Tag Archives: World War II

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.

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.

More Fun Than a Barrel of Surrealists: Costalegre

13 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: Costalegre, by Courtney Maum
Tin House, 2019. 227 pp. $20

In 1937, Leonora Calaway gathers artists known as “degenerates” in Hitlerian judgment and spirits them to Costalegre, a (fictional) resort in the Mexican jungle. Her guests include the reigning Surrealists of Europe, whose work she champions (and often buys), and with whom she’s had love affairs, past or ongoing. The heat and insects are crushing, egos combust, and no conversation takes place without vicious backbiting. Leonora’s immune, so long as everyone does what she says; and since she’s paying, they usually do.

You can imagine, then, what this nest of vipers would feel like to Lara, Leonora’s unloved, unlooked-after fifteen-year-old daughter. Lara Calaway shows artistic talent and gets the chance to practice it, but what she wants most is to be seen by her mother, understood even a little, to be put somewhere she can grow and mature, which Costalegre isn’t.

Leonora’s closely based on Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy collector who left her stamp on modern art, and who, in fact, protected artists from persecution while behaving abominably in most other respects. Her long-suffering daughter, Pegeen, supplied the model for Lara, and it’s her voice that tells this harrowing story, in diary entries.

The Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, as seen from the Grand Canal (courtesy G. Lanting via Wikimedia Commons)

And voice means everything here. I admire how Maum has crafted Lara’s — naïve yet painfully knowing, resigned yet yearning for what she can’t have. She refuses to be overawed by the “loonies,” as she calls her mother’s artist friends, so she perceives their arrogance, selfishness, greed, and lack of empathy for anyone else. Yet she so longs for something to happen, something interesting, that at first, she hopes for better, even as she has her doubts:

All the other loonies are coming on a boat, and I spent a lot of time scanning the ocean for them. For a pirate ship. That’s what they should be on, really, a lively pirate ship. Mum told me the artists would be held for ages at customs and that it was silly to look for them when I could play a game with the ones we already had, but it didn’t seem that far-fetched to imagine one of the Spaniards floating calmly on a canvas or flying on some swan.

But her angry pessimism lies just below the surface. “No one in this world cares about anyone but themselves, especially not these artists, the most famous, the most stupid, the worst in all the world.” She’s also often clear-eyed about Leonora, who “doesn’t know what to do with other women except try to dress like them.”

One of the artists, who doesn’t live in the house but keeps a small ranch where he also has his studio, may be Lara’s salvation, she hopes, someone with whom to have a genuine conversation. This potential connection drives the story and creates a surprising amount of tension, further proof that plot points aren’t necessarily what make you turn the pages. However, I dislike the way Maum enacts this hope of Lara’s, and therefore the resolution of the novel, which leaves me wanting more, as unsatisfied as Lara has been.

My other objection has to do with history. I don’t mind that Maum has brought her artists to Mexico instead of New York, where Guggenheim actually installed them, as the author notes in an afterword. I think that this novel benefits from an exotic, incomprehensible setting, parallel in Lara’s mind to the richness all around that she can’t touch, and which isn’t meant for her. Rather, what rings false is how the characters keep expecting war to break out in Europe any day; it’s too early for ominous predictions. The artists discuss the Anschluss, Hitler’s union between Germany and Austria, illegal by the treaty that ended the First World War, and though that’s frightening, it’s still only March 1938. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, for instance, hadn’t happened yet, though it would shortly.

You can readily understand why these artists had to leave Spain or Germany, but to have them expect that the shooting will begin any moment makes them either seers or paranoid, which undermines what they’ve said. Further, they offer no reasons except for their fears, which nobody doubts or demands an explanation for. Yet Maum is particular about the timing. I think it far more probable that these artists worry about what their native lands have become, and that they can’t go home again, maybe ever. War sounds too drastic, almost theatrical, which does them, and the narrative, no service.

Still, I enjoyed reading Costalegre, and if you like eccentric characters — loonies — you’ll have your fill here.

