Cesare

October 15, 2019
In Nazi Germany, an orphan boy of lowly origins grows up to become an enforcer for German military intelligence and the helpless pawn of a vixen-ish mystery woman. Half-Jewish orphan Erik Holdermann was raised by prostitutes from the age of 9 before being sent to an orphanage. When it is discovered there that he has a living uncle--albeit a cruel and distant one who disowned Erik's late mother for marrying a postman--he is sent to the uncle's farm, where he is regularly beaten up by boys wearing Nazi pins and nearly dies after becoming trapped in a barn during a frigid winter storm. Erik's life takes a momentous turn during cadet school when, with a show of brute force, he saves a man being beaten by a gang of street toughs; that man turns out to be Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military intelligence service. Canaris takes Erik under his wing, dubs him Cesare (a reference to the "magician" in the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and counts on him to threaten or disappear anyone who gets in his way. That can mean someone from the Gestapo or SS--even as he serves the Nazi regime, Canaris is dedicated to saving or safely exporting Jews. Erik's half-Jewish mystery woman, Lisa Valentiner, with whom he has been obsessed since he was a boy, is both a member of the Jewish underground and the wife of a Nazi officer. It's a nebulous world in which the Gestapo, which recognizes the need for Jews in any spy network, employs half-Jews to lure other half-Jews out of hiding. The 82-year-old Charyn's latest work in a distinguished career is subtitled "a novel of war-torn Berlin," but that doesn't begin to prepare readers for this edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable. Cabaret, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, Rosa Luxembourg, "Jewish jazz," traveling executioners dubbed Hansel and Gretel, a hump-backed baron--they're all in the mix. A darkly entertaining, eye-opening novel.

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Starred review from November 4, 2019
Charyn’s spectacular latest (after The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King) captures the madness of Nazi Germany in a fiercely inventive merging of fiction and fact. Erik Holdermann’s parents both die before his ninth birthday in 1928, after which he is raised in a Berlin orphanage. When philanthropist Wilfrid von Hecht and his daughter, Lisa, make a visit to the institution, Erik is smitten by Lisa, a “mischling,” or partially Jewish, teenager a few years his senior. Their lives diverge when Lisa marries an SS colonel and, at 17, Erik rescues a seedy-looking man being attacked by thugs. The man is Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, director of the Abwehr espionage unit. Canaris has Erik trained in killing and disguise, nicknaming him “Cesare” after the somnambulist assassin in the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Though Erik’s covert work becomes the stuff of whispered legend, few know that he’s helping Canaris—whose loyalty to Hitler has frayed in the face of the Führer’s increasingly erratic leadership—to sabotage Nazi attempts to exterminate Berlin’s Jews. After Erik re-encounters Lisa at a dinner party, the two begin a fevered affair. When she’s sent to Theresienstadt, where a “Jewish Paradise” designed by Nazi propagandists hides an Auschwitz way station, Erik risks his life trying to save her. Charyn’s nuanced depiction of the bond between the eccentric Canaris and his protégé balances the novel’s many macabre moments, and the searing ending is a masterpiece of unsentimentalized tenderness. This extraordinary tour de force showcases the prolific author at the top of his game.

November 15, 2019
The 1920 German silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari featured a mad scientist and a somnambulist named Cesare who did his bidding. Adding to his repertoire of unique historical interpretations, Charyn transplants this scenario into Nazi Germany, a setting with nightmarish qualities made real. His Cesare is Erik Holdermann, who survives childhood trauma to become the henchman of Wilhelm Canaris, head of Germany's military spy network, after saving the older man's life. Acting against the Nazi regime from within, they quietly try to help individual Jews escape, but in a place rife with revenge murders and double and triple agents, discovery is inevitable; the only question is when. The taut story line is full of surreal visuals and elaborate illusions, from Berlin's Weisse Maus cabaret, reborn as a Gestapo club, to the purported Jewish cultural center at Theresienstadt. The toxic atmosphere distorts everyone's nature, and if that's not disturbing enough, there are too many superficially depicted, sex-obsessed female characters who enjoy physical abuse. Inventive, intense, and repellent in equal measure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)