Much of the story is set before World War I, and Némirovsky describes a world of wealth and comfort and international flirtations. Extraordinarily beautiful, Gladys Eysenach is a member of a rich Jewish family who enjoys nothing as much as her own beauty and the power it gives her. She only wants to be wanted since in the beau monde she inhabits, a woman‘s value is set by men. Of course, as she gets older, her value is somewhat reduced, which sends her into fits of desperation. There’s the problem of her daughter too, who insists on getting older as well. What’s a vain woman to do? Némirovsky’s prose often feels overheated, as if she was channeling Colette without the wry amusement. Almost everything is told rather than shown, as they say in writing class, and Gladys is such an unsympathetic character than it’s difficult to stay in her point of view for very long. Still, Jezebel has a page-turner quality; one keeps reading to find out what happens. MR
Magic Words: The Tale of a Jewish Boy-Interpreter, the Frontier’s Most Estimable Magician, A Murderous Harlot, and America’s Greatest Indian Chief Gerald Kolpan Pegasus Books, 2012 Hardcover 403 pp. $25.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1605983691
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n his novel Magic Words, Gerald Kolpan of WNPR’S “All Things Considered” takes the reader on a colorful journey back into the post-Civil War American West. Kolpan’s hero, Julius, an Orthodox Jewish youth from Russia, is captured by the Ponca Indians, becomes their interpreter, and falls in love with their princess. When the Army forces the tribe to relocate, their tragic march on foot gives contemporary American readers a shameful history lesson. Woven into these wholesome and instructive pages is a digression related to the title
fiction
which changes the book into adult-only entertainment. Julius’s cousins from Europe are magicians who perform with wild theatricality and the help, to quote the cover, of a “murderous harlot.” Some scenes involving the magicians and their followers include seductions, bloody attacks, kidnappings, druggings, passport forgery, and blackmail. Still, it is interesting to learn how the illusion of magic is created, and the narrative has a compelling pace. For those who are not turned off by, or maybe enjoy high-voltage passages, Magic Words is good leisure reading. An Epilogue tells us that most of the characters were real people, Julius became a prominent Jewish philanthropist, but one magician never did the evil things attributed to him in the book, and what else is made up isn’t clear. Acknowledgements, epilogue. JW
in England and the United States, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he soon found out that although he had carried out his mission, his message fell on deaf ears. Where was the world’s conscience? Did it ever exist? In Part III, the author enters the story, luring us to “dissolve the barriers between message and messenger, between that time and this time.” He asks, what have we learned? And then he goes on to tell us what we should have learned. The most powerful piece of the book for this reader is when Haenel argues that the extermination of the Jews of Europe was not a crime against humanity, but that the entirety of humanity was implicated in this crime, and the Nuremberg trials were not just to prove the Nazis’ guilt but were held in order to acquit the Allies. MWP
The Messenger
Shira Nayman Akashic Books, 2012 Paperback 332 pp. $15.95 [e] ISBN: 978-1617751035
A Mind of Winter
Yannick Haenel Ian Monk, trans. Counterpoint, 2012 Hardcover 224 pp. $24.00 [e] ISBN: 978-1582438146
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ecrecy, insecurity, and distorted memories cast a pall over much of this novel, as if the opium which figures significantly in a portion of the book infused the entire narrative. The lives of the three major characters are complex. All are World War Il survivors: Marilyn from the London blitz, Oscar and Christine from the Nazi depravity in war-torn Europe. The important supporting characters, Barnaby, Simon, and Walter, are well developed and interesting in their own right. The author succeeds in exposing the characters’ inner beliefs and emotional traumas; we discover how their perceptions of events and memories direct the course of their lives. The author’s skill with language heightens the reader’s curiosity to know the truth: who really is Oscar? Is it possible to know, without a doubt, when an act is one of self-preservation or of deliberate collaboration? What was real and what imagined? The functional selectivity of memory is enduring and subtly powerful, but not necessarily accurate or obvious. Yet this selectivity determines and defines the lives of the people at the core of this complex novel. What we bring to the text determines what we take from it, as the reader’s own perspectives and preconceptions become an unwritten part of the narrative. NDK
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he first two parts of this meditation on the Holocaust are non-fiction, and the third part is fiction. While giving testimony to Claude Lanzmann for his film, Shoah, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish resistance, sobs. He has so much to remember. After escaping from a Soviet detention camp in 1930, Karski served as a courier for the Polish underground, carrying information from occupied Poland to the exiled Polish leaders. Captured and tortured by the Germans, he managed to escape and was instructed to tell the governments of the world what was being done to the Jews. Part II is a description of Karski’s book, Story of a Secret State (1944), where he cries out that “a messenger cannot deliver a message without a receiver.” Karski obtained private audiences with world leaders and top officials
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