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

Playing Favorites: The Wartime Sisters

17 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: The Wartime Sisters, by Lynda Cohen Loigman
St. Martins, 2019. 285 pp. $28

Talk about sibling rivalry. From the moment Ruth Kaplan’s younger sister, Millie, first breathes oxygen, the older girl ceases to exist. No one sees her, pays attention, listens, or thinks she has any talents a girl needs. Oh, sure, she’s bright, bookish, and well organized, but since when have those qualities attracted a husband? Not in Brooklyn in the late 1930s, at any rate, when Ruth comes of age, as a serious young woman studying accounting at college. And not so long as thoroughly modern Millie’s around, cheerful, pretty in a way that turns heads, and easygoing.

Do Mama and Papa Kaplan try to balance the rivalry or combat it in any way? On the contrary; they do their best to create and perpetuate it:

Though Ruth’s tiny transgressions were few and far between, they never seemed to escape her mother’s notice. Any misstep Ruth made was a short, shallow wrinkle on an otherwise smooth and pristine tablecloth. Millie’s slipups, by contrast, were like a full glass of burgundy tipped over onto clean white damask. To their mother’s discerning eye, Ruth’s wrinkles were conspicuous. But her sister’s stains were overlooked and hastily covered — anything so that the meal could continue being served.

What a chilly portrait Loigman has created, a premise so simply elegant, with so few moving parts, that there should be no heavy machinery required to create power, poignancy, or depth. Ruth escapes Brooklyn, marrying Arthur, a decent guy, supposedly as dull and plodding as herself, a whiz kid who, in the war years, gets posted to the federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, to do weapons research. Millie’s no-good boyfriend, handsome and dashing but worthless to all eyes but hers, marries her and enlists after Pearl Harbor, also leaving behind a young son, Michael.

The Springfield Armory’s experimental workshop, 1923. In the right background, wearing a lab coat, stands John Garand, inventor of the rifle that became standard army issue in World War II (courtesy National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this part of the story best. Told in flashback, the narrative shows how the sisters’ estrangement only hardens with time. Kaplan mère is quite a piece of work, vicious and controlling. Love is sweet, she says, but it tastes better with bread, and she preaches to Millie the unalterable fantasy that the girl will marry a fabulously rich man who takes care of all her wants, every single second, smitten by her beauty and charm. My grandmother’s version was, “It’s just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one,” which led her to campaign, hard, against my father choosing my mother. So I’m right there with Loigman in all this.

Indeed, when Loigman lets character drive her narrative, which she does until about the halfway point, The Wartime Sisters packs a punch. After that, however, the contrived story takes over. The sibling rivalry, though still essential, gets diluted by the presence of too many other voices, and the narrative descends into predictable melodrama. Loigman might have redeemed this had the sisters confronted one another properly, with a knockdown, drag-out fight that’s been brewing all their lives. Instead, when their obligatory battle arrives, it peters out much too soon — and, even worse, I get the impression that the author has played favorites, tipping the scales. One sister apologizes; one doesn’t, pleading that she wasn’t responsible. Baloney. It takes two to tango.

The prose style reads almost like nonfiction, practically devoid of metaphor. However, I like the dialogue very much, and the author uses it to create short, powerful scenes. The best concern the sisters and, later, Lillian, wife of the commanding officer at the armory, whose upbringing was even more harrowing than theirs and forms a point of comparison. But too many characters seem vacant, whether Ruth’s daughters, the nasty, bigoted busybody wife that probably every military installation must have, or the caricature of Mama Kaplan, a dreadful person with no apparent redeeming features.

Strangely, The Wartime Sisters might have worked had Loigman merely let the sisters slug it out. But once a subplot takes over, the sisters have no chance to get at one another, and the narrative follows the expected route. Ironically, making those extra pieces fit probably demands more work, when filling out the characters already present might have sufficed. It’s too bad; The Wartime Sisters has its moments. I just wish there were more of them.

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.

