Sagas of Survival

EVA (3 I I pp.) -- Meyer Levin -- Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

VICTORS AND VANQUISHED (305 pp.) --FranclsStuart -- Pennington Press ($3.95).

"Go and live" was just about the only legacy a Jewish parent in Hitler's Europe could offer his daughter or son. To go alone into a world of tightening snares was a little easier for a handsome, Aryan-looking girl than for her brother, but to live she still needed her wits about her, day and night. The heroines of these two novels are both young Jewish girls trying to stay alive under Nazi rule during World War II. Apart from this common fate, they share several things-- intelligence, a sharp instinct for survival, religious indifference, and a strong, hard-dying concern about keeping their virginity.

Beyond that, the girls are as different as the writers who tell their stories. Eva's creator is bestselling Author (Compulsion) Meyer Levin; Myra's, an Irish poet and novelist named Francis Stuart. Their two tales are popular blends of genuine escape and ingenuous escapades.

Eva & the Upbeat. Eva is 18, apple-cheeked. a bandit (tomboy) in her native Polish village ; on her mother's urging, she decides to put the dreaded camps-of-no-return far behind her and to pass as a Christian. By a fast shuffle of the cards of identity, she turns up in Austria as Katarina Leszczyszyn, a Ukrainian D.P., peasant-merry and eager for work. An Austrian railroad executive and his wife hire her as a maid, and she does so well that they want to adopt her. Ironically, doctors find Eva "a perfect specimen of the Aryan race." (Author Levin seems to have a fix on naked physical strip-downs ; the book offers at least three.) But adoption would mean discovery of Eva's false documents, and so she breaks out of the snug roundhouse and into an office job at a nearby munitions plant.

On more explosive ground now, she gets so chummy with the Gestapo that they try to set her to spying out the racial history of one of her new friends, a suspected Jewess. The trap, of course, snaps on Eva herself. The next stop is the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nesting at the end of the line for Eva are true love and a family in Israel. From the moment she bounces into view, no reader can doubt that her ending will be upbeat.

A Zionist and longtime student of the Nazi victim--he wrote a stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank that was never produced--Author Levin has evidently done thorough research on what happened after the Gestapo's fateful knock on hideaway doors. He has also covered civilian life as the enemy dourly lived it. In his attempt to follow up the actual Anne

Frank story, he is also bidding to take over its emotional appeal. The difference: The Diary is an authentic human document; Eva, although powerful and credible, is a product of the present day and already a historical fiction.

Myra & Resignation. By comparison, Victors and Vanquished sounds more like romantic imagination than on-the-spot recollection from Author Stuart's shadowed war years. His Myra emerges first in peacetime Berlin, where Luke Cassidy, the novel's hero, is lecturing on English literature. He falls ill, and Nurse Myra ministers to him so angelically that later, after war has broken out, Cassidy feels he must see her again. He skips neutral Ireland to resume his post at Berlin University. Myra shows neither surprise nor joy when Cassidy returns from Ireland to announce his love and troubled decision: to settle and teach in enemy Germany to be near her. She simply sends him to see her father, a physician in forced retirement.

Myra is not hunting either for a ring or parental approval. She is a natural creature of obedience, stoic when the time comes to pin on the stigmatic yellow badge. She accepts Cassidy's infant foster daughter, his dull and his dangerous cronies, his personal instability as readily as her father's orthodox wisdom. When she finally goes to bed with Cassidy, it is with the air of "This, too, shall pass." For all that, Myra is not a wooden figure. She is at least as believable in her resignation as is Eva in her chin-up tenacity.

Much of this discursive novel is evidently autobiographical. Examples: 1) Like his hero. Author Stuart left Ireland in 1940 and spent most of the war years as a lecturer in Berlin; 2) Stuart was once highly praised by W. B. Yeats, once married to the adopted daughter of Maude Gonne, the Egeria of Yeats's nationalist literary salon; his Cassidy has an Irish wife and admits once knowing Yeats "quite well." At one point in the story Cassidy finds a cache of Irish whisky; Author Stuart's style resembles it--warming in small doses only, smoky and unpredictable. Where Eva moves to her promised land with oversure aim, Cassidy never quite makes it. He stops here to help unearth a war-rare Finnegans Wake from the rubble, or just to lean against tired oars in a suburban outing pond. He also pauses to ponder a still-unclear conscience. But, getting nowhere in particular, he still manages to leave Eva behind by a few paces of poetic insight.

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