Good People

August 29, 2016
In Berlin in early 1939, a famous radio broadcaster at a party is asked about the political climate: "I work very closely with the Minister of Propaganda," he assures partygoers, "and I can guarantee that Germany is doing everything it can to avoid war." Thomas Heiselberg, the protagonist in this dense novel, hears the claim but knows far too much to be convinced. Instead, Thomas feels "the familiar weakness... People became shadows. Everything blurred." He's terrified by the events unfolding around him, including the violent murder, in his own home, of a Jew who'd previously worked for his family and returned, unbidden, to care for his mother. Neither generous nor immoral, Thomas, who at least initially works for an American company, tries to stay alive, travelling from Warsaw to Lublin in the process. Not dissimilar to Thomas in nature is Sasha, a young Russian woman in Leningrad in 1938, whose parents have not returned from their most recent interrogation and who then finds herself faced with the choice, as her future husband puts it, to "die or become another person." The book follows Thomas and Sasha in alternating chapters as they become more entangled in the parties they remain determined to neither support nor oppose. As promising as the setup sounds, the narrative is difficult to navigate. Readers will find that the opening dramatis personae of 31 characters in five cities is only the beginning, and that there are, in fact, far more names and positions and connections to keep track of. This breadth reflects Baram's tremendous knowledge, but the story is ineffective and diffuse, as even Thomas and Sasha become as blurry as Thomas's fear.

July 1, 2016
A German market researcher in Nazi Germany and the daughter of literary dissidents employed by the NKVD in Stalin's USSR are brought face to face with the consequences of their actions.The German, Thomas Heiselberg, gets a job for the German branch of an American advertising company. His research brings him to the attention of the Nazis, who are planning the invasion of Poland. Sasha Weissberg, whose parents have been taken away by Stalin's secret police, gets a job interrogating dissidents, some of them people she grew up listening to in her parents' salon. The novel means to investigate the vanity of believing that personal ambition can stay free of history and politics. The period is the uncertain months before the rupture of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, in other words a time ripe for self-delusion. But a fertile period of history does not immediately translate into compelling fiction. Both the protagonists are rather blah, the sort that history tends to describe as "functionaries." Nor does their ultimate intersection provide any dramatic impulse to a novel that is clearly serious in intent and execution but turgid. As slogs go, this is not the siege of Leningrad. But it'll do.

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