“…tipped the contents of  of the pouch into his plan. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filgreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 31, 2014)

Ayelet Waldman’s new book begins in Red Hook, Maine, the setting of her novel Red Hook Road, but the two could hardly be more different. For whereas she had previously confined herself to two families in the same setting over a period of a very few years, she travels in this one to Salzburg, Budapest, and Israel, at various periods over a hundred-year span. By the same token, though, it is a stretch to call Love and Treasure a novel; it is essentially a trilogy of novellas, each with different characters, but linked by a single object and common themes. The object is an enameled Jugendstil pendant in the shape of a peacock. Although only of modest value, it plays an important role in the lives of the people who people who possess it, and provides a focus for the novelist’s enquiry into the lives of Hungarian Jews both before and after the Holocaust.

In the prologue, Jack Wiseman, an old man dying of cancer, entrusts the pendant to his recently-divorced granddaughter Natalie. Immediately, we plunge into the first and by far the best of the novellas, set in Salzburg, Austria, in 1945. Jack, as a young lieutenant in the US Army, is entrusted with the administration of the box-car loads of valuable goods brought out of Hungary on the “Gold Train” — items that he realizes have all been “donated” by Hungarian Jews prior to their exile or extermination. I have no doubt that this is based on truth — not only the train itself, but the horrifying revelation of what happened to its contents, and indeed the exposure of continuing anti-Semitism on both sides even after the War was over. Set in a jurisdiction almost overrun by the sheer numbers of refugees, survivors, and other displaced persons, the story was disturbing, informative and gripping. Even more so as Jack falls passionately in love with one of the survivors, a fiery redhead named Ilona Jakab. It is a surprisingly muscular piece of writing building to a powerful finale. Had I stopped the reading then, I would have given the book five stars.

The other two sections are not quite of this standard. The second novella returns us to the present day when Natalie is in Budapest, keeping her promise to track down the original owner of her grandfather’s pendant. It is less interesting because the laborious process of searching archives is inherently less compelling, but also because it is more difficult to buy into the romance story in this episode. Natalie pairs up with an Israeli art dealer named Amitai Shasho, virile, polished, and wealthy — everything a hero should be — except that he is essentially a Holocaust profiteer, and thus a difficult man for me to trust. He will change towards the end of the novella, but I never really got over my initial disapproval.

The third section is rather more successful, taking us back to Budapest, but now in 1913. It works because Waldman has so perfectly captured the narrative voice of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Imré Zobel, describing his work with a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl named Nina S. It is a perfect parody of Freud’s own literary style, with the added deliciousness of a narrator who, if not actually unreliable, is certainly self-deceiving. But it takes us away from any of the characters whom we have met earlier, and although it fills in some interesting back-story, it is essentially a stand-alone piece.

I mentioned Waldman’s themes. Chief among them is anti-Semitism, seen in an historical context and in some unexpected places; Waldman both makes a strong case for Zionism, and reveals disturbing patterns of discrimination within the Zionist ideal. Almost equally strong is her concern for women’s rights and the historical suffragist movement. And as always, she writes very freely about sex. I was reminded of two other novels in particular. One is The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, which also looks at the twentieth century in Eastern Europe through the history of a single artifact. The other was The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, in its multi-sectional structure and use of psychoanalysis, though Waldman’s book is neither so adventurous in its writing nor so strongly focused on the Holocaust. But you might call it a peri-Holocaust novel, and this I did find interesting. If only it had maintained a stronger focus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ayelet Waldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Red Hook Road Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Bibliography:

• Daughter’s Keeper (2003)
• Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006)
• Red Hook Road (2010)
• Love and Treasure (April 2014)

Mommmy-Track Mysteries:

• Nursery Crimes (2000)
• The Big Nap (2001)
• A Playdate with Death (2002)
• Death Gets a Time-Out (2003)
• Murder Plays House (2004)
• The Cradle Robbers (2005)
• Bye-Bye Black Sheep (2006)

Also:

• Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (2005)
• Bad Mother: A Chronical of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009)

“Before I give you information about the project, let me ask you a personal question,” Manet said. “How do you feel about Jews?”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (DEC 8, 2013)

It is Paris in the spring of 1942. Paris, the glorious “City of Lights” is even more wondrous in the springtime….but not for the French, not in 1942. It is the second year of the victorious Nazi occupation, and the French are struggling to get by. There are economic problems with the payment of the costs of a three-hundred-thousand strong occupying German army, which amounts to twenty million Reichmarks per day; lack of food for French citizens – the Germans seize about 20% of the French food production, which causes severe disruption to the household economy of the French people; the disorganization of transport, except for the railway system which relies on French domestic coal supplies; the Allied blockade, restricting all imports into the country; the extreme shortage of petrol and diesel fuel; (one walks or rides a bike); France has no indigenous oil production and all imports have stopped; labor shortages, particularly in the countryside, due to the large number of French prisoners of war held in Germany. And then there was the Jewish problem.

