Keep Saying Their Names

March 23, 2020
Stranger’s English-language debut blends fact and fiction in a haunting tale of a Jewish family impacted by the horrors of WWII. The narrator, an unnamed writer, is the grandson-in-law of Hirsch Komissar, one of 10 prisoners executed randomly by the Nazis in 1942 in reprisal for acts of sabotage by the Norwegian resistance. Hirsch’s murderer, Henry Oliver Rinnan, was, historically, a notorious Nazi collaborator who perpetrated atrocities in the Gang Monastery, an interrogation house in Trondheim. After identifying Rinnan, the narrator proceeds with “a story so monstrous and unlikely that at first I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was true”—in a ghoulishly ironic twist, the monastery became the home of Hirsch’s son, Gerson, and his family after the war. Stranger interweaves the narrator’s account of Rinnan’s despicable rise and fall with the story of Gerson and his wife, Ellen, whose marriage gradually crumbles under the weight of their home’s malignant legacy. Despite the grim subject, Stranger succeeds in shining a light of hope by keeping the memory of the dead alive. This tale of triumph and compassion is a testament to courage in the face of the darkest evil.