reviews - Jewish Book Council

REVIEWS
Fiction
House’s edition of Lucinella is a boon, especially
in its close-to-Kindle size, albeit with
grayish, rather than black, print. For those
with wry memories, it changes nothing, but
adds fresh admiration for Segal’s facile ability
with malicious language. ABS
THE MURDERER’S
DAUGHTERS:
A NOVEL
Randy Susan Meyers
St. Martin’s Press, 2010. 320 pp. $24.99
ISBN: 978-0-312-57698-1
Think of two little girls witnessing the
murder of their mother by their father.
Think of one small child subsequently
stabbed by the same father and sent all alone
to the hospital. It is painful to envision, and
yet, we are not naïve, and know such violence
exists. Now imagine how the crime, the loss,
and the knowledge of their imprisoned father
waiting for them to visit affects the girls in
every step of their development and every
moment of their adult lives.
...the sisters are bound to each other by
a promise that is wearing to the core.
With excellent craft Randy Susan Meyers
gets us inside the heads of sisters Lulu and
Merry. We are with them at the horrific event,
as they are rejected by family members and
sent to a Dickensian orphanage, then into a
safe but difficult foster home, and on into
adulthood, one as a doctor and one a parole
officer. Choosing to hide their past from just
about everyone, the sisters are bound to each
other by a promise that is wearing to the core.
Not a day passes without wrestling the tug of
family loyalty vs. the wish for oblivion. We
share the ironies of their saving and giving life,
finding and holding onto love, and above all
else the question of forgiveness.
Perhaps readers will find the story unusual
or more disturbing as the family was Jewish.
However, the sad reality of this compelling
tale is the sisters coping alone, without any
community/religious support we might have
anticipated. The author acknowledges the
extraordinary benefit of such support as she
reflects on her own life. PGM
50 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010
David Del Bourgo
Mystere Press, 2009. 284 pp. $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-442-11987-1
PRAGUE SPRING:
A SIMON WOLFE
MYSTERY
This fast-paced detective story is distinctive
in that it weaves two events in 1968—
Berkeley’s student protests and the Czech
uprising against the Soviet Union, for which
the book is named, and mixes in flashbacks by
the central character to his time as a prisoner in
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Inspector
Simon Wolfe works for the San Francisco
Police Department, and is a Holocaust survivor
who was a member of the Mossad’s
“Nokim,” a group that killed Nazis. When a
congressman’s son is murdered, Wolfe’s
attempts to solve the crime are inhibited by the
police and the congressman as he is blackmailed
about his past. He is further compromised
by his feelings for the murder victim’s
psychiatrist, who is a child of Holocaust survivors
herself. Wolfe is a sympathetic character,
though he is a loner with unshakable opinions.
Wolfe’s insistence on following through with
this case leads the reader to explore the ideas of
political corruption, revenge, justice, and survival.
MBA
Anna Winger
Riverhead, 2008. 320 pp. $24.95
ISBN: 978-1594489976
THIS MUST BE
THE PLACE: A NOVEL
To begin to understand contemporary
Germany as it relates to Jews, one must
read This Must Be the Place.
In June the city of Frankfurt invited my
father and several other “Former Frankfurters”
to return for two weeks to the city of
their birth. All of them had survived the
Holocaust one way or another and we
assumed the town wanted to show them how
Frankfurt has changed since the 1930’s. The
city has done this annually since 1980; my
grandmother was among those invited that
first year.
My brother and I joined my father on this
trip and one evening we were invited to dinner
with the other members of the “second
generation” who had accompanied their parents
to Frankfurt. I thought it was meant as
an ice-breaker; after all, we would be spending
a lot of time together on a tour bus. But
over dinner it became clear that we’d all experienced
similar feelings of otherness during
our childhood, feelings many of us had never
given voice to, and passionate conversation
went on into the night.
To begin to understand contemporary
Germany as it relates to Jews, one
must read This Must Be the Place.
I realized that the city of Frankfurt organizes
these elaborate trips (the best hotel, opera,
theater, dinner, museum tours) as much for
their own children and the descendents of survivors
as for the Former Frankfurters themselves.
They want young Germans to meet
survivors face to face to hear their stories
because their own parents or grandparents are
not talking. We heard them worry that the
psychology of this has affected the culture.
Another day my father was invited to
speak at a local high school about his experience
as a Jew growing up in Nazi Germany.
When the organizers learned that my brother
and I would be there as well they changed the
date of the lecture to accommodate us. I was
surprised to learn it was because they felt sure
the students would have questions for us as
well. Sure enough, the students were equally
curious about our feelings as “second generation”
survivors, a term I’d never applied to
myself. What was it like growing up knowing
what our father had gone through? Did we
hate Germans? How did it feel being in Germany
now? My brother answered them with
the words our father had told us as children,
“To hate Germany and Germans would be to
hate him, because he was German, to deny
this would be to grant victory to Hitler.”
It was serendipitous then to read This
Must Be the Place upon my return home,
which embeds themes of identity and guilt
for post-war born Germans and Americans,
Jewish and not, into a subtly rendered story.
Walter Baum is a lonely has-been actor, a
German Johnny Drama without the
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