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.

If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi

I was astonished to learn that this was Levi's only novel written at the end of his career.  I remember him as an iconic writer, in many ways the spokesman for all Holocaust survivors, and had assumed that at least some of his many books were fiction.

Levi was an Italian Jew but his hero here is a Russian Jew.  Mendel has become detached from his unit of the Red Army.  For a year he has been wandering alone through the vast Russian landscape.  Then he is joined by Leonid, a paratrooper who has escaped from the German lager at Smolensk.  Leonid, too, is Jewish, but is keen to hide the fact, a recurring theme of the book.  They decide to wander on together - and wander is the word; they have no plan, no goal.  They meet up with various others in the same predicament, until they come upon the predominantly Jewish partisan troop led by the quixotic Gedaleh.  This becomes their family.  They share the troop's Jewishness and adopt their aim of finding a way to Israel.  Instead of trying to avoid the war, they begin to attack the Germans.

A fascinating and truly moving book, all the more so because the debutante novelist turns out to be a master storyteller.  He doesn't wallow in the horror of the Holocaust but finds green shoots of humanity and hope sprouting from the horror.

It is a disgrace that this is not on the A-level syllabus every year.