The Warsaw Anagrams

On a 1941 visit to the Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a new ghost tells his story to someone who still walks among the living. Stefan Rudnicki delivers the first-person narrative in a deep, versatile voice. As the ghost talks about his investigation into the death of a nephew, listeners will feel his many emotions. These are conveyed as he recounts his memories of such events as his last walk with his nephew and their receipt of fresh lemons to fight scurvy. Both gentle and powerful, Rudnicki's narration captures the terrors of a strange mystery and a frightening era of history. J.A.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

May 23, 2011
Zimler, who examined the slaughter of Jews in 16th-century Portugal in The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, explores a different dark period in the Jewish people's history in this solid mystery thriller. In 1940, psychiatrist Erik Cohen moves into the Warsaw ghetto before the Nazis force him to do so, along with his niece, Stefa, and his beloved great-nephew, Adam, who appears to be about nine. Cohen is frantic when the boy vanishes and is beyond distraught when Adam's corpse is located with the child's right leg severed from the knee down. Determined to track down the killer, Cohen has further cause for alarm after discovering that Adam was not the murderer's only victim; that Benjamin Schrei, a representative of the ghetto's Jewish Council, knew the killing was part of a series; and that a Jew might be responsible for the butchery. The highly unusual setting adds tension to the investigation, and Zimler successfully manages to convey the horrors of the Holocaust through the experiences of one family.