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Fission in Two Parts: Hannah’s War

09 Monday Mar 2020

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Review: Hannah’s War, by Jan Eliasberg
Little, Brown, 2020. 301 pp. $17

In April 1945, U.S. intelligence has uncovered a security leak at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project is building the atomic bomb. Suspicion falls most heavily on the scientists who’ve circulated a petition demanding ethical constraints on the weapon they’ve worked to invent, whose destructive power remains theoretical. What’s more, one signatory has just sent a telegram to her German counterparts in Europe, presumably to convey military secrets.

Said scientist, the only woman at Los Alamos with a high security clearance, is Dr. Hannah Weiss, an Austrian-Jewish physicist. She’s beautiful, brilliant, and tough to corner, a job that falls to Jack Delaney, superspy and seasoned interrogator. He has seventy-two hours to find out what, if anything, Hannah has told her friends in Germany.

Eliasberg tells this story in two narratives. With the Los Alamos story, she seamlessly integrates Hannah’s prewar work at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where, despite her exceptional gifts, she’s consigned to a basement laboratory, her findings ignored. “Jewish science” can possess no truth in Nazi Germany. Eliasberg says that she has based Hannah on Lise Meitner, who received no credit for discovering nuclear fission, because Otto Hahn, with whom she had worked closely, left her name off the paper they published in 1939 so that their research would be taken seriously. Further, at his Nobel address in 1944, he conveniently omitted mentioning her. That in itself is a story, and though the novel follows a different path from her actual life, the Berlin narrative raises similar historical issues and derives tension from them.

Unfortunately, the Los Alamos sections don’t measure up. To be fair, Eliasberg, a screenwriter, keeps the pages turning rapidly throughout, and her dialog punches hard. When Jack and Hannah square off, the verbal jousting sets off sparks. Better yet, the cat-and-mouse contest does more than furnish the necessities of thrillerdom; the interrogation covers questions of science and morality, the power of life and death, responsibility to individuals versus society at large. I also believe the re-creation of Los Alamos, with its hard partying, personal rivalries, and the tension and desperation of discovery with the world’s future at stake.

But I don’t accept the premise. They’re too quick in Los Alamos to slap handcuffs on Hannah and string her up, the stated justification for which runs as follows: Why would a Jewish refugee collaborate with the enemy? Because she must have slept with that enemy. I’m sure such sexist, anti-Semitic logic had its followers; General Leslie Groves, who commanded the Los Alamos installation, was a nasty piece of work, bigoted and ambitious, as the author portrays him here. But that army or intelligence brass would rush to try Hannah before a military tribunal, threatening to hang her before you can say, “Albert Einstein,” stretches credulity. They would certainly have done more to figure out which secrets she’d passed, and what they were worth.

Are her friends working for Germany or the Soviets? The narrative waffles, and faced with that vagueness, the American spymasters plan to kill off famous German scientists right and left, a hasty, perplexing verdict. It’s also puzzling how, even in April 1945, everyone assumes the European conflict will go on forever, ignoring how Germany was in its last gasps.

In reality, battles still took place, but the Reich posed a greater threat to its citizens judged defeatist than its foreign enemies, and was certainly in no condition to develop or deliver an atomic weapon. Yet, somehow, the Los Alamos scientists greet the news of Germany’s collapse as a surprise.

With the exception of Groves, the army and intelligence characters feel flat, and the way they strut and shout gives the impression that they’re trying not to admit how empty and wrongheaded they are. Even Jack, who receives more authorial care, strikes me as a stock character, the rough, tough guy with the usual manly trappings, who needs the right woman to let him be vulnerable. His role in the novel’s resolution, a clumsy, predictable section, wraps the story briskly but, like the rest of the Los Alamos plot, remains forgettable.

Compare that to the Berlin narrative. As before, surprises and twists abound, but the people seem natural, deeper, more complex. Special kudos to Eliasberg for creating characters whose Jewishness feels real, not a matter of convenience, as evidence of which they spend time and effort trying to practice their faith and cope with anti-Semitic decrees. But the non-Jewish scientists who believe they have their handlers by the tail, only to find out the opposite, make an impression too. As a result, the tension feels higher here than in the other narrative, even though the bomb hasn’t been built yet, and the threats against Hannah are only potential.

