“The Jewish Policeman” by Jonathan Dunsky

Before Adam Lapid had been a private detective living in early 1950s Tel Aviv, he’d been a police detective in Budapest, Hungary. Then the Germans came in 1944; Adolph Eichmann himself supervised the deportation of 440,000 people directly to Auschwitz. Among them were Adam, his wife, his two young daughters, and his mother. Adam was the only survivor. 

After the defeat of the Nazis, Adam made his way to Munich. He’s living in a Jewish displacement camp, self-governing but overseen by the American Army (Munich was in the American zone after the war). Adam is not simply existing; he’s looking for former Nazis who think they’ve escaped justice. And he finds one, who soon finds himself strangled in the cellar of a ruined building.

 

Adam also unexpectedly finds himself employed. The camp director asks Adam to investigate a murder, not to take over the police function, but to look into a single death. A resident had been stabbed to death in the camp’s radio room. Because only camp residents had access to the camp, that the killer would be Jewish. And that made it worse; too many Jews had already died during the war, and it seemed an obscenity that another Jew would die at the hands of one of his own.

 

Adam investigates; virtually no clues exist. He travels down blind alleys, spends countless hours investigating, and keeps dodging the man who was appointed the official policeman who resents what Adam has been asked to do. 

 

Jonathan Dunsky

The Jewish Policeman is the ninth Adam Lapid mystery by Jonathan Dunsky. All of these mysteries are thought-provoking; this one is even more than its predecessors. Dunsky more than  touches upon the unsettling idea that people who experience horrific persecution and murder can sometimes become like their persecutors and murderers. 

 

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with nine published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, The Auschwitz Detective, A Death in Jerusalem, In That Sleep of Death, and now The Jewish Policeman. 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.

 

The Jewish Policeman is every bit as good as the earlier Adam Lapid mysteries. Dunsky captures the chaos and desperation of post-war Germany (Hershey Bars and American cigarettes are like currency), and he tells a good story of conflicted motives, illegal justice, and settling old scores.

 

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.

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of A Death in Jerusalem by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of In That Sleep of Death by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Lucky to Be Grateful and A Passage Through the Dark– Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn and Katy Carl at Mere Orthodoxy review Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story by Wendell Berry.

 

Why Cormac McCarthy Stands Alone Among Novelists – Will Hoyt at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writing a Novel at Burger King – Lana McAra at In the Writer’s Chair (via LinkedIn). 

“In That Sleep of Death” by Jonathan Dunsky

I can’t make up my mind here. Is In that Sleep of Death, the latest Adam Lapid story by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky, a mystery or a literary novel? The obvious answer is that it’s some of both. 

It’s 1952. Lapid is a private investigator based in Tel Aviv. He has a painful past – a police detective in Hungary who, with his wife mother, and two daughters, was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 for the crime of being Jewish. He is the family’s only survivor. 

 

For a time after the war, he hunted former Nazis in Europe, quietly and effectively exacting justice. He emigrated to Israel in time for the 1948 War of Independence, in which he was seriously wounded after a heroic action to save his unit from Egyptian gunners. Now he’s a private detective; he bears no great regard for the police, as it was the Hungarian police who herded his family into a boxcar.

 

Sometimes, after nightmares leave him unable to sleep, Lapid wanders the streets of Tel Aviv. And so one night he sees a fellow night wanderer and feels a kinship, even though the two never speak. It’s Lapid who finds the man’s body and calls it in anonymously to the police, and it’s Lapid who takes on his own investigation after the police come up short. And his investigation takes him into the stories of pre-war Jewish Poland, the Holocaust, and contemporary frauds. And it make be taking him into unexpected romance.

 

Jonathan Dunsky

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with eight published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, The Auschwitz Detective, A Death in Jerusalem, and now In That Sleep of Death. 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.

 

In That Sleep of Death is a fine mystery, but it’s also something I hadn’t noticed before in Dunsky’s books – it’s something of a literary novel as well. It has a Kafkaesque beginning, the wandering of empty nighttime streets. It has the overall feel of a literary novel, and yet it’s clearly a detective mystery, not unlike the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Dunsky has produced a good story, an intriguing mystery, and a solid literary effort.

 

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.

 

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of A Death in Jerusalem by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Rise of the Cyber City – Walter Russell Mead at Tablet Magazine.

 

Post Office Tower and Tower Tavern – A London Inheritance.

 

Charles Spurgeon’s Londoners – Spitalfields Life.

 

Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’ – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on Golda Meir’s speech in 1948.

“A Death in Jerusalem” by Jonathan Dunsky

In 1952, a debate was held in Israel’s parliament the Knesset on a rather shocking proposal – for Israel to begin negotiations with Germany to receive reparations for the Holocaust. The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, actively supported and promoted it. The party led by Menachem Begin did not. A riot occurred in which opponents of the resolution attacked the building in which the Knesset was meeting in Jerusalem. Scores were arrested; both the protestors and the police protecting the building sustained many injuries. 