Are We Downhearted?: Dear Mrs. Bird

31 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Dear Mrs. Bird, by AJ Pearce
Scribner, 2018. 281 pp. $26

Emmeline Lake has always wanted to be a journalist, and since it’s 1940, and London is being bombed almost nightly, how better to do her bit than as an intrepid reporter? She already volunteers for the Auxiliary Fire Service, answering telephone calls during Luftwaffe raids. But though she enjoys the work and the camaraderie, Emmy believes she has more to her and more to give. So when she sees an ad from what she thinks is the London Evening Chronicle for an assistant, she applies right away. Her friend Marigold, known as Bunty — don’t ask why; this is England — encourages her to celebrate the start of a sparkling career in reportage. Emmy, the optimistic, hopeful sort, eats it up, and pretty soon, everybody who knows her is congratulating her on her big break into journalism.

Aldwych Underground station used as an air-raid shelter, 1940 (courtesy Imperial War Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

It never occurs to Emmy that, as a junior assistant, she’s more likely to find her typing skills an asset than creative get-up-and-go. Nor does the way she practically walks into the job for the asking set off any alarm bells. Rather, she makes the unhappy discovery that she’s on a different floor from the Evening Chronicle, and it might as well be the moon. Emmy has gotten herself a job as typist to the redoubtable Mrs. Henrietta Bird, the Dear Abby of Woman’s Friend magazine, though a more apt description might be Dear Queen of Hearts. Mrs. Bird doesn’t exactly say, “Off with her head!” But she does shout, and she refuses to answer, or even read, any letter that has the least bit of Unpleasantness in it. The few replies she writes suggest that her empathy, if she ever had any, was jellied in aspic sometime around 1911. There may be a war on, and women are asked to bear many burdens of which men know nothing, all while remaining completely unflappable, cheerful, and physically attractive. But Mrs. Bird knows nothing of this and would rather not hear about it.

Emmy cares, however, and knows how to respond, or thinks she does. And since her boss is often out, that leaves the chance open for mischief, or, as Emmy sees it, offering help to those in need. I’ll leave you to guess what happens.

Pearce captures a certain spirit of the time, an honest, cheery, keep-your-chin-up mood for which beleaguered Londoners enduring the Blitz became famous. Lissa Evans, for one, has written about the other side of that spectrum, those who pretended selflessness or patriotism but were really on the take. Yet there’s no doubt that young women like Emmy existed, and if part of Dear Mrs. Bird seems fanciful, it’s also irresistibly charming:

Today, London was operating under a low and dreary grey sky, the sort that looked like a giant boy had flung off his school jumper and accidentally covered up the West End. Braving the cold, I was wearing a smart blue single-breasted serge suit, my very best shoes, and a little black tilt hat that I had borrowed from Bunty. I hoped I might look both businesslike and alert. The sort of person who could sniff out a scoop and get the measure of it in a moment. The sort of person who is not feeling as if her heart might positively explode.

Humor’s the key to this novel, and I love Pearce’s touch. For instance, of the drinks cabinet in Emmy and Bunty’s flat, the women have decided that if the Germans invaded and broke in, “we would push it down the stairs at them. The full extent of the British Empire was featured in a rather confident orange and we thought that would make them quite wonderfully cross.”

But these people also know pain and hardship as their city’s being blown to bits. Dear Mrs. Bird contains touching moments when war intrudes, and it’s impossible — undesirable — to keep a stiff upper lip. In such a strained atmosphere, estrangements are sometimes inevitable, and Pearce never lets her heroine sail through life. With the bombs falling, that would be ridiculous. The ending does seem a bit contrived, but it’s also funny, and to object would be churlish. Dear Mrs. Bird is a delightful book.

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

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.

A Moral Tale Without a Compass: Once a Midwife

03 Monday Dec 2018

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Review: Once a Midwife, by Patricia Harman
Morrow, 2018. 487 pp. $17

Patience Hester, midwife of Liberty, West Virginia, senses the state of the world in November 1941 with terrible foreboding. Her husband, Daniel, a veterinarian and veteran of the First World War, has said that if war comes again to the United States, he will refuse to go. As healers, the Hesters’ moral predicament offers a compelling premise; add Patience’s past as a political activist for liberal causes and her distaste for Nazi Germany, and Harman has drawn her battle lines.

