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Tag Archives: 1947

Industrial Murder: The German Heiress

24 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1947, Anika Scott, book review, family drama, historical fiction, implausible villain, Krupp, melodrama, moral ambiguity, provocative story, romance, slave labor, soft-pedaling genocide, thriller, war crimes, World War II

Review: The German Heiress, by Anika Scott
Morrow, 2020. 357 pp. $17

Two years after World War II has ended, Clara Falkenberg is on the run. Living under an assumed name, on unconvincing fake papers, and with no visible means of support, Clara might be no different from many other Germans who’ve got something to hide. Except she’s the heiress to the Falkenberg mines and ironworks in Essen (a fictive rival to Krupp), and for her wartime activities helping to manage the firm, a British intelligence captain named Fenshaw is on her tail.

Like every other industrial concern, Falkenberg used up and spat out slave laborers by the thousands, which makes Clara an accessory to war crimes, if not a perpetrator. And when she dares attempt to return to bombed-out Essen, hoping to take refuge with a childhood friend, Fenshaw’s thinking right along with her. No matter where she goes, or what she does, he’s never far behind, and there are plenty of people willing to betray anyone for the right price.

706px-Auschwitz-Birkenau_Complex_-_Oswiecim,_Poland_-_NARA_-_305897

U.S. military intelligence photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 1944, which shows the I. G. Farben installation, lower center (courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I salute Scott’s authorial bravery in attempting to cast a heroine from a war-criminal mold. I’m not sure she succeeds entirely — or, to be precise, whether she tells her tale with enough moral consciousness, having decided, for obvious reasons, to avoid certain enormities. But The German Heiress nevertheless has a few things going for it, and Scott tries to finesse the moral questions, grounding them in family relationships whose participants may or may not have deluded themselves.

To an extent, that works, though the strategy leaves two unmentioned, outsized elephants in the room — the slave labor program in its conception and practice, and the Holocaust. The Third Reich as a systematically murderous, exploitive regime never quite makes it to these pages, in part because the only visible inhuman act occurs on a relatively small scale and appears, in retrospect, only toward the end.

But approach the novel on its given terms, and you have a vigorous narrative peopled by unusual characters. Clara herself, if perhaps too lightly dealt with from a moral standpoint, has a passion to know the truth about her family, especially her beloved father, now interned as a war criminal. Does he deserve that? she wonders. What did he really think when he saw what was happening, because surely, he must have known? Where does that put her?

Her soul-searching redeems her somewhat, and I appreciate the author’s difficulty here, attempting to make a sympathetic character out of a slave overseer. Clara does have a certain appealing warmth and vivacity, and I like how Scott handles a nascent romance with Jakob, a disabled veteran turned black marketeer. The connection grows slowly, incrementally, with back-tracking and deal-cutting involved.

The storytelling keeps a rapid pace, and the pages turn. The plot revolves around Fenshaw’s pursuit and, more importantly, Clara’s uncovering of ugly family secrets that force her to reexamine her moral position and what she’s responsible for. Whether you can accept Clara’s insulation from stark wartime realities may depend on your point of view, but at least the family loyalty comes through, as does her disillusionment when she learns the truth. As for the narrative as a whole, Jakob’s voice enters abruptly, as does that of a young, disturbed boy who doesn’t believe the war has ended. But these bumps even out as the novel progresses, and Jakob steals many of the scenes he’s in. With him, as with Clara, Scott deploys detail with aplomb:

The stranger caught him, gasped at his weight, buckled and then stabilized. His smell hurtled Jakob back to days he didn’t want to remember. It was the smell of the front, of damp wool and oiled leather, of bergamot and citrus eau de cologne that didn’t quite cover the stink of a soldier’s fear. Whoever it was, he was thin, and he was shaking, and for the few moments Jakob had his arms around him, he felt the stranger’s wildly beating heart.

Two weak links mar the novel. I don’t believe Fenshaw for one second, whether it’s his fanatical pursuit of Clara, his broad-brush character, his fascination with her (which even dates from before the war), or his astonishing security lapses that further the plot. Given all these, the end, the second weak link, seems not only melodramatic but highly improbable.