Approximately 49 concentration camps are in use in France during the occupation, the largest of them at Drancy. In the occupied zone, as of 1942, Jews are required to wear the yellow badge. On the Paris Métro Jews are only allowed to ride in the last carriage. Thirteen thousand one hundred fifty-two Jews residing in the Paris region are victims of a mass arrest by pro Nazi French authorities on 16 and 17 July 1942, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, and are transported to Auschwitz where they are killed.

Parisian Lucien Bernard is a struggling architect, trying to make a name for himself. He is just trying to earn a living, gain some respect in his chosen field and stay alive. He hates the Germans but has little feeling for the plight of the Jews. Since the German occupation, all work has dried up unless it is for the Nazis.

As the book opens he is on his way to an appointment when a Jewish man is gunned down by a German soldier right in front of him. His main concern is that he not be splattered with blood because he has an important appointment with Auguste Manet, a potential client and wants to make a good impression. He also wants to arrive on time.

“Lucien had learned early in his career that architecture is a business as well as an art, and one ought not look at a first job from a new client as a one-shot deal but rather as the first in a series of commissions.”

This job has much potential. “Monsieur Manet had money, old money. He was from a distinguished family that went back generations.” And Manet was in an excellent position to obtain German contracts. Manet offers Lucien two commissions. He cannot take one without the other. One is for a large factory – to design a new Heinkel Aircraft Works, the other is to construct a secret room in which to hide someone. A room that will never be discovered no matter how well a house is searched; rather like the “priest holes” of yore. Lucien needs the money and wants the contracts that this relationship might bring. He accepts.

Lucien’s first hiding place is inside a Doric column. The actual work is carried out by a German named Herzog and another man. Both have worked for Manet for years and are entirely dependable. He begins designing more expertly concealed hiding spaces -behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe – detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

Lucien’s Faustian bargain with the Third Reich is central to the plot. His moral dilemma between his art and his humanity leads him to decision making and life threatening choices. The architect is not the hero here. His actions are not heroic. He undertakes each “hidey hole” design project because he also receives generous monetary recompense and is awarded German engineering projects as a part of the bargain. The “heroes” are the individuals – a Catholic priest, a wealthy Jew, a Parisian fashionista and a German soldier, who, despite the risk of certain death, step up and do something/anything to thwart the actions of the Gestapo.

Lucien is a character who changes as the novel moves, but not without struggles and betrayals. What he is doing is very, very dangerous and there is one German who is determined to capture this man who tricks and deceives the Germans.  Lucien may be somewhat detestable in the beginning with his philandering, his off-handed anti-Semitism, and his greed, but he undertakes a monumental metamorphosis which strips the negative influences from his life and allows his true self to shine through. That may sound corny but it is true. In that aspect, The Paris Architect is a beautiful story of change and growth.

Charles Belfoure is an an author and an architect. Because of his architectural background and insight to the human soul and spirit, he has the ability to shape characters the same way he might craft buildings. The architect’s skill of seeing through to the skeleton of a building must have imbued him with the power to reveal the humanity in each of us.

Just a bit of historical information about the book. Mr. Belfoure has stated that he got his idea about the hidey-holes from Elizabethian England. Priest holes or hidey-holes were secluded or isolated places; hideaways. The term was given to hiding places for priests built into many of the principal Catholic houses of England during the period when Catholics were persecuted by law in England, from the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. The effectiveness of priest holes was demonstrated by their success in baffling the exhaustive searches of the priest-hunters. Search-parties would bring with them skilled carpenters and masons and try every possible expedient, from systematic measurements and soundings to the physical tearing down of paneling and pulling up of floors. It was common for a rigorous search to last a week, and for the priest-hunters to go away empty handed, while the object of the search was hidden the whole time within a wall’s thickness of his pursuers. He might be half-starved, cramped, sore with prolonged confinement, and almost afraid to breathe lest the least sound should throw suspicion upon the particular spot where he was immured. Sometimes a priest could die from starvation or by lack of oxygen.

I was immediately immersed in this unusual novel and highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sourcebooks Landmark (October 8, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Belfoure
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on fiction based on historical Paris: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Bibliography:

• The Paris Architect (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Baltimore Rowhouse (1999)
• Monuments to Money (2005)

“As the time passed the Dodds found themselves confronting an amorphous anxiety that suffused their days and gradually altered the way they led their lives. The change came about slowly, arriving like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice. It was something everyone who lives in Berlin seemed to experience.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAY 19, 2011)

Before you even think of reading Erik Larson’s latest masterwork, clear your calendar, call in sick, send the kids to grandma’s, and place all your evening plans on hold. You will not want to come up for air until you’ve reached the last pages. It’s that good.

In his preface, Larson writes, “Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance and nothing was certain.”

The father was William E. Dodd, the mild-mannered and almost laughingly frugal history professor who became an unlikely choice as FDR’s pick for America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany. The daughter was his bon vivant 24-year-old daughter, Martha, a beautiful and irrepressible woman of great physical appetites, who went along for the adventure of a lifetime. Their story is nothing short of extraordinary.

To quote Mark Twain: “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” Certainly, this is a story in which truth trumps fiction. Martha – a compatriot of literary legends Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder – quickly takes her place in German society. Larson writes, “As the daughter of the American ambassador she possessed instant cachet and in short order found herself sought after by men of all ranks, ages and nationalities.” One such pursuer was Rudolf Diels, the young chief of the Gestapo, a scarred, confident and charismatic man with penetrating eyes.

