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Read All About It

The Czech Ring,
A Nazi's Mistress, and
Murder On Yom Kippur

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM ASSISTANT EDITOR

igo
iterary scholars re-

gard Karel Polacek
as Czechoslovakia's
answer to Ring
( ("Shut
"Shut up," he ex-
plained)
Lardner.
His books
have been
called "masterpieces of black
humor," and during the
1930s Mr. Polacek was the
most prominent Jewish
writer in his country.
So why doesn't anyone to-
day know about Mr. Polacek?
That may all change with
the recent publication of his
What Ownership's All
About (Catbird Press, North
Haven, Conn.), a darkly hu-
morous novel about what
power, even a tiny amount,
does to a person and those
under his thumb.
What Ownership's All
About, written in 1928, is the
first of Mr. Polacek's works
to be published in English.
The novel focuses on po-
liceman Jan Faktor, who

Sherri Szeman

builds a three-family house
on the outskirts of Prague.
He begins to lord his respon-
sibility over his tenants, and
they respond by fearfully con-
ceding to his increasingly ab-
surd demands.
Mr. Polacek was born in
1892 and was one of the most
popular novelists, journalists,
children's writers and hu-
morists in the former Czecho-
slovakia. Among his works
were Jewish Stories and The
Five ofUs, a novel of World
War I. He died in a concen-
tration camp in 1944
wo new works of non-
fiction, both by
women, focus on the
horrors of the Holo-
caust.
Sherri Szeman's The
Kommandant's Mistress
(HarperCollins) explores the
complex themes of power,
sexual domination, evil and
obsession. The narrative
moves through time, offering
three remarkably different
versions of the same event
and challenging the reader to
ferret out the truth.
The story is told first
by Max von Walther, the
head of a Nazi death
camp in Eastern Europe.
Among the Jewish pris-
oners he spots the beau-
tiful Rachel Levi, whom
he takes as his mistress
and with whom he be-
lieves he shares a unique
relationship.
The second part of the
novel has Rachel's per-
spective: her humiliation
and degradation at von
Walther's hands.
The final section of
The Kommandant's Mis-
tress offers still another
view of the relationship

T

between the two — an objec-
tive perspective provided by
official documents that reveal
startling facts that skew all
the reader has been told.
The Kommandant's Mis-
tress is the first novel by Ms.
Szeman, associate professor
of creative writing and Eng-
lish literature at Central
State University in Ohio.
Boat of Stone (Perma-
nent Press, Sag Harbor, NY),
by Maureen Earl, is a work of
fiction based on an actual
event: the detention in 1940
of more than 1,500 German
Jewish refugees in a British
penal colony on the island of
Mauritius after their depor-
tation from Palestine.
Ms. Earl's fictional narra-
tor is Hanna Sommerfeld,
who now lives in Israel and
whose life is interwoven with
recollections of the past —
her flight from Germany, her
ambivalent relationship with
her husband, and her coming
of age in Mauritius.
During the course of the
book, Hanna deals with the
murder of her mother in a
Nazi death camp, the death
of her husband, and a preg-
nant granddaughter who is
seeing a reincarnation ther-
apist.
Ms. Earl, whose previous
works include Gulliver Quick,
was born in Cairo, the daugh-
ter of a British pilot and a
French mother. She is mar-
ried to author Clifford Irving.
n the midst of Middle
East peace prospects
comes a new book, A
Place Among the Na-
tions: Israel and the World
(Bantam) by Likud leader
Benjamin Netanyahu. The
former Israeli ambassador to
the United States considers

I

Karel Polacek

such topics as why Israel, 40
miles wide, is under such re-
lentless physical and ideo-
logical attacks from its Arab
neighbors, 500 times its size;
why Zionism, once supported
by leaders worldwide, has in
recent years come to be so
scorned; and why Israel is be-
ing held to a higher moral
code of conduct than other
sovereign states.
Mr. Netanyahu has been
working for the past five
years on A Place Among the
Nations in which, he says, he
has "tried to focus on the
main assumptions concern-
ing the Arab-Israeli conflict
and to analyze their truth-
fulness. I also have concen-
trated on Israel's position in
the world, its internal ad-
ministration, and its rela-
tionship to the Jewish people
worldwide."
Among Mr. Netanyahu's
statements that are sure to

get reaction these days: "No
matter that the PLO wasn't
actually elected by anyone.
No matter that its only claim
to unchallenged support lay
in the fact that it slaughtered
any Palestinian opponent
who dared dissent. Through-
out the Arab world, it was ac-
cepted that the PLO had to
be pushed front and forward
when discussing Israel, so
that the attention of the
Western public opinion would
remain focused on the pur-
ported sins of Zionism
against the Palestinians,
rather than on, for example,
the Arab states' feverish
arms buildup aimed against
Israel and against each oth-
er."
nd finally, some
late-night reading
for those who enjoy
nightmares: Fami-

A

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co
a,

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