I wish I could tell you that Once a Midwife takes off from this promising platform, delivering a meaningful narrative that explores conscience and convenience. Unfortunately, directly or by implication, the novel lets just about everyone off the hook, which results in a moral tale lacking the requisite compass. Evil boils away until the dregs belong only to the local KKK or the SS assassins of Eastern European killing fields. Racism? Not here; the African-American characters may receive a cold look or two, but most everyone else is the soul of tolerance. Somehow, the Holocaust has become public knowledge in rural West Virginia a year before anywhere else, and, even more miraculously, nobody in Liberty voices prejudice against Jews, even at a meeting of America First, an organization notorious for anti-Semitism. Consequently, the bad guys are the few, irredeemable Them, whereas the good guys are Us. And since everyone’s the same underneath, why can’t we all live in peace and harmony?

Asking that all-important question in December 1941 might be a bit late, but, in any case, the people in this novel aren’t flexible enough to grapple with it. Patience tells the reader and other characters what she feels, referring to facts from her past or current events, announcements that turn a potential person into a headline. Daniel’s even less convincing, for he sounds alternately like a whiny adolescent and a holier-than-thou prophet. Rather than show why he’s a pacifist or have him struggle with his beliefs, Harman has him recite potted history that could have come from a seventh-grade textbook; when pressed, he tells generic stories about his war service. So he’s a talking head who’s got glib, half-baked answers for everything, not a deep-thinking man of conscience. But he’s not alone, for characters in Once a Midwife seldom talk to each other. They talk at each other, usually to dump information—and boy, are they misinformed.

I firmly believe that historical novelists should have poetic license, and that the writing and presentation matter ten times more than research. Still, I need to believe that the author has some sense of what facts she’s changing and why, whereas here, I question Harman’s grasp of the era, its events, and especially its timeline. The war seems to serve merely as a cauldron to dish up convenient plot points. Meanwhile, the premise contains enough untapped conflict to fill a novel by itself.

For instance, why doesn’t Patience — or anyone — ask Daniel whether, as a veterinarian serving a farm population, he’d try to get a deferment for an exempt profession, especially given his age? He might not listen, because he refuses even to register for the draft, but so much the better—another point of conflict with his beleaguered, overwhelmed wife, more room for him to show (not explain) his principles. Also, Daniel’s situation might have changed when, a year after Pearl Harbor, Selective Service lowered the age of draft liability to thirty-eight, a fact that the narrative doesn’t mention but a circumstance that offers another possible iteration of the same conflict.

But these moral complexities, which should be the novel’s strength, wind up resolving themselves. At several points, Patience wonders whether her husband’s a weakling or has taken dubious positions, for which she hates him for short bursts, invariably snapping out of it. It’s as though the narrative prevents the characters from getting too upset with one another—a common flaw in feel-good novels, but unfortunately, Harman pushes this into the realm of cluelessness. She evokes the hurtful, ignorant trope that divides Germany into a basically decent but cowed majority and a tiny sliver guilty of all evil, a morally simplistic position that denies history and insults the victims.

Worse, Harman underlines the (studiously low-level) bigotry, rampant jingoism, small-mindedness, and government propaganda visible in Liberty; weighs that against Axis lies and brutalities; and implies that it’s a wash. I must confess I nearly lost it when a group of German POWs recently arrived to West Virginia sing a Christmas carol and in this way prove their basic humanity to Patience’s satisfaction. With little hesitation–and even less thought to what they might have done–she gives a pass to men who’ve bloodied and terrorized half of Europe. Where’s the moral sense in that?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Our National Shame: The Mercy Seat

24 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: The Mercy Seat, by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Grove, 2018. 254 pp. $26

When the clock strikes twelve one steamy midnight in 1943, New Iberia, Louisiana, will send one of its sons to the electric chair. Willie Jones, an African-American teenager, has been convicted of raping a white woman. But whether young Willie deserves to die for this crime — or, in some minds, whether there was rape involved — divides this small, rural community to the point of violence.