The other – one of the great loves of her life – was Boris, a senior agent for the NKVD, the precursor of the Soviet Union’s KGB. Although he is nominally married, he falls passionately for Martha and indeed, the two consider marrying.

In the meanwhile, her ambassador father is experiencing the crushing disillusionment of recognizing that the Germany of his college years has been taken over by a group of mad men. As a lone voice in the wilderness, he tries to voice concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home, encourage Roosevelt to censor the growing evil, and fight the backstabbing of the wealthy “Pretty Good Club” of affluent ambassadors who race from one glittery party to another. And astoundingly, he tries –without success – to refocus the State Department’s priorities; their “main concern about Germany remained its huge debt to America’s creditors.”

Through the eyes of history, we – the readers – know the eventual outcome of the story, and it’s viscerally painful to see all the junctures where Hitler’s nefarious plans could have been stopped – but weren’t. Like his magnificent Devil in the White City, this book is tautly told, with lots of foreshadowing, building suspense at every corner.

Ending about the time of “The Night of the Long Knives” – Hitler’s purge and the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement – this is an unforgettable look at life inside Germany in 1933 and 1934, through the eyes of a naïve but well-meaning American father and daughter. It is a tour de force about “complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,639 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erik Larson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Day After Night by Anita Diamant Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

Bibliography:

• The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992)
• Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1995)
• Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999)
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003)
• Thunderstruck (2006)
• In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (May 2011)

“Colourful is only that what she can still remember, surrounded by darkness of which she is at the core, her head […] carries colourful memories, memories of somebody, who she was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? Who owns the memories?””

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 2, 2011)

The “Girl,” who ponders these questions, is one of the protagonists in Jenny Erpenbeck’s innovative and powerful novel Visitation. Memories of innocent excitement and happiness of youth, of arriving, settling down, and then having to leave again and of families and people loved and lost form the core of the story. People and events are centred around a lake-side summer house surrounded by expansive woods and gardens in the region just east of Germany’s capital, Berlin, affording it the role as the central character and integrating force of the narrative. Using her zooming lens, the author condenses many decades of twentieth century German history into time-specific, intricate and intimate glimpses into the lives of twelve different residents and their families living on the property. While the owners build and add to the house, change it and its grounds over time, leaving visible marks and impressions, they are in turn impacted by the environment and the historical events occurring beyond it.

Starting out more like a fairy-tale, the novel gains intensity as it progresses: the portraits become more intense, reaching deeper into the background of the individuals, also relating their actions to specific historical time periods of the last decades: from the Weimar Republic, through the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, War and Soviet occupation, to Socialist East Germany and Fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. The Girl’s haunting account far away, having had to flee her home and Germany, stands out as one of the most heart-wrenching chapters. In others, the reader senses underlying tense emotions, despite the deceptively detached, often sparse language, that refers to most protagonists only as the Architect, the Writer, the Visitor, etc. or the Gardener. However, despite the apparent indistinctness, the individuals portrayed are engagingly realistic and anything but bland generalizations. Events beyond the calm of the summer house are alluded to, hints that may be easier to detect for the German reader. The narrator’s language and style changes slightly as the story moves from one voice to the next. Erpenbeck often uses rhythmic prose, sometimes staccato sentences, repetitions, or lyrical prose to reflect her protagonists’ moods and characteristics. While the different individuals pass through the house as transient residents – some return later, allowing for intergenerational connections – only the “Gardener,” more a symbol than a person, remains as a constant, his chapters alternating with the others.

The original title Heimsuchung has several meanings in German, one of which is “Visitation.” This has an ominous or threatening undertone and often refers to ghosts or disease. An additional meaning contained in the term is “searching for home.” Both connotations are beautifully captured in stories. For example, the Authoress looks back on a long life, that included fleeing the home of her youth all the way to Moscow and the Urals, and, even while “going home” now to the house and the lake, she is still searching for the “home” that she can emotionally return to. On the other hand, the overconfident Architect, a former Albert Speer collaborator, is on the run, the ghosts of the past having caught up with him: he is locking up, hiding the valuables, leaving the key for the next occupant of the house…

Award-winning Jenny Erpenbeck is a representative of the younger generation of German authors (born in 1967). Many like her were born and raised in then East Germany. Their background enables them to take a different perspective on the past. Inspired by and based on her family’s summer house, the author sensitively mixes her own memories and those of people she knew with the wide-ranging fictional reality of her novel. While recent novels like Simon Mawer‘s The Glass Room come to mind, in that comparable techniques were used to build the novels, Erpenbeck’s voice is fresh and independent and very convincing. Visitation, published in German in 2008 and now available in the highly praised translation by Susan Bernofksy, was recently chosen by author Nicole Krauss as one her favorite books of the year.

