"Grandma Rachel's Ghosts" by Jonathan Dunsky

In the late 1970s, I first started reading the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991). The event that sparked my reading was likely his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He wrote and originally published only in Yiddish; eventually, his works were translated into English. Perhaps more than any other writer, his stories and novels helped to preserve, even if in a small way, the Yiddish culture of Poland and Easter Europe that was destroyed by Nazi Germany.

His stories are filled with ghosts and conmen, rabbis and rounders, saints and sinners. He had grown up in Poland’s Yiddish culture before he emigrated to the United States in 1935 (he saw correctly perceived the Nazi threat). From his own experiences, and those of family and friends, he had a huge well of memory to draw upon.

I was reminded of Singer’s stories when I read “Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts” by Jonathan Dunsky. The author calls it a fantasy story, but I have my doubts. Grandma Rachel is dying, and she’s unnerving her daughter and the family with what sound like ravings. She’s claims to be talking to her two dead sisters, and no one else can see them.

Jonathan Dunsky

That is, until grandson Jacob arrives. As a child, Jacob spent a lot of time with Grandma Rachel. And he’s seen the two sisters many times, dressed in long woolen dresses, talking with his grandmother and commenting on everything from how to raise Jacob properly to baking desserts. Jacob also knows the sisters’ stories.

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with five published and the sixth soon to be. The five are Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, and A Deadly Act. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; the short story “The Unlucky Woman,” and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

This short story, like those of Singer, linger long after you finish reading them. It’s indeed about two ghosts, but it’s also a story of how culture and memory are transmitted through the generations. 

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sister by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Auschwitz Violinist by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of A Debt of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of A Deadly Act by Jonathan Dunsky.

“The Day of the Lie” by William Brodrick

This is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Father Anselm of the Gilbertine Order Larkwood Monastery near Cambridge receives a call from John Fielding, who’s been a friend since they were 11 years old and sent to the same school. Anselm had gone into law before becoming a monk, while John went into journalism. John had traveled globally and had been a reporter for BBC when he was forced to leave Warsaw in 1982 for “espionage.” Which translates as talking to dissidents.

Since then, John had been involved in an automobile accident and had lost sight in both eyes. And he needs help. The woman he was meeting with in 1982, who was to connect him to a shadowy dissident known as the Shoemaker and had herself been arrested, had shown up at his door in London. She was asking for help in bringing to trial the man in the secret police who had arrested them. 

But this wasn’t her first arrest by the secret police officer. That had happened in 1951. She and the officer had been in the anti-Nazi resistance together as teens. In 1951, he had arrested her but executed her husband. He had also persuaded her to give up the child she was carrying and gave birth to in prison.

And now, the officer had survived the fall of the communist regime in 1989 and was quietly retired, spending his days with his stamp collection. Many people want him brought to justice.

In other hands, The Day of the Liewould have been an interesting story of the aftermath of the Cold War. In the hands of author William Brodrick, the story is less a mystery novel and far more serious literary fiction, with a slight suspense element to it. This novel is as good as any of the John LeCarrenovels, and LeCarre ranks as one of the best spy story writers.

William Brodrick

Reading this story is like opening kachina dolls. You think you’ve found the answer – for example, who the informant was that betrayed John and the woman – and it turns out not to be an answer but only a path deeper into the story. And along the way Brodrick explores human motivation and psychology, the damage wreaked by years of first Nazi and then Soviet domination, and how all that history continues to shape, guide, and distort the present.

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

The Day of the Lieis a masterpiece, and I don’t use that term lightly.

Related:

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Deadby William Brodrick.

My review of A Whispered Nameby William Brodrick.

Top photograph: Mokowtow Prison in Warsaw, by Jolanta Dyr via Wikimedia. The prison plays a significant role in The Day of the Lie.

“The Radio Signal” by Friedhelm Radandt

In early 1945, Friedhelm Radandt was 12 years old when he, his mother, and a sister were forced to flee their home in Pomerania, a region south of the Baltic Sea and part of both Germany and Poland. At the time, the area was part of Greater Germany and inhabited primarily by ethnic Germans. Freidhelm’s father was with the German Army in Italy; an older brother was with the Hitler Youth and a related organization and an older sister was working as a governess on a rural estate to fulfill her requirements with the Nazi state. 

The reason for the family’s flight was the approaching Soviet Army. Nazi Germany was crumbling, with the Americans and British invading from the west and Soviet Russia from the east.

In Warsaw, the Job family were ethnic Germans who had considered themselves Poles – until Germany invaded in 1939 and gave them German citizenship papers. Ludwig Job worked for the electronic manufacturer Phillips as a research and developer of radio tubes. Ludwig learns that Polish partisans have placed his name on an execution list, and he’s able to transfer to a research site in Germany. But the family stays in Warsaw, until they, too, face the approaching Soviet armies, which, as the Germans knew, had been given full leeway to take all manners of revenge upon the German population.

Friedhelm Radandt’s The Radio Signal is the story of these two families during World War II and immediately after. While they didn’t know each other until well after the war, they had several things in common – their ethnic heritage, living in Poland, becoming part of the German refugee flood that was desperate to escape the Soviets and reach the Americans or the British, and their religious faith. Friedhelm Radandt would also marry Elizabeth Job, bringing the two families and their histories together.

While this is a story of family, The Radio Signal also answers another question – what did practicing, believing Christians do during the Nazi regime? And the answer is rather candidly mixed. They did their jobs; they served in the military. Radandt’s father drew the line, however, at having his sons sent to an elite Nazi training camp, and he lost his job as a result. He solved the unemployment problem by joining the German Army, where the Nazi leaders had less control. And just as everyone else did, they suspected that the Jews were being taken away for evil purposes.