Replica of the electric chair once used at Louisiana State Penitentiary (courtesy Lee Honeycutt via Wikimedia Commons)

Winthrop’s tale evokes To Kill a Mockingbird, of course, but she follows a very different, necessarily compressed route, for the action takes place entirely within twelve hours. The trial is eight months gone, ancient history, so there’s no Atticus Finch to plead for Willie’s life. Rather, his court-appointed lawyers, who never appear in the narrative, hardly opened their mouths to defend him. There is a child narrator, a sort of moral chorus role, the district attorney’s son, Gabe. But he’s one of nine third-person voices telling the story, seven white and two black. All are sympathetic to Willie, in varying degrees and for very different reasons, yet nearly all believe that there’s absolutely nothing they can do or could have done differently. No matter what their station in life, well off, scraping by, or dirt poor, they have one thing in common — they are terribly lonely, and their feelings about the forthcoming execution, which can’t be easily expressed, show just how isolated they are.

The great genius of The Mercy Seat is how Winthrop extracts almost unbearable tension from voices reacting to events that have been ordained, a Greek tragedy about modest lives. Although she reveals slivers of back story that challenge the reader’s assumptions, information isn’t what propels the narrative with such irresistible force. It’s feeling, pure and simple, rendered in physical description, as with this passage from Gabe’s point of view. This kind of writing takes my breath away:

He looks at his father — the lines bleeding back from the corner of his eyes, the hard bone of his nose, the flat space between his eyes, the quiver of muscle along his jaw as he chews — and for a frightening moment Gabe can’t find in all those features the father he knows. He can’t see the man in the backyard, shirtsleeves rolled up, pitching him a ball, or the man with the fishing rod and tan hat at the edge of the bayou, or the man sitting on the edge of Gabe’s bed at night, reading glasses on the tip of his nose. For a frightening moment, studied hard, his father’s features combine into the face of someone he can’t recognize, someone willing to send a man to death, and he feels himself reel the way he did when he took the slug from the Kane twins’ father’s flask, the world suddenly shot into the distance.

Every character in the novel lives with an urgent question, the necessity for all fiction, and that’s what provides the tension. Gabe’s question is whether he can still love the man who’s prosecuted Willie and sent him to the electric chair. And because the reader cares about both characters, you want to know how that will resolve. The Mercy Seat reminds me that heroism may be measured in small gestures, because there’s no chance of a great one.

The passage above comes from a two-page chapter, an authorial decision that cuts two ways. I don’t know how else Winthrop could have told her story through nine, well-crafted individual voices, especially with such thrift and elegiac power. Nor do I ever feel, as I have with other novels told in brief chapters, that the writer is pandering to readers with short attention spans. Still, the rhythm of rapidly changing perspectives gets to me after a while. I’ve never been much for pointillism, though the way Winthrop has selected her dots accomplishes one thing. Six of the seven white narrators wouldn’t call themselves bigots, and you sense their fear of the bitter, violent men who are.

With one significant exception, The Mercy Seat re-creates the time and place in ugly, frightening detail, down to the eagerness of the citizenry to witness the execution or listen to it on the radio (!). But World War II is hardly to be seen, except to provide an emotional transition for two characters. There’s little mention of rationing, though a bakery figures in the action, and there seem to be an awful lot of military-age civilians around.

But that’s a quibble. The Mercy Seat — which takes its title from a blues song about the electric chair — is easily one of the most powerful novels I’ve read this year. And I’m sick at heart to think of how the senseless hatred that condemns Willie Jones remains powerful enough in our country that politicians can appeal to it and hold public office.