Israeli writer Jonathan Dunsky has incorporated that historical event into his seventh Adam Lapid mystery, A Death in Jerusalem. And Dunksy places his private detective right in the middle of the protest; the man who lost his wife, daughters, and mother to the holocaust is outraged at even the suggestion of the idea of reparations. Lapid finds himself in jail, the intense focus of a policeman who seems to be waging a personal vendetta against the detective.

 

Lapid is unexpectedly released from custody. The source is a Tel Aviv manufacturing executive with influence, and he wants the detective to find out why his daughter, a young nurse in her 20s, committed suicide. Lapid accepts the job, and he soon discovers that nothing is what it appears. In the nurse’s apartment, he finds a gun used to kill a doctor. Staff at the hospital where she worked all seem to be hiding something, and for different reasons. Even his client fails to give Laipd information that might help explain what happened. And lurking in the background is the policeman who arrested him, ready to mete out his own form of justice.

 

Jonathan Dunsky

A Death in Jerusalem is the second Adam Laipd story set outside Tel Aviv (the first five were all located there) and the first to be set in Jerusalem. (The sixth, The Auschwitz Detective, was set in the infamous death camp.) It’s also a complex story, with several sub-plot story lines requiring close attention to characters. This is not a story you can easily breeze through, for that complexity reason as well as the underlying themes of the Holocaust and reparations. This is not a cozy mystery you finish in one sitting.

 

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with seven published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, The Auschwitz Detective, and now A Death in Jerusalem. 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.

 

A Death in Jerusalem captures the sense of Israel at the beginning it its modern statehood. It was a place and a time in which anger, occasional rage, corruption, and sharp business practice coexisted with the patriotic and heartfelt desire to build a nation for the Jews. Dunsky adroitly maneuvers his characters between these two poles, which are sometimes not as far apart as they might appear at first glance.

 

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.

 

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

 

My review of The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky.

“The Auschwitz Detective” by Jonathan Dunsky

We know Adam Lipid as the fictional private detective in 1950s Israel. We know he has a history: a police detective in pre-war Hungary, shipped with his entire family to Auschwitz in 1944, the only survivor of that family, and an entrepreneurial assassin in post-war Europe, targeting former Nazis and death camp officials. Almost all of what we know of his time in Auschwitz is that his wife and two young daughters were gassed and sent to the crematorium. We suspect but don’t know that the same happened to his sisters and his mother. His father had died before the war. 

In The Auschwitz Detective by Jonathan Dunsky, we find out what happened to Adam in Auschwitz. He was one of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz in 1944. He was one of the few who survived. His survival is even more surprising given that he was a former police officer; the camps were inhabited by a wide array of criminals in addition to ordinary citizens. had been there two months, forced to work as a slave laborer, when a particularly brutal prisoner overseer, himself a camp inmate, gives Adam three days to find the killer of one of his “servants.”

 

If Adam fails to find the killer, Adam will die. Ordinary justice didn’t exist inside the camp, where the overseers were Jewish or non-Jewish criminals, German SS guards, or even the SS doctors, who seemed to enjoy picking out those destined to die as physically unfit. The murder victim, a 15-year-old boy, was found with two pieces of bread hidden in his shirt, which tells Adam this was no murder by an ordinary prisoner. An ordinary prisoner would have taken the bread. 

Adam’s assignment takes him across the breadth of the camp’s operations. He’s assigned to take the suitcases left on the platform by incoming trainloads of Jews and bring them to the warehouses. Except there aren’t enough warehouses. He works inside the warehouses, where the victim had worked, sorting through clothes and belongings. He talks with inmate guards and other camp inmates. He can do this because the name of the overseer strikes fear in everyone. And through it all, he tries to stay alive, and keep a good friend alive as well. 

What he experiences and uncovers is as dark as the skies above the crematoria.

 

Dunsky is best known for his Adam Lapid mystery stories, with six published: Ten Years Gone, The Dead Sister, The Auschwitz Violinist, A Debt of Death, A Deadly Act, and now The Auschwitz Detective. 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.

 

The Auschwitz Detective is a departure for Dunsky and his detective. It is as much a detailed snapshot of how Auschwitz operated as it is a murder mystery. It’s filled with historical detail, reflecting what was likely an enormous amount of research, but not to the point where the research overwhelms the story. 

 

And surprisingly, it becomes a story of hope. As Adam’s good friend always tells him, “There’s always hope, Adam. There’s always hope.” Even in the Human evil that was Auschwitz.

 

 

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.

 

My review of Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts by Jonathan Dunsky.

"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.

"A Deadly Act" by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s 1951 Tel Aviv. Israel’s War for Independence is four years past, and the Holocaust of World War II a few years older, but both events loom large in the new country’s everyday life. They also loom large in the life of private investigator Adam Lapid. 

Lapid had been a police detective in Budapest until 1944, when the German army moved in and took over the country. Lapid, his wife, his daughters, and more than 400,000 other Hungarian Jews are loaded onto cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz. His wife and daughters died on the day of arrival. Lapid is one of the few who survived. Before emigrating to Israel, he spends two years traveling around Germany, murdering Nazis who believed they had successfully evaded war crimes.