(Having read the novel in its original, all translations in this review are mine.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	New Directions; First Edition edition (September 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenny Erpenbeck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Vanishing of KatharinaLinden by Helen Grant Another house that inspires an historical story: Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• The Old Child & Other Stories (1999; 2005 in US)
• Cats Have Seven Lives (2000)
• Trinkets (2001)
• The Book of Words (2004; 2007 in US)
• Visitation (2004; September 2010 in US)
• Things that Disappear (2009)

“David’s little voice arose beside the camphor tree, his Yiddish words filled that tropical night, his Jewish song enfolded the forest and enfolded me, little Raj. His voice was so serene, the words flowed naturally, and this recital entered into me and reached my heart, making me at one with the world around me, as if, until then, I had been a stranger to it. The lament seemed to enhance the beauty of the natural world and, if I may dare say it, amid these recollections, amid these terrible and barbaric events, I felt as if this lament spoke of the beauty of life itself. Even though I did not understand a single word of it, the tears rose in my eyes and, more than everything, more that those days spent together, more than our escapade itself, it was this moment that tied forever the knot that bound us together.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (APR 14, 2011)

Usually I review books shortly after reading them. However, Nathacha Appanah’s book, The Last Brother, sat so deeply in my heart that I had to wait several days before reviewing it. I needed it to come closer to the surface, closer to that word place where emotions can be translated into language.

Nathacha Appanah is a French-Mauritian of Indian origin, born in Maruitius and now living in France. The Last Brother won the Prix de la FNAC 2007 and the Grand Prix des lecteurs de L’Express 2008. Geoffrey Strachan has beautifully translated it into English. It reads as if it is in its native language, a feat very rare for translations.

The novel is set in Mauritius during 1944-1945. Mauritius is an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The book is about terror and adversity, about hope and exaltation. It is about the little known fact that 1500 Jews were sent from Palestine to Maritius for four years because they did not have the right papers when they landed in Palestine and were viewed by the British as illegal aliens. They are placed in a facility that was somewhere between a concentration camp and prison. One hundred twenty-seven Jews did not survive the four years of imprisonment. It is also the story of a deep and beautiful friendship of two young boys. Raj is nine years old and from Mauritius. David is ten years old and is a Jewish prisoner. He is an orphan from Prague. The story is narrated by Raj when he is seventy years old. He wants to tell his story as precisely as possible.

Raj comes from an extraordinarily impoverished background. He lives with his parents and two brothers in a hut in Mapou. Living conditions were so unsanitary that if a child got sick, it was assumed that he would die. “As a child I was a weakling. Of the three brothers I was the one who was the most fearful, the one who was always somewhat sickly, the one they protected from the dust, the rain, the mud. And yet it was I who survived at Mapou.” His father is a drunk who enjoys physically abusing Raj, his mother and brothers. “If we did not sing the way he wanted he would hit us.” Raj is the child picked to be educated. At school, he learns that not all fathers are like his and that not all children live in mud huts.

Raj and his brothers are very close. One day as they are walking, a terrible storm comes suddenly and both of Raj’s brothers are killed. The family leaves Mapou to resettle in Beau-Bassin where Raj’s father has gotten a job as a guard in the prison. One day, Raj’s father beats him so brutally that he ends up in the prison hospital with “a broken nose, cracked ribs, bruises, a blue pulp instead of a mouth.” It is in the hospital that his friendship with David is forged. David suffers from malaria and dysentery. They have little in the way of a common language but Raj knows some French from school and David speaks French. They slowly and very carefully communicate. Raj thinks that Prague is a village somewhere between Mapou and the prison. He does not know what a Jew is. “I do not know if I ought to be ashamed to say this but that was how it was: I did not know there was a world war on that had lasted for four years and when David asked me at the hospital if I was Jewish I did not know what he meant.” Gradually, Raj learns what is going on in the prison and his friendship with David gets closer and closer.

Serendipitously, Raj finds a way to loosen a piece of barbed wire in the ground and after a deadly cyclone, he manages to get David out of the prison and they start on an impossible journey to freedom. This part of the book has some of the most beautiful scenes I have ever read. Ms. Appanah’s language is spell-binding. It is poetic, lyrical, and sensitive. She takes the reader to places that language rarely takes us – those deep places in the soul where there is only bare and beautiful emotion but no words to describe things.

This book is filled with antithetical meanings. Where there is despair there is happiness; where there is fear there is courage; where there are prisons there is freedom; where there is regret there is hope. On the surface, this is a very sad book, but at its core there is profound beauty and exaltation. It is the story of two “kings,” Raj and David, sharing their kingdom of childhood.

This is the best book I have ever read. It left me speechless and uprooted. I had to re-read it in order to write this review and I know I will read it again many times. It is a book I will recommend to my friends and those who love to read. Thank you, Ms. Appanah, for this remarkable gift.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press; Reprint edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Nathacha Appanah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another good read:Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

Bibliography:

• Blue Bay Palace (2003)
• The Last Brother (February 2010)

“Everywhere, in the grip of death, life goes on too.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (DEC 16, 2010)

To be comfortable in the world of the Kafkaesque, one must slowly climb up the literary ladder, page after page, year after year. My journey began with the likes of V.C. Andrews during my tawdry youth, and then eventually reached its pinnacle with Tolstoy, and of course, Kafka. Aside from my literary snobbery (which is nothing short of a veneer – I still love me some Sidney Sheldon), having entered Kafka’s abyss of absurdity and horror makes Hans Keilson’s novel, Comedy in a Minor Key, not only recognizable, but entirely brilliant.

