THE RABBI'S HOLOCAUST HEROES MUSEUM

A married couple decides to open a Holocaust museum in Alaska.

Goldsmith’s sequel to his 2015 novel, The Rabbi of Resurrection Bay, finds his two main characters, Rabbi Chani Kahn and her husband, Dr. Marc Cohn, dealing with new trials at their home in Resurrection Bay, Alaska. And one of the most dramatic of those challenges crops up literally on Page 1 of this new book when Marc gets a midnight phone call summoning him to a highly confidential emergency meeting in Jerusalem. Marc is stunned when he’s told that “the future of Israel” is in his hands. Strings are pulled, rapid transport is arranged, and soon Marc and Chani are face to face with the prime minister of Israel, being briefed on a tense situation. The leader of one of the few nations willing to supply Israel with the plutonium it needs in order to continue its clandestine nuclear weapons program has emerged from a coup attempt with a badly damaged face. The skills Marc acquired in his pre-Alaska life as a plastic surgeon are now needed to restore the leader’s appearance and keep the plutonium flowing. From this running start, the author rapidly expands his narrative in branching, interconnected stories, one featuring the emotional and even legal aftereffects Marc experiences when he takes on the mission for Israel and another starring Chani. She’s diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease, which makes her extraordinarily sensitive to cold temperatures. She also starts investigating her own past after visiting the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. These plot threads come together in the efforts of the couple to establish a Holocaust Heroes Museum in Alaska. Somehow, Goldsmith manages to balance all of these disparate plotlines so smoothly that no single strand dominates the others and all work well together. The author is an earnest and unpretentious prose stylist, and he turns his overstuffed story into compelling reading.

A multifaceted tale of faith and perseverance.