Fiction’s Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey’s The Wall Nancy Sinkoff A BSTRACT In 1950, John Hersey, a Pulitzer prize–winning American author, published The Wall, an immediate best seller and one of the first English-language novels of the Holocaust. Quickly superseded by literature written by Jewish survivors, The Wall nonetheless deserves reconsideration as a major work of Jewish ethnography that intro- duced the English-reading public to Polish Jewish culture in the immediate postwar years. This article gauges the public’s adoring and grateful reaction to The Wall through an analysis of the scores of letters penned to Hersey while also examining the American English- and Yiddish-language presses’ criticism of Hersey’s novel. The book’s success was assured by Hersey’s sensitive interlocution into a culture not his own, illustrating the significance of the author’s gentile provenance and philosemi- tism in the postwar years. Key words: The Wall, Holocaust representation, John Hersey, philosemitism, Warsaw Ghetto uprising I n June 1947, John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist, published a short story in the New Yorker entitled “A Short Wait” about a Holocaust survivor and refugee from War- saw. In the story, Luba, newly arrived in the United States, is sitting in the foyer of an opulent Upper East Side apartment waiting impa- tiently for her relatives, who she believes have ignored a letter she sent Nancy Sinkoff, “Fiction’s Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemi- tism in John Hersey’s The Wall ,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 17, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 48–79