arts & life

b oo k s

FICTION continued from page 51

Death &
Baseball

The story of racist killers
in mid-1930s Detroit told
against the backdrop of
our champion Tigers.

David Sachs | Senior Copy Editor

D

etroit won the reputation
as the legendary “City of
Champions” in the mid-1930s when
the Tigers, Lions and Red Wings rose
to the top of their sports, and home-
town boxer Joe Louis ruled the ring.
But all was not
w
well in what was
t then the nation’s
f fourth largest
c city.
Tom Stanton’s
T Terror in the City
o of Champions:
Murder, Baseball
M
a and the Secret
S Society that
S Shocked
Depression-
D
Era Detroit (Lyons Press) tells the
true story of the Ku Klux Klan-like
“Black Legion” that despised blacks,
Catholics, Jews, union organizers
and others — and murdered more
than 50 people.
While Detroiters cheered Tiger
slugger Hank Greenberg, Bert
Effinger, the “major-general” of the
Black Legion, dreamed about releas-
ing poison gas in the country’s largest
synagogues during Jewish holidays.
One Black Legion murder occured
in 1935 when member Harvey Davis
wondered what it would be like to
kill a black man. The group lured
Silas Coleman, 42, onto their prop-
erty in Pinckney, then chased him
“like a deer” and shot him to death
before celebrating with beers and
shots of whiskey.
Of Jewish interest are tales about
Greenberg as well as prominent
anti-Semites Henry Ford and radio
priest Charles Coughlin.
Stanton, who teaches journalism
at the University of Detroit Mercy, is
author of the acclaimed memoir The
Final Season, about the last year of
baseball at Tiger Stadium.
For Detroit history buffs, sports
fans and true-crime enthusiasts,
Terror in the City of Champions is a
fast, thrilling ride into a hectic, fran-
tic time in the Motor City.

*

52 June 23 • 2016

THE HOLOCAUST

continued from page 51

■ The title of Brenda Janowitz’s
new novel, The Dinner Party (St.
Martin’s), refers to a suburban
Passover seder — peopled with
two sets of potential in-laws,
including a family of Rothschilds
— that is indeed different from
every other night. The holiday’s
themes of freedom and letting go
relate to the characters’ struggles.
■ On June 19, 1953, Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg became the only
Americans to be put to death for
spying during the Cold War. The
day Ethel was arrested, she left
her two young sons with a neigh-
bor and never came back. In The
Hours Count (Riverhead), Jillian
Cantor (Margot) weaves fact with
fiction by creating the story of a
fictional neighbor, Millie Stein.
Knowing the Rosenbergs as an
ordinary-seeming Jewish couple,
Stein is thrown into a world of
lies, betrayal, spies and counter-
spies.
■ Told with compassion, The
Houseguest (Counterpoint) by
Kim Brooks, a vibrant debut
novel, is set during the Holocaust,
all around America. At the outset,
a rabbi in Utica, N.Y., convinces
a local junk dealer and his family
to take in a European refugee, the
volatile and charming actress of
the book’s title. As the characters
feel the war approaching their
own lives, they reach out in their
own ways to fight.
■ Set against the backdrop
of a starry cast of characters,
including Mark Rothko, Jackson
Pollock, Lee Krasner and Eleanor
Roosevelt, The Muralist: A

