, unexpected phone call that tore open the past George Hurst had so carefully buried. First the phone call, and then the visit from a mysterious Mr. Kashkin, who wanted to know whatever George Hurst could tell him about a man named Daniel Shaw and Shaw's wife. Through the next 36 hours, during which George Hurst struggled with the... more » problem of concealing or revealing what he knew, his future, the chances for the happiness which he and his beautiful Gentile wife had so carefully built for their two sons -all these were suddenly hanging in the balance.
This is the framework within which Jerome Weidman has written his most memorable novel. For exciting as the events of these two days are, it is the way in which those events force George Hurst and the reader back into the past, and through the whole course of his life up to the present, that provides the richest elements of the book and the most deeply human and compassionate writing of Mr. Weidmans's distinguished career.
From the days of his humble origins on the Lower east Side of NYC, George Hurst has been haunted by two obsessions -his passion for a girl who was to betray him again and again, and his deep-seated conviction that the non-Jewish world was literally an enemy camp, hostile, contemptuous, and irreconcilable. Although he has never been able to exorcise these ghosts, George has led a full and varied life and won through, as the novel opens, to at least a truce with his "enemies". Or so he believed, until Mr. Kashikin appeared to ask his seemingly innocent questions.« less