Johann Blumenthal is a German silversmith, a talented silversmith who counts both Gentiles and his fellow Jews among his regular customers in The Silver Music Box (2017) by Mina Baites. Filled with love for a homeland that doesn’t always love him back, he enlists in the German Army to fight in World War I. Before he leaves, he crafts an exquisite silver music box for his young son, Paul, to remember him by. When Johann doesn’t return from the front, Paul and his mother, Lotte, are left to pick up the pieces with the help of Uncle Max, also a talented jeweler.
Fast-forward to the 1930s. Paul, now a young adult, is still captivated by his father’s music box. He’s also captivated by Clara, a doctor’s daughter who longs to be teacher, an occupation closed to those of her religion. So she determines to convert to Christianity in order to fulfill her dreams. Paul does the same in order to be with the love of his life, and for a while all is well. Of course, we know that things don’t stay that way. As life in Germany gets increasingly more difficult and dangerous for Jews, the Blumenthals looks for ways to protect themselves from the coming storm. Each of them — Lotte, Uncle Max, Aunt Martha, and Paul and Clara — seek different paths to safety.
I wasn’t in the best head space to read historical fiction about the run-up to the Holocaust, to be honest, but I was invested enough in the characters and story to keep reading, and I’m glad I did. The narrative takes a big leap in time from 1939 to 1963, content to fill in the tragic details in the form of a later descendant of the family searching for her roots. This lightened the tension, which I appreciated.
It’s a good story, perhaps a bit simplistically told, but captures well the growing fear of the German Jewish community as the Nazis grow in strength and power during the lead up to World War II.
So of course I hated it, right? Wrong! The Martian is one of the best books I’ve read this year, with a protagonist who is witty and smart and arctic chill under pressure. And he gets lots of practice being cool and unflappable, as crisis after crisis threaten to end his Mars castaway gig quicker than a barefoot jackrabbit on a hot greasy griddle in August. Even after Watney is able to make contact with NASA to let them know he isn’t dead yet, he faces a real puzzle: how can he survive four years until the rescue mission can reach him, with food that will only last for about a year?
That’s the basic setup for A Divided Loyalty (William Morrow, 2020), the 22nd entry in the police procedural series set in post-World War I England. Rutledge is a classic flawed protagonist, back from serving as an officer in that brutal war with a severe case of what was then called shell shock. It has left him hearing the voice of his dead sergeant Hamish at the most inopportune times. Much of the attraction of this series is observing how Rutledge battles his demons to continue serving as a highly effective Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard. So effective, in fact, that he’s often called on to solve cases that have stymied his superiors, and that’s the situation he faces here. A more senior Inspector was assigned to the initial investigation and came up with nothing, managing neither to identify the victim nor the killer. As Rutledge reluctantly follows in his colleague’s footsteps, he find anomalies in the initial investigation that are hard to explain.
society. (A cynic might note that the recent Republican interest in providing treatment instead of prison for drug users only came once the opioid epidemic struck middle-class whites, but I digress).