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

Occupation Confection: The Baker’s Secret

25 Monday Jun 2018

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Review: The Baker’s Secret, by Stephen P. Kiernan
Morrow, 2017. 308 pp. $27

By June 1944, the German Occupation weighs heavily on the Norman coastal village of Vergers. The Germans confiscate whatever food the villagers grow or catch, deport men of working age to their armaments factories, and delight in summary executions. One person they shoot is Ezra Kuchen, the baker; the villager who takes his death the hardest is his assistant, Emmanuelle, known as Emma.

Emma would never dream of joining the Resistance, whose activity she blames for other losses, and who believes the Allies will never invade, so what’s the point? But willy-nilly, Emma becomes the prime mover in a complicated barter arrangement whose weblike strands encompass the whole village, and which the Germans would certainly call resistance. Her treason centers around baking bread for the occupiers, which she cuts with enough straw to make extra loaves for neighbors in need. In each loaf, she carves a subtle V.

Each morning required every gram of Emma’s skills, all of her artifice, to bake loaves containing straw and have neither the Kommandant nor his officers notice. Yet this was only one of five hundred deceits, all conceived during the long strain of the occupation. She learned to sow a minefield and reap eggs. She could wander the hedgerows pulling a rickety cart, and the result would be maps. She could turn cheese into gasoline, a light bulb into tobacco, fuel into fish. She could catch, butcher, and divide among the villagers a pig that later every person who had tasted it would insist had never existed.

I like this part of the novel the best, and not only because of Emma’s ingenuity. Every fiber of her duplicity exists to satisfy someone else’s wants, which she at first resents, because they leave no room for her own. But over time, she realizes that throwing herself into feeding others gives her a reason to live despite her pessimism, and keeps her from dwelling on her repressed desires, which would drive her mad. When someone tells her to have hope, she snaps, “Can that be eaten? What does it taste like?” But since the novel opens on June 5, 1944, the reader knows what’s coming before she does.

Having written about military occupations and traveled Normandy, I was looking forward to The Baker’s Secret. (My fondest memory of the many French walking trails I’ve followed is of Calvados, where a group of local hikers pressed wine and food on me and told me how grateful they felt to Americans for having liberated them.) I gobbled up this confection of a novel in just about one sitting, which says something about its excellent pacing, but I felt hungry soon afterward. The story pleases, but, except for Emma, the characters have no depth, and the fable-like tone makes it hard to tell whether to take the narrative’s real tragedies seriously.

I took this photo in 2015, near the Norman village of Thury-Harcourt, an area that saw heavy fighting several weeks after the invasion.

One weak link is the German soldiery. Unlike the case with All the Light We Cannot See, to which this book will inevitably (and wrongly) be compared, Kiernan’s occupiers deal out plenty of brutality. But they’re stiff, utterly predictable marionettes who act like no soldiers I’ve ever read of or seen, let alone like the Wehrmacht. They are easily fooled, spout racial and political prejudices like windup toys, seem not to understand their own weaponry, and even invite Emma to a place where she can see their fortifications, which they then boast of to her. They’re not buffoons, exactly; more like a collection of bumbling neurotics with guns.

Just as the Germans are unreal enemies, the villagers are improbable, idealized good guys. They’re more like a foreigner’s idea of what French people must be like, with generic, styled modes of expression, attitudes, and descriptions. Further, I don’t believe that Vergers has a Jewish baker, that Ezra Kuchen is Jewish, or that the villagers would honor him in death so fervently. He’s a cliché, a blatant device, and, incidentally, the only villager to possess a last name, whose meaning (“cake”) is no subtler than anything else in this story. Kiernan tries hard to evoke Emma’s fear that someone in Vergers will betray her, but you know they won’t; they’re too righteous. Over time, a candidate presents himself, but he’s so roundly detested that you expect his duplicity rather than fear it.

I appreciate Kiernan’s attempt to show the cruelties perpetrated during the Occupation, and to portray the violence of the invasion as a decidedly mixed blessing for the people of Normandy. But The Baker’s Secret, though it has its poignant moments, teeters between cartoonish fable and skewed reality, and leaves me unsatisfied.

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