Given all that, would the Lise Meitner/Hannah Weiss narrative have made a thriller by itself? It’s a great story, that’s for sure, the gripping part of Hannah’s War.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via an independent publicist, in return for an honest review.

Family Snapshots: Summer of ’69

24 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: Summer of ’69, by Elin Hilderbrand
Little, Brown, 2019. 418 pp. $28

For Kate Foley Levin, the annual family pilgrimage in summer 1969 to her mother’s home in Nantucket will feel sparse and lonely. Her only son has been drafted and is an infantry grunt in Vietnam; any moment, she expects the telegram announcing his death. Kate responds by withdrawing to finds solace in the bottle. Meanwhile, her eldest, pregnant daughter can’t leave Boston to join the family, for her due date is weeks away, and she’s too uncomfortable to travel. Said daughter also suspects her geeky MIT husband, who consults for the Apollo space program, is cheating on her. The next eldest daughter, a contentious soul, has annoyed Kate by making a mess of college and getting arrested at protest marches. But she won’t be there to bother anyone, because she has a job on Martha’s Vineyard, where, unbeknownst to Mom, she falls for a Harvard man who happens to be black.

Jessie Levin, half-sister to these siblings (her father, David, is Kate’s second husband) needs her mother more than ever. Just turned thirteen, she feels utterly bereft without her family, especially her half-brother, to whom she’s very close. She’s also fighting several losing battles, most notably with her bigoted, vicious grandmother, Exalta, which Kate might have helped with, but forget that. One firefight concerns Jessie’s identification with her (purely cultural) Jewishness, a link she shares with her father; she’s freaked out that Exalta’s an anti-Semite.

So we’ve got the Vietnam War, to which the Levins and Foleys are opposed, and a son at risk. We have possible marital infidelity, alcoholism, political protest, interracial romance, and anti-Semitism. As if that weren’t enough, we have sexual and physical abuse, feminism, Jessie’s sexual awakening, and abortion. And oh, yes, Jessie’s reading The Diary of Anne Frank for school. Summer of ’69 purports to be beach reading, but that’s one hell of a load.

Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, July 21, 1969 (courtesy NASA, via Wikimedia Commons)

What we don’t have is the Sixties — the lingo, the vibe, the sense that this was an unusual decade, the belief that so much was possible yet so much was wrong, and that you felt compelled to take sides and make a statement. Hilderbrand shows none of that. She’s strong on fashion, issues, and headlines, but those are period details, museum exhibits. The summer of 1969 was my last before my senior year of high school, so we share a fascination for that moment (she was born that July). But, much as I enjoy re-creations of that time and salute her attempt, I don’t think she gets it.

In her favor, she can keep the pages turning. She’s a keen observer of family dynamics, and she manages to thread several narratives without missing a stitch. In her world, people don’t talk to each other, and the closer they are by blood, the less they say, because they have secrets to hide. She also has a friendly, drop-in-for-a-chat-dear-reader tone that makes her narrative pleasant company, like an easy-listening radio station.

But Hilderbrand’s ease cuts two ways. Despite the pain the characters suffer and the issues she raises, which couldn’t be more momentous, the treatment feels one-dimensional, like posed family snapshots. Everything seems too far away to hurt anybody for real. With so much simmering conflict and so little honesty, you’d think more would explode, and that’s why I finished the book. I wanted to know how Hilderbrand would resolve these conflicts—and I now know I wandered into Never-Never Land.

One problem’s the characterization. Kate’s controlling and craven by turns, and it’s not clear why. David’s a good guy with no depth, and the older sisters represent themes but lack compelling internal lives. Jesse’s the only character who seems reflective about what matters:

Jessie thought all grown-ups lived in a different atmosphere, one that was like a cool, clear gel. Adults had problems, Jessie knew — money and their children — but one of the benefits of reaching adulthood, she thought, was that you outgrew the raw, hot, chaotic emotions of adolescence.

Yet this girl, intelligent and emotionally tuned in, gets upset that Anne Frank dies; she thinks the book shouldn’t have ended like that. The Holocaust! Who knew? Hilderbrand warps her narrative up, down, and sideways to let her characters find redemption and forgiveness and throws in the world’s most famous Holocaust victim, as though Anne defined those values. But don’t get me started on writers who co-opt a Jewish girl as a Christian saint, a Joan of Arc who turned the other cheek–a travesty encouraged, in part, by Anne’s father, who sanitized his daughter’s diary for publication.

