The Sonderberg Case

Mark Bramhall's warm, textured voice is a perfect vehicle for this spare, if flawed, meditation on guilt and innocence, parenthood, and the sins of fathers and sons. The technical challenges include Yiddish, German, and various "New Yawk" accents; Bramhall is completely at ease with these. The emotional challenge is something else--conveying the anguish of journalist Yedidyah as he covers the murder trial of a young German, Werner Sonderberg, who pleads "Guilty, and Not Guilty" in the death of his elderly relative. Yedidyah comes to understand that his own life has been more shattered than he ever knew by the tragedy that befell European Jewry during the Holocaust. As Yedidyah pursues the truth about Sonderberg's case and his own, Bramhall's sensitive, focused performance serves the text respectfully, and shines. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

June 14, 2010
Wiesel (Night) returns to the moral questions that characterize the post-WWII generation in this slim novel that is both overstuffed with plot and skimpy on motive. Yedidyah Wasserman, a well-regarded theater critic in New York City, is split between his parents' generation of Holocaust survivors and that of his sons, young American men who have chosen to move to Israel. Yedidyah imagines himself in the comfortable middle until he is called upon to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate. He is enthusiastic, but the trial is an unsettling opportunity for him to search the past and his family history, and also inexplicably angers his wife, Alika, a stage actress. The novel is told mostly via Yedidyah's personal reflections and each component of the story is so divorced from the next—there are no scenes, for instance, that show Yedidyah with more than one family member at a time—that it's difficult to assemble a larger view of his life. The ambitious scope of the story, spanning generations, is compelling, but limited by the novel's length.