But I hate to take credit where it’s not deserved. I am not the lone genius who has pegged Keilson as a contemporary of Kafka – many literary critics have beat me to the punch, and rightfully so. Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key (published in 1947), is also followed by The Death of the Adversary, published in 1959, and shares some very distinct characteristics – both aesthetic and thematic, with the aforementioned tale. His minimalist prose are skillfully juxtaposed with themes of tragedy, which reflects his work as a psychiatrist post WWII, and his pioneering developments in the effects of war trauma on children. Trauma, as a reoccurring theme, resonates throughout his work.

Keilson’s Comedy ironically reveals the story of Nico – a Jewish perfume salesman hidden in the second-floor room of Wim and Marie, a benevolent Dutch couple, during Nazi-occupied Holland. In this room, Nico’s life is carefully preserved by the couple, who manage to go about their daily lives amidst the dread of exposure. Yet apart from the terror, all three characters lead lives that border on the painfully banal. Day after day, Nico anticipates the moment when Marie can deliver the daily paper upstairs. Both Wim and Marie too look forward to the clandestine conversations they share with Nico when the sun goes down. These small, but endearing rituals, keep the trio bound in camaraderie and secrecy, while Europe’s Jews are detained and annihilated. Yet despite the fact that Wim and Marie carefully tend to Nico each day, he eventually succumbs to a feverish illness which takes his life in the very room that promised sanctuary.

I refuse to spoil the novel by revealing the climax, so I will return to my musings of the Kafkaesque. Keilson deliberately avoids discussion of the occupation and its horrors in order to set the stage for the deep ironies that the novel comically uncovers. Nico is similar to Joseph K. – he is seemingly persecuted simply for existing. Both characters are confined in psychological isolation, and neither of them foresees an end. Moreover, the world in which Nico and Joseph K. live in escalates into mystery and unfathomable trepidation, with little respite. Like Joseph K., Nico endures the fear that comes to epitomize his entire existence.

Comedy in a Minor Key perfectly conveys the trauma that ordinary people experience during their life span. But more importantly, it also imparts the illogical dimensions of oppression that afflict people all over. That misery sometimes cannot be avoided at any cost is the philosophical conclusion that Keilson’s Comedy cleverly relates with pathos and farce. Keilson’s message reverberates clearly: pain and suffering is universal, and sometimes, the only way to communicate this anxiety is through humor. (Translated by Damion Searls.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (July 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Hans Keilson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Death of the Adversary

Bibliography:

• Life Goes On (1933)
• A Comedy in a Minor Key (1947; July 2010 in US)
• Death of the Adversary (1962; July 2010 in the US)

“How can I describe to you what it feels like to have nothing left inside? To become hollow? For months, I could not live, would not die. Not here, nor there. The same man I told you about was with me. I was all alone, except for him. One day when I was too weak to dress, to eat, even to speak, he said to me: ‘Jana, now you fear life as you once feared death. You are more afraid of life than of death.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 3, 2010)

Filling in the gaps. Ami Sands Brodoff opens with an epigraph from Rabbi Avi Weiss: “The Torah is written ‘black fire on white fire’ . . . black fire refers to the letters of the Torah . . . the white refers to the spaces between the letters . . . they are the story, the song, the silence.” Exploring the story, singing the song, reflecting on the silence, these are the promises of this intimate yet ambitious novel, and they are both moving and beautiful. To say that Brodoff does not quite realize them is not to diminish the value of her search. The book is a sincere and obviously personal attempt to illuminate mysteries that may ultimately remain unknowable.

Jane Ives is a retired New Jersey kindergarten teacher. Now over 80, she was born Jana Ivanova in Prague and enjoyed a happy childhood before being caught up in the Holocaust and transported to Terezin and then Auschwitz. There, because of her good German, she became a “Secret Keeper,” typing out false death certificates, including for members of her own family, randomly selecting one of 34 approved “illnesses,” although the cause of death was always the same. Somehow, she survives and comes to Montréal, living there for two separate periods before she settles in New Jersey, pregnant with her only child, a daughter named Willow.

Jane raises Willow on the “memory books” she has kept of her childhood and life in Montréal. But there are gaps in the collection of photographs and in the stories that Jane is willing to share: the entire Holocaust period for obvious reasons and, more mysteriously, any details about Willow’s father. Perhaps in order to structure her own stories, Willow becomes a puppeteer, finding it easier to relate to her wood and plaster creations than to real people. When, at the age of 40, she is invited to a theatre collective in Montréal as artist in residence, she accepts. Coincidentally, Jane is also invited to Montréal by an organization called the Witness Foundation, to record her memories of the Holocaust. There, in this Northern city that Brodoff obviously loves, as the long winter finally turns to summer, mother and daughter begin their process of rediscovery, emerging from the spiritual hiding that had held them frozen for so long.