Let’s stay with Jessie, a perceptive, nominally Jewish child whose brother’s in the Viet Cong’s crosshairs. Her heart’s been broken, and she has a sense of painful reality, even if she doesn’t always understand the why or how. Maybe she unconsciously connects her brother’s fate with Anne’s. They’re both so good; how can they die?

That’s a worthy question, but Hilderbrand doesn’t stay there. Having shown how bad things can almost happen to good people, she bails them out by snapping her authorial fingers, relieving them of the hard work of living. Maybe that’s what a beach book is supposed to do, keep you at a distance from work. But in relying on that illusion of substance, Summer of ’69 trivializes its subject matter.

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

Holocaust Hallucination: Cesare

10 Monday Feb 2020

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Review: Cesare, by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue, 2020. 365 pp. $27

Berlin, 1943. Amid Germany’s war against the world and murder of European Jewry, there are many secrets dangerous to know, not least that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence, has a private agenda. Whenever he can, he hides Jews, mostly German Jews, of whom a few thousand may still be found in the capital. Most are tenuously protected by marriage to Christians; others live underground in ghettos that even the SS doesn’t bother to penetrate. But the biggest secret is that Canaris uses his best agent, the widely celebrated Cesare, to try to make sure these hunted people stay safe.

Er, wait. The head of the Abwehr rescues Jews? His best agent’s persona is a household word?

Wilhelm Canaris, executed for treason weeks before the war ended, remains a mystery as to the extent of his dissidence. This photo dates from 1940 (courtesy German Federal Archives, via Wikimedia Commons)

While floating through the dream that is this novel, once or twice I had to check the historical record, just for grounding. Concerning one particularly stunning instance, which I can’t divulge because it would give too much away, I found that Charyn reports history as it happened. So however strange Cesare may be, the truth may be even stranger. Does it matter?

No. And there’s plenty of powerful fiction here, starting with the protagonist. Cesare’s real name is Erik Holdermann; six years earlier, in 1937, he rescued a tramp from a severe beating by a group of hoodlums. The tramp was Canaris, and that made Erik’s fortune. But what he does with it is something else. Cesare takes his sobriquet from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, an expressionist film of 1920 in which Conrad Veidt (remember him as Major Strasser, in Casablanca?) plays a somnambulist slave who sleeps in a coffin and murders people while in a dream state. And just as Dr. Caligari explored the horrors that occur between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and oblivion, Charyn wants to show you the nightmare that built and characterizes the Third Reich, not least of which is its citizens’ refusal to face their murderous reality.

This warped image describes life from the ground up, at least for a certain privileged class. Every form of entertainment attacked as “degenerate” by the regime exists within blocks of Gestapo headquarters, tolerated by the authorities, many of whom enjoy its frenzies. Such dualities apply everywhere. Cesare’s great, obsessive love, Lisalein von Hecht, the half-Jewish daughter of a banker, plays many roles, or appears to — his ally and protector, his betrayer, wife of a Party muckamuck, lover of a cabaret chanteuse, communist, rescuer of Jews. Her father helped bankroll Hitler because he feared the Reds more than the Nazis and assumed the vulgar corporal would be easily managed. Even Cesare himself, though not Jewish, was looked after by Jewish prostitutes as a young orphan; and when he must penetrate an inner sanctum he can’t enter any other way, despite his reputed shape-shifting skills, he wears a black uniform of the SS. To the Jews, there’s no doubt about his identity:

The ghetto had its own golem, not twisted out of clay, but a man of bone, blood, and gristle, born in Berlin. This golem had never harmed a single Jew. He often traveled about in the boots and silver sleeves of an SS captain. How wily their golem was. He mimicked their enemies, and could make a gauleiter [district leader] disappear. And if their savior was a somnambulist beholden to a white-haired German admiral, what could it matter to them? The coffin Herr Cesare slept in was secreted somewhere in [the Jewish ghetto]. And woe to any man who rocked that coffin and interfered with Cesare’s sleep.

