Between the Nazi frying pan and the Soviet fire
Text Publishing, £10.99 Reviewed by David Herman
BORN I N Jerusalem i n 1976, Nir Baram is one of the leading Israeli novelists of his generation, a generation that includes Etgar Keret and Eshkol Nevo. His latest novel, received critical acclaim and sold 35,000 copies when it was published in Israel in 2010.
It is one of the very few contemporary Israeli novels not to be set in Israel, past or present. The narrative moves between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, between Kristallnacht and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. And it is an outstanding historical novel.
Its strength lies in its original- ity. There are no clichés in Baram’s account of Nazism. His Nazis are interesting, ambitious young men playing office politics, trying to rise up the greasy pole to promotion.
Only one SS officer is an out-andout thug. Like Robert Littell’s controversial novel, Baram’s story draws on recent historical research for its depiction of how the Nazi state works and how departments fight each other to control key areas of policy.
And, as the son and grandson of Labour ministers, Baram has an acute sense of how politics work.
The central German character is Thomas Heiselberg, a young careerist on the make, working for an American-owned advertising company. When the Americans pull the plug on their German operation, Heiselberg, ever t h e o p p o r - tunist, tries to join the G e r m a n Foreign Office, and gets involved with the German occupation of Poland. Heiselberg is a fascinating creation: ambitious, motivated entirely by selfinterest, troubled (but only a little) by the fate of two Jewish women he knows, and deeply alone. An orphan and an only child, he has no family, and no wife or children of his own. The German chapters alternate with those set in the Soviet Union. Sasha Weissberg, the central Soviet character is more sympathetic than Heiselberg but is also dark, complex, haunted by feelings of guilt. She lives with her Jewish parents and twin brothers in Leningrad at the end of the purges of the 1930s. Baram superbly evokes the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that hangs over everyone in Stalinist Leningrad. Sasha’s friends and family constantly wait for the knock on the door in the middle of the night. As the net draws ever nearer around her family, Sasha agonises about how to save her young brothers. Will she have to make a pact with the devil? At what cost?
Sasha and Heiselberg are two of the most interesting characters in contemporary fiction. They are both ambitious, young, “full of strategy”, trying to keep afloat within totalitarian states. “We’re survival machines,” Sasha’s husband writes to her. The writing only occasionally shines but the literary and historical research are firstrate. This is an original and intriguing study of empty selves in dark times. Nir Baram is clearly a writer to look out for.