The post-Holocaust theme of emerging from a private world of suffering into a life led in public is undoubtedly an important one. It was treated very effectively, for example, by fellow Canadian author Anne Michaels in her Fugitive Pieces. But it requires a difficult balance between the inner life and the outside one that I don’t think Brodoff quite manages. There are too many inconsistencies and outright coincidences. The memory- book sequences of dialogue between mother and daughter work more like prose poems than the record of a real relationship; it is difficult to see Willow as the product of an ordinary American high-school and college. Curiously enough, as she pursues her career as a puppeteer, readers can feel enriched by admission to the arcana of her technical world; it is always fascinating to read about professionals engaged in the minutiae of their craft. But when the same sense of privilege extends to ordinary life, the result is merely distancing and hermetic.

Brodoff’s Montréal is presented virtually as a Jewish enclave, with hardly a gentile in sight. Yiddish expressions pepper the dialogue, sometimes obvious from the context, but not always. This is a subject that interests me considerably, and I really wanted to share Brodoff’s experience as a fellow human being. But I felt I was being continually pushed away, as though I didn’t belong, whether as a gentile reading a book about Jews, a man reading a book about women, or an adult reading a book intended perhaps for teenagers (as some other imprints from Second Story Press tend to be). Conversely, I responded positively to Willow’s work, as a theatrical artist myself. The best books transcend such coincidental identifications on the part of their readers; this one, I’m afraid, did not.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Second Story Press (October 1, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ami Sands Brodoff
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another take on a Holocaust novel: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Bibliography:

• Can You See Me? (1999)
• Bloodknots: Stories (2005)
• White Space Between (2008)

“…the dead take with them not only what we love in them but also what they love in us…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 26, 2010)

Andrew Winer has written a potboiler that is also literary. Writing about such a serious subject as the Holocaust sometimes constricts a novelist into a more conventional form of storytelling/historical fiction. But as we have seen with such books as Frederick Reiken’s Day for Night and Nicole Krauss’s more postmodern Great House, as well as Death as a narrator in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, the only unwritten rules are to grip the reader in a credible story and to edify through words. Winer has done both, and he puts his unique stamp on it with his fluid, page-turning, thriller style blended with his out-of-the-box imagination and mellifluous prose. Like Plath did so craftily with The Bell Jar, Winer will reach a wider audience by his hewing of the elevated with the pedestrian. Saul Bellow meets Stephen King. I applaud his ambitious style, which he succeeded with on many levels. Two stories parallel and merge, reaching forward in one, backward in the other, fusing in a transmigration of redemption.

Two separate storylines eventually merge together. One starts in 1928 Vienna, a time when the Jews, once so integral to the art and intellectual community, are being persecuted. Some Jews, such as the novel’s Pick family, have converted to Catholicism in order to assimilate (which I say with irony, as assimilation in this case was more like betrayal to one’s faith) and garner financial success without oppression. Young Josef Pick, the son of converts, visits his Jewish grandfather Pommeranz in the very poor Jewish district and begins his career as a ketubah artist, or “marriage artist.”

The second storyline is the one that opens the novel in modern times. A highly acclaimed native American (Blackfoot) artist, Benjamin Wind, has plunged to his death with the wife of an esteemed art critic, Daniel Lichtmann, whose glorious accolades to Wind made the sculptor famous. Aleksandra Lichtmann, a beautiful, seductive survivor of Russian anti-semitism, was a beautiful woman of rare charm and dauntless courage, a woman who spoke her mind resolutely and with artless candor. Her husband, Daniel, is heartbroken and suffused with guilt for falling into an emotional detachment with her (for reasons I won’t go into—readers will want to see the details revealed on their own). This is further complicated by the fact that their marriage is a second marriage for both of them.

In Jewish tradition, a ketubah is a document, one that is fundamental to the traditional Jewish marriage and is a form of Jewish ceremonial art. It outlines the responsibilities of the groom to the bride and is written in Aramaic, the vernacular of Talmudic times. (I strongly recommend that readers google ketubah images in order to see the stunning, detailed artwork involved.) The ketubah is also fundamental to the themes and storylines of this novel. Josef Pick, at age ten, becomes immediately arrested by the poignancy and beauty of ketubot art and, with a mythical and mystical spirit, is imbued with an aesthetic grace that permeates him and allows him to create a ketubah, largely influenced by his childhood desire for his feuding parents to fall back in love. He eclipses his grandfather’s talent and is soon mentored by him. Pommeranz, who earns few schillings blessing fowl and meat, becomes a Jewish star with his grandson. The storyline with Josef continues into adulthood, highlighting his relationship with his lifelong friend, Max Weiner, and Josef’s wife, Hannah, a complex and triangulating trio of passion and suffering. This story takes us into the terror of the Holocaust.

Daniel is determined to uncover the seeds of this tragedy. Were Aleksandra and Benjamin having an affair? Were they unhappy, filled with guilt, or did someone push them? The police haven’t found any clues to a crime, and Daniel commences to investigate on his own. This leads him into his own crimes of the heart as well as important details of his wife’s history and the provenance of Benjamin’s ethnic roots. Wind’s artwork is explored with exquisite sympathy and philosophical mien and woven into a deep abyss of pain and expression. This storyline also leads back into the marrow of the Holocaust, which gives the novel its quintessence. Two artists from two generations bifurcate and meld. The reader is pulled into an intricate labyrinth of lies and love, horror and shame, betrayal and faithfulness.

