Cesare - Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is 85 years old and has been publishing novels for more fifty years.  So why am I only just hearing about him?  Why has he been so disgracefully underpublished in the UK?

Congrats to Oldcastle/No Exit for getting hold of Charyn's 2020 novel Cesare.  They have published and publicised it well.   Cesare is the teenaged naval cadet Erik Holdermann who rescues a man being attacked by hooligans - only to learn that the man is Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr.  Canaris is a man of honour who repays his obligations, and Erik becomes 'Cesare' to Canaris's Caligari (referencing the expressionist silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), assassinating his master's enemies.

Erik is Aryan but was brought up by prostitutes in the Berlin ghetto and educated at a Jewish school.   He is adopted by the wealthy Baron von Hecht and becomes besotted with the baron's half-Jewish daughter Lisalein.  By the time war breaks out Lisalein has married the Nazi Valentiner, formerly her father's accountant.  She and Erik smuggle Jews out of Berlin.   Ultimately, inevitably, the Gestapo catch up with them both.

They are reunited at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp 'paradise' which the Nazis created to mask the Holocaust.  Also here is Benhard Beck, the Jewish cabaret artist who was the orinal Mack the Knife in Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  He colludes with the commandant in maintaining the myth of the camp - until the Red Cross finally turn up to inspect it.

Cesare is an astonishing book.  It is violent, comic, and makes no bones about the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.  The fictional characters are as convincing as the 'real' people.  Erik, Lisalein and Beck are benificent monsters; Canaris, who was executed by the Nazis a month or so before their defeat, is a martyr.  I hope Cesare opens the floodgate for mass publication of Charyn's backlist.  Meanwhile I have tracked down an ominibus of his Isaac Sidel novels from the mid-Seventies.