An engrossing mystery wrapped in a coming-of-age story and the heart-rending legacy of the Holocaust.
A young Jewish woman searches for her lost uncle in Israel during the harrowing trial of Adolf Eichmann in Bernstein’s novel.
In 1961, Susan Reich, a first-generation Jewish teenager raised in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in New York City, is not the dutiful Zionist of her father Yehudah’s wishes. She wants to travel before going off to college, a plan her domineering father will only support if she goes to Israel to investigate the fate of his brother, Yakov, who disappeared after the Germans invaded Poland during World War II 20 years earlier. With little information to go on, Susan arrives in Jerusalem at a time of tumult and mourning as Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, is put on trial. As she listens to heartbreaking accounts of survivors in the course of the search for her uncle, she struggles with what it means to be a Jew. When she falls for Ezra, a Moroccan man in her Hebrew language class, she sees firsthand the impoverished conditions and prejudice his people face as non-European Jews. The experiences of Ruth, a waitress and Holocaust survivor whom Susan befriends on her quest, raise complex and contradictory ideas about love, rape, power, fear, and survival during the most horrific of times. The author brings the troubled young nation of Israel alive on the page, with trash-filled alleyways, smoke-filled cafes, and the pall of the Eichmann trial hanging over everything. The novel has a noirlike quality (“Around them, they heard the sounds of neighborhood cats yowling in the darkness. When she first heard them, Susan thought they were babies crying”), which, along with recurring themes of identity, history, culture, ethnicity, and sexuality, makes for an immersive detective novel. Bernstein’s story is no mere exercise in pulp—the narrative leans into the disturbing physical imagery and emotional fallout of the Holocaust while vividly capturing the tenor of Israel in 1961. This compelling, character-driven story will captivate even those with limited knowledge of Jewish history, the Nazis, or Eichmann and teach valuable lessons along the way.
An engrossing mystery wrapped in a coming-of-age story and the heart-rending legacy of the Holocaust.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9789493276376
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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