With such portrayals and references — throw in Kafka and Melville — Cesare is a literary novel par excellence. But it’s also a disturbing, hallucinatory thriller, with as many plot twists and double crosses as the number of angels capable of dancing on the head of a pin. Throughout, the author immerses you in the hell that was the Third Reich. As with other thrillers, there’s plenty of sex, but it’s mostly desperate, typical of German activities then, rather than erotic. At times, it’s hard to tell whether female characters are mere sex objects (sometimes for each other), or whether Charyn’s trying to turn James Bond on his perfect, Casanova head.

What I do know is that Cesare possesses the reader, in a howl of pain and madness. Yet I didn’t feel suffocated, only glad I could close the cover and realize I wasn’t living inside it. And with this novel, Charyn has shown me what fiction can do.

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

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

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Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

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

Daring Rescues: The Flight Portfolio

20 Monday May 2019

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Review: The Flight Portfolio, by Julie Orringer
Knopf, 2019. 553 pp. $28

In 1940, Varian Fry, literary scholar and foreign policy historian, arrives in Marseille facing an impossible job: pry a handful of stateless, mostly Jewish refugees out of Vichy France and get them to safety. They belong to the intellectual and artistic cream of Europe, which poses a difficult question, whether it’s moral to save Marc Chagall or André Breton while letting nobodies die. In any event, Vichy won’t grant exit visas; the police have informers everywhere; the American consul in Marseilles, Hugh Fullerton, won’t help; and the U.S. State Department, patently anti-Semitic, sends threatening cables to Varian.

Varian Fry has long been a hero of mine; you’ll know why if you see the small exhibit about him at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. So I was very much looking forward to reading The Flight Portfolio, whose first hundred pages will take your breath away. You get the full flavor of Marseille, the perilous work of escape, the constant setbacks, arrests, exposures — did I say, “No; and furthermore”? — and how absolutely out of touch Varian’s Stateside supervisors are about the danger, the stakes, the costs, the methods required.

On the bright side, helpful people just show up at the committee office in Marseille, like Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, whose skill, coolness under fire, judgment, and private funds keep the effort afloat. Orringer does a terrific job with these secondary characters (these two women, incidentally, are real historical figures) and how Varian learns from them to handle a job no one could have prepared him for. Together, their inventions are ingenious, their subterfuge and play-acting essential, their courage and humanity the stuff of legend.

Meanwhile, you read this in prose that could only come from a Muse herself:

The walk from his hotel took him down the boulevard d’Athènes and across the aorta of Marseille, the Canebière, where diners lounged at café tables and jazz angled from the open restaurant windows despite the post-occupation ban. The street smelled of diesel fuel and cardamom and wet gutters, of tobacco and women’s perfume.… At this hour the port was still faintly illuminated by a horizon line of brilliant yellow, the last liquid dregs of a sunset that had insisted its corals and ochres through the fog. But in the streets, darkness had already fallen; the alleys of the port district snaked into ill-lit caverns on either side of the boulevard.

Yet despite all that, The Flight Portfolio disappoints me. Partly that comes from the repetitive rescue process, similar to a revolving door. For instance, when Chagall refuses, at first, to heed Varian’s warnings that he’s in danger, there’s Walter Benjamin, the eminent philosopher, to consider; and after him, Walter Mehring, the poet and satirist of the Nazi regime. Each person’s case differs, and the traps and obstacles vary too. Yet, when one refugee makes it through the door (or not), another steps up. Despite the myriad complications and tension that results, it never spirals upward. That’s the nature of the story.

Perhaps to add context — personal and political — Orringer invents Elliott Grant, a former lover from Varian’s Harvard days, and ties him to the escape narrative. (Varian is bisexual; his wife, Eileen, remains an off-stage presence.) Grant doesn’t appeal to me; he seems like a golden boy too conscious of his aura, and a snob to boot. He’s there to teach Varian the symbolic link between saving hunted refugees and being hunted oneself as a homosexual, but that doesn’t click into place until the last hundred pages. During the huge chunk in the middle, Grant’s presence almost always leads me to ask why I’m reading about him when the clock is running out on the great intellectuals of Europe. The revolving door gains no tension, and in fact slows down.

Orringer wishes to argue that Varian’s devotion to the cause results partly from his sexual identification. Fair enough; but if so, must this home truth elude him for so long? I’m particularly puzzled because he readily grasps a different moral parallel, regarding a shameful incident from his past, which Orringer introduces as though it’s crucial, yet makes little use of it. I could have read more about that. I’d have also liked to hear more about Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, and Vice-Consul Harry Bingham, who disobeys his boss to aid Varian, and about the others who do much of the clandestine work.