Novel (Algonquin Books), by
B.A. Shapiro (The Art Forger)
tells of a young American painter
working for the Works Progress
Administration. Inspired by
historical events during the
Roosevelt administration, The
Muralist follows the protagonist
as she works to define herself as
an abstract artist, tries to obtain
visas for her Jewish family living
in German-occupied France —
then suddenly vanishes in New
York City in 1940.
■ Author Edward Lewis
Wallant, compared to other
Jewish American writers such as
Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, died
one year after The Pawnbroker
(Fig Tree Books) was originally
published in 1961. One of the first
American novels to deal with the
lingering trauma of the Holocaust
— and inspired Sidney Lumet’s
1965 film of the same name,
which was the first American
movie to deal with the Holocaust
from a survivor’s perspective,
depicting the Nazi extermination
camps as evoked in Nazerman
the protagonist’s nightmarish
memories. Set in Harlem, The
Pawnbroker, now reissued in a
new edition, explores the fraught
relationships between Jews and
other American minorities.
■ Set in 1950s Brooklyn, The
Two-Family House (St. Martin’s)
by Lynda Cohen Loigman is the
story of two women and the two
children to whom they give birth,
two minutes apart in a 1947 bliz-
zard, in the house their families
share. The two mothers are mar-

ried to a pair of brothers, and
the novel follows their entangled
lives. This sparkling debut novel
is inspired by stories the author
heard in her childhood.
■ Called a “modern-day Jewish
Jane Austen” by reviewer Leah
Rozen in People magazine,
Cathleen Schine (whose ex-
husband is New Yorker film critic
David Denby) writes a funny
novel about aging, family, loneli-
ness and love in They May Not
Mean to, But They Do (Sarah
Crichton Books/FSG). When Joy’s
beloved husband dies, her adult
children did not count on the
reappearance of a suitor from her
college days and on Joy herself to
become as suddenly willful and
rebellious as their own kids.
■ From the Yiddish for “choked
with emotion,” Verklempt
(Doppel House Press), by
Austrian journalist and former
politician Peter Sichrovsky, is a
collection of darkly humorous,
often absurd and almost always
touching Jewish-themed short
stories.
■ Reed Farrel Coleman, who
once said, “I have a great Irish
name, though I’m of Ukrainian
Jewish heritage,” is the creator of
the acclaimed Moe Prager crime
novels featuring a Jewish ex-cop
in 1980s New York. In Where
It Hurts (G.P Putnam’s Sons),
Coleman introduces Gus Murphy,
another middle-aged cop, in a
book that is both a crime story
and a meditation on grief and
loss.

accounts of daily life in the Warsaw
and Lodz ghettos of two Yiddish
journalists who ultimately died in
the Holocaust. Their
frightening words fill
300 pages, includ-
ing the Sept. 6, 1942,
account of when 22
Jews were executed,
“their hanging bod-
ies swaying wantonly
like twenty-two leaves
fluttering from a with-
ered branch.”
■ In The Anatomy
of Malice: The
Enigma of the Nazi
War Criminals (Yale),
professor of psychol-
ogy Joel E. Dimsdale examines
four war criminals — Ley, Goring,
Streicher and Hess — and asks
whether they were fundamentally

like other people or fundamentally
different.
■ “It’s a lie that Poles killed the
Jews in Jedwabne,” says Tadeusz
S., a retired doctor from Warsaw.
Though an eyewitness, he was one
of many to cover up the events of
July 10, 1941, a day when residents
of the Polish town herded local
Jews into a barn and set it on fire,
murdering 1,600 men, women
and children. The Crime and the
Silence: Confronting the Massacre
of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by
Polish journalist Anna Bikont, is an
astonishing act of investigation and
documentation in the face of lies,
denial and massive indifference.
■ The Nazi Hunters (Simon &
Schuster) by Andrew Nagorski
focuses on the men and women
who worked to track down Nazi

war criminals and bring them to
justice, as the era of being able to
do so is coming to a close.
■ Once loyal Hitler Youth
participants, brother and sister
Hans and Sophie Scholl became
founding members of the White
Rose, a group of students in Nazi
Germany appalled by Hitler’s mass
slaughter of German citizens and
determined to resist his regime at
any cost. With archival photos and
a thoroughly researched and well-
told story, Newbery Honor win-
ner Russell Freedman details the
beginning of the movement and
the lives of its members in We Will
Not Be Silent: The White Rose
Student Resistance Movement
that Defied Adolf Hitler (Clarion
Books).