He arrives in Israel just in time for the War for Independence. He joins the Israeli army and becomes a national hero for his almost suicide-like mission that saved his company. He also nearly dies but is carried to safety and army doctors by his best friend. After he recovers, and after the war is over, Lapid becomes a private investigator based in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv of the early 1950s is a noir kind of city, with nearly every citizen a minor criminal for evading rationing. And some citizens do far worse – smuggling, fraud, corruption, and murder.

Jonathan Dunsky

Lapid is hired by a stage actress who was once famed for her performances but now almost a cripple after receiving serious injuries in a hit-and-run accident. She wants him to prove that her husband, a stage actor and director, murdered an actress five years before. She believes he’s the murderer in the unsolved crime because she lied to give him an alibi. The cold case looks almost unsolvable, and the police aren’t exactly happy with Lapid for attempting to do what they couldn’t. But he finds a loose thread here, a slender lead there, and soon the private eye is unraveling a carefully orchestrated series of crimes. He’s also putting his own life at risk.

A Deadly Act is the fifth Adam Lapid mystery novel by Israeli author Jonathan Dunsky. It’s a solid, often mesmerizing evocation of a place and time almost 70 years in the past. It fits well in the tradition of noir mysteries, where almost every character carries a past they’d rather forget and you never know when a gun will be fired or a knife thrown. And it explores the theater in Israel’s early modern history.

The first four Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist, and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; 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.

Like the good noir novel that it is, A Deadly Act throws one twist and turn after another. It’s a story where the facts keep changing, and no one is who they appear to be.

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.

"A Debt of Death" by Jonathan Dunsky

Private detective Adam Lapid takes most of his meals at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv. It is 1950, and rationing – and the black market – are the order of the day. Lapid like the café food; he likes the time he can spend there, talking with Greta and playing chess against himself; and he likes the fact that other diners leave him alone. But what he loves is the coffee, the best in Tel Aviv, he believes.

Lapid had a past that stretches back to police detective days in Hungary and the Nazi concentration camps, the camps that took the lives of his wife and daughters and the camps where he almost died. He has a postwar history in Europe, when he spent time in Germany helping to hunt down and murder some of the Nazis who escaped the Allied armies. And he has a history in the Israeli war for independence in 1947-48, when he performed a particularly heroic (or foolhardy, or both) action in the Sinai that got him wounded.

Jonathan Dunsky

He’s at Greta’s one evening when a man is found dead right outside the café. Lapid knows the man, one Nathan Frankel. He knew Frankel only recently in Tel Aviv, but he knew him even more in Auschwitz. Frankel was the man who saved Lapid’s life after a particularly brutal beating with a whip by a Nazi camp guard, the beating that left permanent scars on Lapid’s back. The detective figures he owes a debt to Frankel, one that will determine Lapid to find who killed the man.

It’s a debt that will take Lapid into people involved with illegal currency exchange, black market activities, organized crime, police corruption, and personal passion. A Debt of Death is the fourth (and most recently published) Adam Lapid mystery novel by Jonathan Dunsky, and it’s an excellent entry in an already excellent series. 

The first three Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; and The Auschwitz Violinist. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; 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.

Dunsky works Israeli history and its criminal underbelly so well that the reader seems to walk the streets with Lapid as he searches for a killer and pays his debt. A Debt of Honor is one fine mystery read. 

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 Violinistby Jonathan Dunsky.

“The Auschwitz Violinist” by Jonathan Dunsky

It’s a chance meeting. Private investigator Adam Lapid bumps into a man he knew at Auschwitz, a violinist who played in the orchestra the Nazis had at the death camp. It’s Tel Aviv, 1950, and it’s not unusual to see people you once assumed had been murdered in the camps. 

The violinist invites Adam to hear a performance he’s given at a bar, and Adam goes. The music is haunting, not only for Adam but for the other patrons as well. Afterward, they part, with a promise to getting together again. 

And then Adam finds out that, when he arrived home, the violinist committed suicide. The bar owner asks Adam to look into it, because the idea of suicide makes no sense in this case. As Adam starts, everything points to suicide. Only it points two well to suicide. Adam finds a letter in the man’s mailbox from a friend in Jerusalem. He visits there, only to learn that the friend had also committed suicide. And the friend had also been a musician in the Auschwitz orchestra. 

It turns out to be murder. Two, in fact. And then Adam finds a third.

Jonathan Dunsky

The Auschwitz Violinist by Israeli writer Jonathan Dunsky is the third in the Adam Lipid detective series, and it’s a dandy story. Dunsky combines Israeli modern history, the horrors of the Holocaust, and a hardboiled cynical detective hero to create a story and a series that are riveting and difficult to put down (I failed to put it down, reading it straight through). 

The four Adam Lapid mysteries are Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; 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.

Reading The Auschwitz Violinist has further confirmed me as an Adam Lapid fan. My problem is that I read them faster than Dunsky can write them.

Related:

My review of Ten Years Gone by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky.

My review of The Dead Sisterby Jonathan Dunsky.