It’s a daunting task, biographical fiction — what do you include, omit, embellish, or invent? Orringer pours her heart out for The Flight Portfolio, and I admire her imagination and gift for putting it on the page. All the same, for me, this novel remains earthbound.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Romanian Tragedy: The Girl They Left Behind

04 Monday Mar 2019

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Review: The Girl They Left Behind, by Roxanne Veletzos
Atria, 2018. 353 pp. $27

One horrific night in January 1941, police and paramilitaries in Bucharest drag thousands of Jews from their homes and murder them. A young couple, fearing the worst, abandons their not-quite-four-year-old daughter in hope that someone will take her in. Someone does; and through great good fortune and personal connections, a childless couple, Anton and Despina Goza, adopt her and name her Natalia. Even better, adoptive parents and child make a practically seamless fit, and, for better and worse, Natalia remembers no other life, no other family.

Luckier yet, the Gozas have a happy home, despite wartime shortages, bombing raids, and the German presence that comes with being a Nazi satellite. Anton has a successful stationery business, built by hard work and an abundant reservoir of personal warmth, and the Gozas want for very little. Natalia even has a piano to play, at which she seems a young virtuoso. Ironically, the real troubles begin after the war’s end, when the Soviets come to Romania. Stalin’s men intend to root out “bourgeois counterrevolutionaries,” as in anyone who’s got two pennies to rub together. That puts the Gozas in the crosshairs.

Bucharest, late 1930s, Bratianu and Magheru boulevards (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain

How this drama plays out is the greatest strength of The Girl They Left Behind. Veletzos excels at scenes revealing the nitty-gritty of Soviet rule — the uniformed thugs who “inspect” private homes for signs of wealth; the joyless, muzzled schoolroom; the several families packed into one apartment, with a Party informer in their midst. Natalia’s past, though not unique in Holocaust literature, packs a punch too, and the reckoning you know is coming hangs over the narrative like a storm cloud.

Unfortunately, I think Veletzos could have allowed a full-fledged hurricane and derived even more power from it. One wind that never even gets a chance to blow concerns Natalia’s reaction to her private discovery (which happens in very contrived fashion) that she’s adopted. Though surprised, she shuts the news from her mind, which seems rather nonchalant, especially for a teenager, who’d likely be trying to figure out who she is. She never asks herself (or anyone else) who the fugitives might have been, though she knows the date of her abandonment and could have put two and two together. It’s as though Veletzos, having evoked the Holocaust, wishes to leave that behind, like the girl.

Later, when Natalia understands the complete story, she still fails to plumb that aspect of herself. But even without reflecting on her Jewish heritage, she’d surely imagine who her birth parents might have been, why they fled, and what sort of blood runs in her veins. She might also ask why her adoptive parents never told her. But Natalia never holds onto criticism of them, only about others.

Then again, the narrative idealizes Anton and Despina. Consider this first description of him:

Despina could not help thinking that he looked handsome in his striped silk pajamas, even at this early hour, his short-cropped hair rumpled, the faint smell of last night’s whiskey still on his breath. He began brushing his teeth, humming a tune to himself. Sometimes his boundless optimism rattled her a little, but it was part of his charm. And her husband was certainly a man blessed with undeniable charm.… It wasn’t just her on whom Anton had this effect but practically everyone who knew him. His lightness of being was infectious, irresistible. Women turned their heads as he passed them on the street, looking like Cary Grant in his suits tailored to perfection, a white angora scarf draped over his broad shoulders…

Sounds like someone I’d like to meet, yet surely Anton would show a blemish once in a while, especially given the stress of war and two foreign occupations. Despina’s messier, but in a clumsy way, toward mania — first, as a woman desperate for a child, and then as a fiercely protective, almost lunatic, mother. Why does such intense maternal love in fiction so often require screaming fits or cold, manipulative silences? Grief and passion feel more authentic when they’re not histrionic. What’s more, the portrayal strikes me as antifeminist, as though we can only understand such an overwhelming attachment through hysteria. M. L. Stedman made the same mistake in her otherwise excellent novel, The Light between Oceans, so I don’t mean to single Veletzos out. In both cases, though, I think a flaw other than craziness would have served better.