Friedhelm Radandt

Friedhelm and his wife Elizabeth eventually emigrated to the United States. He earned graduate degrees at the University of Chicago. and taught there and at Lake Forest College before serving as president of Northwestern College in Iowa and The King’s College in New York. He is also the author of From Baroque to Storm and Stress 1720-1775: The Literary History of Germany (1977). He now lives in Seattle.

The Radio Signal is an extraordinary story of how ordinary people get caught up in great upheavals, and the choices and decisions they make to save their families.  

Top photograph: German refugees and soldiers fleeing eastern Prussia ahead of the Soviet troops, February 1945; photo by Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons. 

“The Girl from the Train” by Irma Joubert

It’s 1944 Poland. Gretl, a six-year-old German girl, is on an open-car train with her older sister, mother, and grandmother. She doesn’t understand where the train is going, but the reader does – Auschwitz. Gretl’s mother is half-Jewish, and even though she was married to a now-dead SS officer, the family has too much Jewish blood to be exempt from the Final Solution.

The train cars are not locked; Gretl’s sister jumps first. And then Gretl jumps and tumbles down the embankment. She’s to meet up with her sister, and then together they’ll find their mother and grandmother, who also plan to jump. Except the train reaches a bridge – and the bridge has been wired with a bomb. The target was an expected German troop train; no one in the guerilla Polish Home Army unit expected the train headed the other way, to Auschwitz.

Gretl hears the explosions but doesn’t make the connection to the train. She eventually finds her sister, who after years in the ghetto is extremely sick, and dying from tuberculosis. The are found by Polish partisans and taken to a farm family. The teenaged boy who set the bomb, Jakob Kowalski, takes Gretle to his family, where she will live for the next four years. She has to keep quiet about her Jewish blood; Jakob’s family likes Jews even less than Germans.

Based on actual accounts, The Girl from the Train by Irma Joubert is the story of Gretl and Jakob. It moves from the family farm, to the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis (which the Russian Red Army, across the Vistula River from Warsaw, sat out), to the program that took German war orphans to South Africa for adoption, and to the first decade of Poland under Soviet communist rule.

Despite the 13 years difference in their ages, the little German girl and the Polish teenager forge a strong and tender relationship. It’s one that will span decades and continents, experience separation and reunion, and eventually have to battle through religious and ethnic intolerance.

Irma Joubert

Joubert is the author of two novels in Afrikaans, Ver Wink die Suidenkruis and Tolbos, and two other novels in English, Child of the River and The Crooked Path. A graduate of the University of Pretoria, she taught history for 35 years. She lives in South Africa.

The Girl from the Train tells a little-known story – what life was like in rural Poland during World War II and its aftermath – and combines it with other little-known stories, like the German war orphans and South Africa’s role in World War II. It slows a bit in the early South African middle, but it becomes a fascinating, engrossing story of a relationship that survives despite everything thrown against it.

Top photograph by Tom Barrett via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s “The Emperor of Lies”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, dedicated a good deal of his writing life to the preservation of Yiddish stories, language and culture, which had been nearly destroyed by the Holocaust in World War II. Singer was the son of a Polish rabbi; his mother was the daughter of a Polish rabbi. He emigrated to America after Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, and over the course of his literary life became best know for his short stories.

It was Singer who came constantly to mind while I read Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies, for what Sem-Sandberg has done is to painstakingly recreate the Jewish ghetto in Lodz in central Poland during the war. With this extraordinary novel, he has preserved the history of the ghetto, its government, its people, its brutality and its horrors, from the time of Nazi occupation in 1939 to the liberation by the Soviet army in early 1945.

Utilizing records, histories, archives, newspapers and other existing materials, Sem-Sandberg has recreated the story of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, “chairman” of the Lodz ghetto through the entire period of occupation. Rumkowski is a historical figure, as are many of characters of the novel, and has been generally understood to have been a kind of collaborator/puppet/despot. He is indeed all those things in the novel, and more that are worse, but the author seems to have almost gotten inside Rumkowski’s head. The reader comes to understand how this man justified his decisions and actions, how he viewed the ghetto, how he sacrificed people to remain in control of his larger purpose – the most productive manufacturing community in the entire German Reich, for that, he believed would ultimately save them.

And, of course, it didn’t. Rumkowski misled his people, and he also misled himself.

The Emperor of Lies is about more than Rumkowski, and as his control begins to slip, we see the other characters coming into sharper and sharper focus. It is in these individual stories, of heroes and collaborators, traitors and everyday people desperately seeking to stay alive, that the world that was the Jewish ghetto of Lodz truly comes alive. These stories are more than just backdrops to the central role of the leader of the ghetto; they become the vehicles through which memory is preserved.

The world of the ghetto was a hierarchal society of a ruling elite, mostly Rumkowski and his family and friends; the Jewish police who enforced order and obedience for Rumkowski and the Germans; the people fortunate to have obtained easier, white collar jobs; the people who did the hard work in the factories; and the “unproductive people,” the elderly, the sick and the young children, the ones who were most expendable and the one who would be the first to be “deported,” which meant sent to the death camps.

The novel is a story of horror, of what people crazed with fear and hunger will do to stay alive, of how people turned on each other for whatever short-term benefit could be had, and people who somehow managed to retain their humanity in the face of a very brutal existence.

The Emperor of Lies is an amazing story, told with understanding and heart. Sem-Sandberg holds back from judgment; it would have been a very different, and far less successful, novel had he sat in judgment of his characters. Instead, he tells their stories, much like Isaac Bashevis Singer told his stories, with understanding and even love.

The novel was an unexpected best-seller when it was published in Sweden in 2009. It is a big novel, with more than 650 pages, including appendices and a very helpful list of characters. The story is told so well, however, that you soon forget the size and get wrapped into the world of the ghetto in Lodz.