Average book, but not worth keeping. ( )

I started reading this seriously and found it a bit heavy, but once I decided it was a thriller/whodunit, albeit set in the Warsaw Ghetto, I enjoyed it much more.

This review originally ran in Noir Journal: http://noirjournal.typepad.com/noir-journal/2011/03/noir-journal-38-from-spies-t...

In October 1940, Warsaw's German occupiers ordered that Jews be rounded up and crammed into neighborhoods that took up only two percent of the city. This was the Warsaw Ghetto: Specially erected high walls, barbed wire and sadistic guards doomed Warsaw's Jews to grim and brutal ways that were only just beginning.

One of the doomed is an elderly Jew, Erik Cohen, once a prominent psychiatrist. Erik gets by but is already skin and bones. We know little about his former life, only that he was respected and took some comfort in that respect. Erik's young nephew, Adam, is one of Erik's few lights of hope. Adam has a sparkle about him and might just make it out of this hell.

Then Adam is murdered. It's a grisly killing that leaves the boy's corpse horribly disfigured and tossed onto barbwire just outside the ghetto. Erik's shock turns to rage, and he summons the grit to find the killer. The clues are few and cryptic and Erik will endanger friends and family on the way, which would seem more careless if they weren't already so damned.

The desperate hunt is on. Erik and his old friend Izzy even cross over secretly into regular Warsaw, a chase full of riddles and false friends that will lead just where it had to. This isn't standard historical crime fiction. The story surges between: Erik's pursuit of an untouchable and crafty killer who, in standard historical mystery style, also symbolizes the dark era; and Erik's longing for lives and loved ones lost and soon to be lost, the former pummeling Erik in storms of emotion and nightmare.

Erik Cohen had been an atheist and modern Jew, but the old Jewish ways loom even as they're being eradicated. At times the dead seem to come alive like Ibbur in the Jewish Kabbalah, decent souls not sure if they're alive or dead. The ciphers and anagrams of that tradition will also help Erik cover his tracks — and lead him to the killer.

The dire setting of The Warsaw Anagrams outdoes the mean streets of most any noir novel. Those inside slowly succumb to misery and oppression, cold and hunger, and those somehow alive survive as ghosts of their former selves. It's a grueling wasteland churning backwards to a primitive state where good can rarely find its reward. Everyone loses and the more cunning often win. The story evokes noir in the fierce and hopeless way Erik and others scrap and scheme to beat rigged odds, well knowing they're well screwed. They will finish off what they pursue not so much to survive but to honor their dead and plunge a jagged blade into the throat of all those who thrive on making them disappear.

Author Richard Zimler is from New York and lives and teaches in Portugal. Zimler's novels include the internationally bestselling The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Hunting Midnight, Guardian of the Dawn, and Seventh Gate. He's won numerous prizes for his historical fiction, and the reasons ring clear in The Warsaw Anagrams. The writing is intense. Zimler is able to pinpoint emotions and desires with dead accuracy. The beginning and some sections favor loose, introspective narrative over action and dialogue that show the reader the way, but these passages work with great effect to establish Erik's longing, agony and the harsh fate of too many.

Near the end, when Erik tells the man who will continue his quest for him, "Beware of men who see no mystery when they look in the mirror," you begin to know just what Erik means.

— [a:Steve Anderson|3518909|Steve Anderson|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1294016085p2/3518909.jpg]

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Ben scritto, avvincente, ma gli è mancato qualcosa per essere perfetto. ( )

There are so many novels about the Holocaust, some of them great, Sophie’s Choice, others, which shall remain nameless, not so great. Zimler’s touched on the events of the Holocaust in some of his other books, most notably in The Seventh Gate which is set in 1930s Berlin, and, of course, most his books are concerned with the persecution of an individual or group because of their differences, but this is his first novel to deal directly with the Holocaust.

The novel is set in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 1940s. When we first meet Erik Cohen he is an “ibbur”, a spirit who needs to complete an important task, visiting his old home, where he meets Heniek Corben and, needing to be heard, tells Heniek his story. Erik, an elderly Jewish psychoanalyst, moved from his comfortable flat to live within the Ghetto with his niece Stefa, sharing a bedroom with his nine year old nephew, Adam. When Adam is murdered, possibly by the Nazis, Erik sets out to try and solve the mystery. As he investigates Adam’s murder, he discovers that other children have been killed in similar circumstances.

Zimler’s narrative explores a Ghetto where amongst the starvation, dejection and despair, there is still hope, love and kindness. But the world outside is a terrible place, where a Jew can be picked up by the SS at any time, and anyone suspected of harbouring or helping a Jew can be killed without a thought. Yet it is in this world that Erik finds the terrible and horrifying solution to Adam’s murder.

Zimler’s prose is direct and seemingly simple and it is this directness that is at the heart of his genius – he doesn’t shy away from Erik’s occasional pleasures, a crystal of sugar in his coffee, or what passes for coffee in the Ghetto and his pains, offered a cup of coffee in the world outside, he takes ‘a first sip of coffee, but its dark flavour was so redolent of better times that I wasn’t sure I ought to drink it.’ This simplicity gets to the heart of the characters and I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried, more than once, while reading this book.

But this is not a depressing book. Yes it bears witness to a dark period in European history, one that has been and is sadly being repeated for other reasons, in other lands, even now. But, as in his other books, in amongst all the horrors of the Holocaust, there is hope. His characterisation makes it clear that no one is ever completely good, or bad, so there is always hope that goodness will eventually prevail. Also, there is Erik’s hope, the heart of the book, that someone will survive and bear witness in order to ‘remember the dead in all their uniqueness.’ ( )