If The Girl They Left Behind sometimes seems predictable, that’s partly a function of the story, which sets up certain expectations and delivers too reliably, and partly because of characters who react the way they have before. That’s why I like the scenes you can’t anticipate, like those describing Soviet rule; and since I knew very little about Romania before I read the novel, I drank all that in. What could have been a powerful, unforgettable story fails to rise above the poignant, but for some readers, that will be enough.

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

Saving Your Life (and the World): The Lake on Fire

25 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: The Lake on Fire, by Rosellen Brown
Sarabande, 2018. 349 pp. $18

Why in the world is a group of Ruthenian Jews from Zhitomir trying to homestead in Wisconsin? That’s the question Chaya-Libbe Shadarowsky asks herself, and by the time she’s seventeen, in 1891, she’s come to a few conclusions. So when her parents pull her out of the school she loves, which has expanded her outlook and given her hope, and plan to marry her off within the community, she must make an excruciating choice.

Chaya loved her parents and felt their difficulties — her mother breathed for them, she was their pulsing machine. She admired her father for the dignity of his commitments. He was a man who bled for others, who ought to have been given a chance to work for the well-being of strangers. But they were living someone else’s life, she was certain of that. Driven to improve their chances, they had chosen wrong, and were covered with the dust of failing farmers. They seemed to attract catastrophe — the rain that soaked the hay before they got it in, the calf that strangled in the womb and could not be pulled out until its poor mother expired, the wind — so harsh it could not be measured — that took down the chimney pipe and let the rain flood in and soak the quilts and bother the babies. Each, if you traced it back a few steps, was the result of their incompetence.

She dreams of escape though she has no money, a struggling grasp of English, and no idea what she could do to keep body and soul together. But Chaya is nothing if not resourceful, and when she makes it to Chicago, her ten-year-old brother, Asher, unexpectedly tags along. His presence delights her, for she loves him more than anyone, yet also terrifies her, and not just because she now must support two people on invisible means. He’s ungovernable, and his impulsive nature, which seeks unfamiliar words and experience, renders him incapable of understanding obstacles, especially other people’s feelings or private property. Though Chaya worries he’ll be arrested for petty theft, the notion that her little brother might be a sociopath or harbor deep rage never occurs to her.

Both siblings bend their talents to social protest. Asher scrambles for a living as sneak thief and wunderkind and befriends the men building the World’s Columbian Exposition, due to open in 1893. With inequality visible on every corner, he becomes a political radical, whereas Chaya, committed to working within the system, crosses paths with Jane Addams and other social reformers from the higher classes. The juxtaposition poses the chief question of The Lake on Fire: Once you see oppression and suffering, how do you respond?

The novel explores several answers, each of which finds representation in a particular character or characters, achieving a universality in the particular. That’s not so unusual; more remarkable is how Brown proceeds with such subtlety that no one, ever, sounds like a talking head. The Lake on Fire therefore offers a primer on characterization, and it’s a demanding art. Brown takes her time, because she wants you to see everything she does and enter her narrative. This is what literary fiction aspires to, painstaking vividness that feels effortless. Readers who assume that portraying physical background, feelings, and character to such an extent must inevitably be highbrow or boring don’t know what they’re missing.

However, the unhurried approach works only because Brown constantly introduces the unexpected through the characters’ reactions, particularly to unforeseen intrusions that no one else would notice, but which mean the world to them. It could be a strange-looking dog on a railroad station platform, a manner of dress, the weather, an odor that carries particular associations, but they all spark a search for meaning and keep the reader close. Once or twice, I wanted the internal narrative to stop, and the external one to resume. But this wasn’t because the story bored me, only that I’d gotten the point, and the tension made me impatient.

More seriously, Asher gets under my skin in the wrong way. After a while, he becomes hard to like, and though I don’t demand liking in fiction, the reasons I dislike him — his self-absorption and lack of empathy — evaporate when it’s thematically inconvenient. If he’s unempathic in general, how does he wind up caring so much about the downtrodden men whom the city gobbles up and spits out? Chaya, usually so clear-eyed, seems to overlook or forgive her brother’s bad behavior on reflex and wonders why others can’t. Her stubbornness paints her (and the author) into a corner, the outlet from which strikes the only contrived note in the book.

Still, The Lake on Fire bowled me over, a splendid example of what literary fiction can be.

