A finely crafted novel about family, identity, and the precariousness of comfort.
by Dahlia Japhet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2019
Japhet tells the story of a German Jewish woman’s search for love and God during World War I in this debut historical novel.
Dana Newman discovers an ancient Roman coin at a Stormville, New York, flea market in 1999, which reminds her husband’s relative of an old family story from Germany. Ilse Ehrenkrantz, who was 17 in 1912, fell in love with her stepcousin Georg, a skilled fencer and womanizer who decided to join the Prussian Army. He was also a numismatist—a coin collector—and he sent Ilse a necklace made from a Roman denarius that bore the image of Apollo. Ilse’s father, a Jewish publisher, was doing well, but some of his friends complained about persistent anti-Semitism. Ilse, meanwhile, felt confined by her life in Munich’s middle-class Jewish community. Her interest in religious-themed art led to curiosity about Christianity itself, and she began to associate more with the Christian girls at her school. “I want God to enlighten my heart,” she told her sister. “I want faith, perhaps faith in Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, as Messiah. I want to understand the religion which inspires artists so powerfully.” Georg, too, thought of converting—a necessity for becoming a Prussian officer. However, Ilse risked losing the love of her family if she turned her back on Judaism. As war loomed on Germany’s horizon, Ilse had to decide whether her infatuations—with Georg and with Jesus—could sustain her through what was to come. It was a decision that would reverberate through the rest of the century. Japhet’s prose skillfully evokes the early-20th-century period, from the diction of the characters to the details of their clothes and furniture. The novel’s depiction of upwardly mobile Jews in prewar Munich and Berlin opens up a world that one rarely sees portrayed in fiction, and one gets the sense of what assimilation meant to some of the members of Ilse’s generation. It’s a mannered novel about wealthy people, calling to mind the work of such authors as Edith Wharton or E.M. Forster, and its pace mirrors the literature of the time in which most of it is set. For all the talk of art and aspiration, however, the author ensures that history’s horrors are never far below the surface: “When I came to Germany, there was a famine in Berdichev,” recalls Sara, a poor immigrant who would later become the wife of a wealthy businessman and take Ilse under her wing. “Starving villagers stole bread from the children of others, and especially from poor Jewish children…be glad you have never seen hunger, and mothers watching their children die.” Japhet manages to weave the histories of the Jewish people, Germany, socialism, and art into the narrative, providing context that makes the actions of the characters feel tragically inevitable. The frame narrative, set in 1999, feels largely unnecessary, as the primary plot builds toward a conclusion that’s mostly satisfying, if slightly predictable.
A finely crafted novel about family, identity, and the precariousness of comfort.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5802-2
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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by Ariel Lawhon ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2020
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | ESPIONAGE
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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