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3426 E. West Maple Rd., at Haggerty Rd.

(248) 926-9555

Historical fiction can be stuffy, but not when Leslie Epstein is the
author. In his latest novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World (Other Press;
$$24.95), Epstein applies his irreverent, tragic-comic-absurdist sensibil-
ity to the fate of the Jews in Fascist Italy. In his best-known book, King of
the Jews, Epstein focused on the egotistical, morally questionable Nazi-
appointed Jewish leader of one of Poland's doomed Jewish ghettos. Here
he invents a similar, but non-Jewish, egotistical, morally tainted collabora-
tor, the American architect and expatriate Amos Prince.
Hired by Mussolini to build a mile-high monument
to his regime, Prince (like the pro-Fascist American
poet Ezra Pound) makes Italy his home and becomes
ever more voluble in his Fascist cheerleading and anti-
Semitic radio broadcasts.
And yet, Prince's right-hand man, Max, is Jewish.
Epstein depicts this cog-in-Prince's wheel as assimilat-
ed enough to overlook his boss's racism, but conflicted
EIGHTH WIMER 1:11.13
enough about his own collaboration with Prince and
Mussolini to attempt a redeeming, self-aggrandizing
scheme to rescue Rome's Jews.
Adding to the convoluted plot, Max chooses an even more morally
compromised collaborator for his ultimately bungled plan: Israel Zolli, the
real-life chief rabbi of Rome, who did in fact abandon his community, tak-
ing refuge in the Vatican in 1943 and converting to Catholicism in 1945.
Epstein's provocative mix of fact and melodrama careens between the
antic and the operatic to keep the reader off balance until the end. You
gasp in horror, even as you laugh. In Eighth Wonder of the World, Epstein
has composed a post-modern take on fiction as well as the Holocaust, a
dark joke that would be funny if history hadn't proven even darker.
- Diane Cole

reviewed and applied to today's dilemmas
by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in Why Arendt
Matters (Yale University Press; $22).

FICTION

Tova Reich's sat-
ire invents people
of diverse ethnic
groups taking
over the United
States Holocaust
Memorial Museum
to call attention to
their own traumas
in My Holocaust
(HarperCollins; $24.95).

identity, deceits and diverse lives as a
young newlywed tries to save her family.

The Polish Woman by Eva Mekler
(Bridge Works; $21.95) develops a
story about a possible survivor of the
Holocaust suspected of identity theft as
she tries to claim ties to a rich Jewish
family in New York.

A collection of Holocaust memoirist
Primo Levi's unpublished stories — with
characters of all ages and subjects that
range from sex to war — comes to read-
ers in A Tranquil Star (W.W. Norton;
$21.95).

FOR YOUNGER READERS

Norman Mailer puts his imagination
to work with a novel about Hitler's
childhood in The Castle in the Forest
(Random House; $17.95).

A Hatred for Tulips by Richard Lourie
(Thomas Dunne Books; $22.95) pres-
ents a fictionalized account of the
betrayal of Anne Frank and introduces a
desperate young boy.

Fences and the obstacles they present
and represent are part of a drama set
during the Holocaust in The Boy in the
Striped Pajamas by Irish author John
Boyne (Random House; $15.95).
The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff
(MIRABooks; $13.95) is a story of false

Rebekkah's
Journey: A World
War It Refugee
Story (Sleeping
Bear Press; $17.95),
a picture book by
Ann Burg, is based
WA*•
PAIrt
on experiences of
Jews temporarily sheltered at the Fort
Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter.

Teen readers meet an amateur boxer
sparring for his life in Auschwitz in
by Jean-Jacques Greif's The Fighter
(Bloomsbury Publishing; $16.95), an
award-winning novel translated from
the French.

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April 12 • 2007

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