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

Blood and Money: House of Gold

18 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: House of Gold, by Natasha Solomons
Putnam, 2018. 433 pp. $26

Greta Goldbaum, a spirited young woman in 1911 Vienna who thinks nothing of going barefoot when her shoes pinch or contesting conventions that make no sense to her, dreams of choosing her own life. Alas, Vienna’s no place for free spirits, nor is the Goldbaum family the type to tolerate them. As international bankers (patterned after the Rothschilds), the Goldbaums have branches in various European capitals, connected by blood ties, common interests, and a remarkable network of couriers. So it is that distant Goldbaum cousins traditionally intermarry, which is why Greta has been betrothed to her kinsman Albert, in London, whom she’s never met. Neither of them has any say in the match.

But that doesn’t mean Greta has to like her bridegroom, or vice versa, and from her point of view, there’s much to dislike. Pedantic, dull, and as straight-laced as they come, Albert has one great passion, collecting butterflies. Greta finds that utterly appalling and cruel. For his part, Albert fears that his stubborn, immodest wife is always seconds away from attracting the wrong kind of attention and creating a scandal.

Passing of the Parliament Bill of 1911 in the House of Lords, Samuel Begg (courtesy Gutenberg Project via Wikimedia Commons)

I seldom read sagas because, fairly or not, I assume them to involve melodrama, contrivance, and an obsession with the surfaces of wealth and power that don’t interest me. But I made an exception for House of Gold, and I’m glad I did. Solomons needs no melodrama or contrivance to tell her tale, because she adeptly introduces the unexpected without resorting to plot twists. A passing sight or ordinary occurrence, unremarkable in itself, becomes a focal point for the characters to seek meaning. Consequently, Greta and Albert reveal their many facets naturally, as does most of the rather large cast of characters. Toward the end, the narrative veers toward contrivance, but even there, Solomons reclaims these moments somewhat by having her characters grapple with their humility.

Also, Solomons has tackled a thorny subject, the bigoted canard about Jews and money, and done so with surehanded brio. If anyone or anything purely represents anti-Semitic delusions, it’s the Rothschilds, which demands that an author conduct a deep, consequential examination of wealth and power. House of Gold delivers. It portrays the delicate balance the Goldbaums must strike, aware that however wealthy and/or ennobled they are, they’re outsiders and always will be. Their family name may permit a demarche in the halls of government, even to the palace or the prime minister’s office, but they know what’s said about them and how precarious their reputations are. Moreover, none can ever be sure that outsiders deal with them candidly; something’s always in play, even in the wedding presents lavished on Greta and Albert:

Two saloons had been set aside for this purpose, and yet still they were not large enough. Clients of the Goldbaums from all over Europe had sent tokens expressing felicity and gratitude, and the silent hope of generous terms in future negotiations. Tables heaved with silver dinner services from President Fallières, and Persian rugs from Emperor Franz Joseph himself. The British empire was expressed in miniature: hand-painted wallpaper from China, a carved chest from the maharajas of Rajasthan filled with finely colored rugs, an ivory jewelry box from Ceylon.… Greta escaped the minute she could, wishing that so many strangers had not been quite so generous, requiring so many hundreds of thank-you letters. If she had remained a moment longer she might have overheard Albert remark that he found the habit of ingratiating gift-giving obsequious and excessive.

Solomons means to recount history, and to some extent, she manages. Against the Goldbaum backdrop, she portrays the Liberal reform of 1911, which diminished the power of the House of Lords; the rise of feminism; and, most significantly to the plot, the First World War, which threatens to destroy the banking house and the family. I like how she conveys the home front, in its shortages and prejudices, the latter of which keep Greta from venturing out where people will hear her Austrian accent. Less successful or convincing is the narrative conceit that America entered the war to protect the extensive loans made to the Allies, a notion that serves the plot but not history and involves an information dump or three.

My other serious complaint involves Otto, Greta’s beloved brother, who needs a flaw or two and more depth in general. I understand the forces that restrain him, but though he appears to have dreams as wide as the heavens — he’s a brilliant astronomer — I don’t know what they are.

Still, I like House of Gold and think it’s worth reading for the central issues explored, the two principal characters, and the myriad details of everyday life that emerge from the narrative.