Winer’s prose is masterful, with a restrained floridity that anoints the story with poetic lyricism. It compels me to allude to Flaubert’s mot juste, the ability to find the exact right word or expression. His metaphors and imagery are scintillating and prolific, and I will dare to say orgasmic.

“She laughed at him with an unbearable harshness. The laughter spread across her features like a fast-moving storm front, until it was all darkness.”

In describing a created ketubah:

“…first as blooming yellow florets in a tussock of dandelions and then as gossamer ball angels raised by the wind to the impure geometry of the living…the sky is a fabric of seraphic, thickly flowered souls whispering advice at its edges.”

There are flaws. Winer tends to telegraph events, but he is one of the few authors I know who can make exposition emotional, stirring. Some plot turns are too quick and convenient, preventing the reader from forming his or her own conclusions, or to find the spaces between the words. When Winer is describing art, he is exalting, and does allow the reader to interpret and have a go at personal translation within his own. But with the plot, he too intermittently spells out too much information, and truncates some elements of the story. And some components (which feed the potboiler aspect) are a bit contrived and overwrought, and I had to wince, especially the emergence of another, later romance in the book that felt inorganic.

In a lesser author, these blemishes would have decreased my overall satisfaction. But, despite this criticism, there is something about the whole here transcending the sum of its parts, (and I am not condescending in this observation) and the parts interlocking in a resonant and finally delicate and ecstatic way that moved me to accept the warts and come away with my heart on fire and my senses roused to tears. This is a highly engaging, memorable, exuberant, and yes, even boisterous and entertaining Holocaust and modern tragedy tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co. (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrew Winer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Behind the Book
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of the above mentioned books: Day for Night by Frederick Reiken Great House by Nicole Krauss The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Bibliography:

• The Color Midnight Made (2002)
• The Marriage Artist (2010)

“I could not give him up; I needed him. His existence meant my destruction in the near future, that much was certain. But his sudden death, or some other event that would have robbed me of his threatening presence, would equally have destroyed me. Between us two, ties and obligations had come into being, perceptible only to those whose share in the things of this world lie in suffering. A strange and questionable share, perhaps; but who can break the community that secretly establishes itself between the persecutors and their victims?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 22, 2010)

What is the relationship between persecutors and their victims? In The Death of the Adversary – poised on the brink of what soon will be one of the world’s most horrific tragedies – an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country reflects on an unnamed figure who will soon ascend to power. Although the figure (“B”) is never revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is Hitler and that the narrator is of Jewish descent.

The narrator – who bemoans his own passivity – is blessed, or cursed, with high intelligence. Because he is unable to come to grips with evil for its own sake, he twists his logic to make sense out of the insensible; he knows B hates what the narrator represents, but he believes that the narrator desperately needs that hatred and, in fact, feeds on it…eliciting hatred in return. He goes further: in his “logical” mind, he believes that the adversary and his victims are in a state of symbiosis, feeding upon each other and because of their mutual need, neither adversary will eliminate the other. History, of course, has sadly shown how ludicrous this conclusion was.

Keilson uses a conceit in presenting these musings; his fictional (or autobiographical?) narrator has deposited a manuscript for safekeeping during the war years. Now, as he awaits word of the death of B, he rekindles his memory about the events of those pre-war years.

In haunting prose, he remembers his father’s words when he was only 10: “If B. should ever come to power, may God have mercy on us. Then things will really start to happen.” He recalls being ostracized from a group of non-Jewish children who seek to banish him from their games. He remembers the ending of a close friendship with another man who, it turns out, is enthralled by B. and his ideas. He recounts the two times when his path and his adversary’s intersected.

And, in one of the most devastating parts of the book, he recreates an evening at the apartment of a saleswomen he worked with whose brother and friends are revealed to be Nazi thugs, who desecrate a supposed Jewish cemetery to prove that even in death, Jews will not allowed to experience peace. As the young man describes in exhaustive detail how gravestones – even those of young children – were defaced, our narrator sits transfixed, unable to admit to his heritage or condemn these monstrous acts.

It bears acknowledging that Hans Keilson – now a centenarian – lives in an Amsterdam village, after the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee from his native Germany. He is a psychoanalyst who pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. It is no surprise, then, that the book is underpinned by a deep psychoanalysis of the relationship of perpetrator and victim, and the victim’s sense of denial and self-delusion. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t. By removing the victim from his more primal emotions, there is a certain sterility that is not normally seen in Holocaust-themed books. The translator, Ivo Jarosy, appears to take a literal rather than interpretive approach, which creates a certain British formality in tone.