That said, The German Heiress, a debut novel, is a provocative story, and I like those. And since I’m the type who can’t look at a Bayer aspirin bottle without thinking of the company’s infamous, erstwhile parent, I. G. Farben (disbanded after the war), that I sat still for this book instead of throwing it across the room testifies to the author’s talent for diverting me.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Just Three Blocks Apart: Not Our Kind

17 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1947, anti-Semitism, book review, commercial fiction, disabilities, historical fiction, Kitty Zeldis, New York City, romance, stock characterization, tension through the unexpected, World War II

Review: Not Our Kind, by Kitty Zeldis
Harper, 2018. 337 pp. $27

One morning in 1947, Eleanor Moskowitz is on her way to a job interview when two taxicabs collide on a Manhattan street. Eleanor, riding in one, suffers a mild injury, though she’s more upset at missing her interview. But the passenger in the other taxi, Patricia Bellamy, insists on bringing Eleanor to her Park Avenue home and tending to her.

As it happens, Patricia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, needs a tutor, and Eleanor has teaching experience and a Vassar degree. More importantly, Margaux takes to her instantly, as she has to no other person besides her parents and her mother’s brother, her Uncle Tom. As an angry, whiny child suffering a disability — she had polio and walks with a cane — she normally dislikes everyone on sight, so the connection to Eleanor means something to Patricia.

Trouble is, Eleanor’s Jewish, and Patricia’s an anti-Semite — the genteel sort, to be sure, but her husband, Wynn, is louder and more pointed about it. In fact, he’s louder and more pointed about everything, a drunken boor with roving eyes and hands. But the Bellamys hire Eleanor anyway, because Margaux likes her, and they’re desperate for someone to get through to their daughter.

Screen shot from the trailer for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947, which featured John Garfield, one of the era’s great actors, in a supporting part. For this and other “suspect” roles, the House Un-American Activities Committee destroyed him. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Eleanor has her doubts too. As her mother says, these prospective employers are “not our kind,” and the newly hired tutor feels intimidated by their wealth, apparent ease, and, well, perfection, observable even in the building where they live, only three blocks from her own:

Mrs. Bellamy lived in a twelve-story apartment building on the southwest corner of Eighty-Third and Park. Eleanor was more attentive today to the six limestone medallions, each depicting a wreath of fruit and flowers, the four massive Greek columns, two on either side of the door, as well as the black lanterns that were attached to the façade. With its limestone and brick exterior, the building projected a permanence, and even moral rectitude, that made the buildings in her own neighborhood seem almost provisional in contrast.

Zeldis has New York down — the clothing styles, social mores, scenery, and, most germane, workplace anti-Semitism. The author has a gift for the unexpected, the essence of tension, so that even when the plot seems predictable, events don’t turn out quite the way you think. I also like Zeldis’s knack for getting tremendous mileage out of a simple situation that’s actually very complicated, especially once Patricia’s charming, individualist brother happens on the scene and hits it off with Eleanor right away. The Bellamys’ prejudice lurks behind every interaction, as if the elephant in the room were trumpeting loudly, except they try not to hear it. It’s the problem that simply won’t go away, and Zeldis resists any temptation at easy fixes. For the most part, until the last quarter of the novel, the plot unfolds naturally, with no apparent guiding hand.

Where Not Our Kind falls short, I think, lies in the characters, especially the men. Wynn is a cartoon; Zeldis belatedly announces his merits, trying to mitigate his villainy, but you don’t see them. Likewise, though Tom’s charming, he’s elusive, and though I can see Eleanor admire his ease and wish she had it, and that she soaks up his kindness and sensitivity, that’s different from love. I like Patricia and her daughter, who seem real, and Eleanor’s mother, Irina, who can observe that she’s unhappy about decisions Eleanor has made, but that unhappiness isn’t fatal.

The heroine’s another story. I sympathize with Eleanor, but once I finished the book, I tried to remember her flaws and couldn’t. She’s unsure of herself and a little envious, but those hardly count, and she seems remarkably self-possessed, seldom at a loss for the words she needs to stick up for herself. She grows toward feminism without using the term, a worthy theme and apt for the time, but I find Patricia more rounded.

Further, Eleanor’s Jewishness is entirely cultural, and though many novelists draw such characters, I often suspect that they do so merely for the inconvenience that observance causes in the workaday world, or because they’re not confident they can do otherwise. Zeldis plainly can; late in the book, Eleanor recoils inwardly at pork on a plate. She could have, should have done that throughout the narrative–not necessarily as strongly, just to acknowledge her difference, her otherness, which she notes in many other ways.

Finally, Not Our Kind, despite its marvelous descriptions of clothing or architecture, doesn’t feel like 1947. There’s no sense of relief after a war, or even that there was a war, though we’re told that Wynn didn’t fight, and that Patricia lost a brother. There’s nothing about popular culture, politics (as in anti-Communist hysteria, whose roots lay in anti-Semitism), or other goings-on — surprising, given that Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about covert anti-Semitism, came out that year.

I enjoyed reading Not Our Kind, but I don’t think it will stay with me.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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