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

Perpetrators: A Meal in Winter

04 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: A Meal in Winter, by Hubert Mingarelli
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor
New Press, 2018. 138 pp. $15

One brutal Polish winter in an unspecified year during World War II, three German soldiers embark on a mission they dislike because remaining in camp would require them to do what they like even less. Emmerich, Bauer, and the unnamed narrator evade their despised lieutenant, a self-important martinet, to go hunting one of “them.” If the trio brings their quarry back to camp, they’ll be spared having to execute those prisoners already collected. But if they pretend to have caught one and shot him or her on sight, the lieutenant won’t believe them and will be certain to assign them the mass killing duty, which disturbs their dreams and troubles their consciences.

Since “one of them” means a Jew, A Meal in Winter is therefore a Holocaust novel, and an unusual one, at that. Not only does Mingarelli focus entirely on Emmerich, Bauer, and their unnamed comrade — the perpetrators — the author casts them strictly as men ordered to perform a task they hate, which poses moral dilemmas. The real sadist, therefore, is the unseen lieutenant, who has placed the three in their predicament. What’s more, they seem neutral, if not indifferent, to Jews, whereas a Polish civilian who happens on them is a vicious anti-Semite. Emmerich, Bauer, and the narrator are reservists, meaning they’re older men, and Emmerich has an adolescent son he’s worried about, an anxiety his buddies try to help them with.

No Holocaust story I’ve ever heard starts from such a focus on individuals rather than mass actions, but that doesn’t mean A Meal in Winter couldn’t have happened. Mingarelli plainly wants as spare and simple a narrative as he can get, preventing the perpetrators from hiding in a large group. That approach works well in some ways, but others, not.

The understated prose conveys the frigid, barren winter landscape, the physical difficulties of coping with it, the trio’s attempts to pull through their hardships together, and, from the outset, having to choose between unpalatable alternatives. Such is their state of mind that when they capture a Jew and find an empty house in which to warm up, that counts as a special occasion:

When I turned around, there was smoke floating from the chimney. The sight lifted my heart. Added to the fact that we had avoided the shootings and that there had been no wind since the morning, it was no exaggeration to say that this had been a good day.

And of course Emmerich’s sharp eyes [which had spotted their captive] had made it an even better day, for tomorrow we would undoubtedly avoid the shootings again, if there were any. Bringing one back meant we would have the right to go out searching again. Nobody would be giving us evil looks…. Unlike today, we would even be able to wait for the kitchen to open so we could get our rations. We would be entitled to all of that tomorrow.

So far, so good. A Meal in Winter is a haunting novel, to be sure, a razor-sharp moral tale that attempts to explain how men caught up in a heinous crime contribute their share of it. Mingarelli, a writer of great subtlety, never lets his characters soapbox; like most soldiers, they’re largely inarticulate, especially about feelings. So it is that when Emmerich frets about his son at home, and whether the boy will take up smoking — what the soldiers do plenty of — I read that as his prayer that his son will never have to hunt and kill anybody.

But there’s one problem with A Meal in Winter. Emmerich, Bauer, and friend are still killers, and they’re chasing down victims who pose no threat. They’re not fighting off Russian soldiers or Polish partisans; in fact, they’re not fighting at all, because the people they’re hunting have no weapons. Like most soldiers, these three concentrate on how to stay warm, eat enough, and get safely through another day — but that program requires them to murder innocents. Consequently, they’re unsympathetic — at least, to me — and if I’m supposed to be impressed that they tell the anti-Semitic Pole to quit foaming at the mouth, forget it.

Conversely, if Mingarelli wants to show how these men kill without malice or conviction, you could argue that’s even worse than if they were die-hard anti-Semites. Granted, a key strength of this novel is how Mingarelli leaves plenty of space for the reader to slip into the story and ask, “What would I do in this situation?” But though I understand the soldiers’ plight, which Mingarelli describes in remarkably few yet vivid words, I can’t call them victims, care about them particularly, or identify with them; they’re moral placeholders, no more.

Nevertheless, as a moral exercise, A Meal in Winter will challenge readers, and there’s much to be said for that. This slim novel won’t take you much time — I spent longer writing this review than I did reading the book — yet I’m confident it will stay with you.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, where this commentary appeared in shorter, different form.

Just Three Blocks Apart: Not Our Kind

17 Monday Dec 2018

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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.