Still, as Arthur Miller once wrote, “Attention must be paid.” Hans Keilson is one of the last witnesses to the atrocity that was the Holocaust. In an era where – incredibly – a new breed of Holocaust deniers are rearing their ugly heads, it is important for the world to understand once again the sheer evil and damning repercussions of this most heinous act of genocide. (Translated by Ivo Jarosy.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reissue edition (July 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wkipedia page on Hans Keilson
EXTRAS:	The New York Times article on Hans Keilson
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of : Comedy in a Minor Key Also try: The Great House by Nicole Kraus

Bibliography:

• Life Goes On (1933)
• A Comedy in a Minor Key (1947; July 2010 in US)
• Death of the Adversary (1962; July 2010 in the US)

” …there’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 15, 2010)

“Tender” and “noble” are two words I have never used to describe a Roth character. In fact, Roth’s usual suspects are razor sharp with a mean streak of self-loathing to befit the most unlikable anti-heroes of the American literary canon. Not to mention, most of his characters are so self-obsessed and entrenched in complicated sexual proclivities that they seldom do the right thing. And much to the chagrin of my feminist friends, I’m amused, if not seduced, by these delinquent male protagonists, and look forward to their self-deprecating demise each and every time I encounter them.

Which is precisely why my love for Eugene “Bucky” Cantor bemuses me in a way I can’t describe. Cantor, the leading man in Roth’s latest novel Nemesis, is so decent, so likable in a non-Rothian way, that if you’re a stalwart fan of Alexander Portnoy or David Kepesh, two of the most deliciously depraved characters to ever grace Roth’s fiction, then Bucky Cantor materializes like Mother Theresa. And yet never before have I ached for such a character – identified with such a man whose nobility and innocence would have previously escaped me.

Is it the setting of this novel, 1944 wartime Newark, that makes the emergence of a character like Cantor so salient, if not, believable? Or, is it the raging outbreak of polio in Jewish Weequahic that brings all of these elements together? A child orphaned by the death of his mother upon giving birth, abandoned by his charlatan of a father, Bucky Cantor is saved by his wholesome grandparents who raise him with dignity and unmitigated devotion. Schooled by his grandfather – a kind, but indubitably, man’s man, Cantor appears in the first chapter of Roth’s novel as a hero of sorts. Especially to the children of Chancellor Avenue School, who worship Bucky as their beloved playground director during the summer of the polio outbreak. Unhinged by his inability to serve in the army due to his compromised eyesight, Cantor allots his time and affection to the Jewish children of Weequahic who compete for his love and approval. From standing up to a group of anti-Semitic Italian hooligans on the playground, to modeling his outstanding athletic prowess, Bucky Cantor is more than the local victor of summertime Newark – he becomes the center of these children’s lives. So when polio hits the Chancellor playground and ruthlessly stakes out the fates of these children, so begins the slow and agonizing decline of Roth’s most affable frontrunner.

What strikes me as sheer genius on the part of Roth, is the allegorical references to Europe’s Shoah that line the pages of this heartfelt narrative. Even while Roth makes references to Nazi-occupied Europe and the ongoing war, he is quick to evade any talk of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Instead, he redirects the readers to Pearl Harbor, or the calamity of polio, which like the Holocaust, swiftly and mercilessly wipes out the Jews of Newark. That Cantor is overwhelmingly haunted, page after page, with crippling doses of survivor’s guilt, only makes this metaphorical imagery more deliberate and nuanced. Like many survivors, Cantor rails against the wrath of God, who does little to stop the slaughter of Newark’s children. And his disbelief of God, which appears early on in the novel, intensifies as the narrative progresses, leaving Bucky more desolate, more pathetic, than possibly imaginable.

So, who was Bucky Cantor’s nemesis? Was it the rampant Anti-Semitism of the 1940s – so disproportionate in its ugliness – that forced Cantor to always “stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew?” Or was Cantor’s unconditional allegiance to patriarchy the Achilles’ heel that forced him to view his own weakness as feminized and unacceptable. I would suggest, his penultimate nemesis was the polio outbreak of the 40s.

Making his indomitable nemesis, of course, God.

In all of this uncertainty lies the unadulterated beauty of Roth’s new novel – the resounding message that despite life’s malevolent blows, goodness does abound. And in the face of mankind’s cynicism, once in a great while, we are blessed to make the acquaintance of people like Bucky Cantor.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Philip Roth SocietyWikipedia page on Philip Roth
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Plot Against America Indignation Exit Ghost Everyman

Bibliography:

• Goodbye, Columbus: Novella and five stories (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends) (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• Deception (1986)
• The Conversion of the Jews (1993)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)**
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The Plot Against America (September 2004) **
• Everyman (April 2006)
• Indignation (September 2008)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

** Philip Roth appears in novel

Zuckerman Novels:

• The Ghostwriter (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Ogry (1985)
• The Counterlife (1985)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (October 2007)
• The Humbling (November 2009)
• Nemesis (October 2010)

David Kapesh Novels:

• The Breast (1973)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Nonfiction:

• Reading Myself and Others (1975)
• The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1990)
• Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for Goodbye, Columbus (2002)
• Study Guide for The Conversion of the Jews (2003)

Movies from books:

• Goodbye, Columbus (1969)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (VHS only) (1972)
• The Human Stain (July 2004)