Good People
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
It’s late 1938.
Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company.
In Leningrad, twenty-two-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents’ literary salon.
They each have grand plans for their lives. Neither of them thinks about politics too much, but after catastrophe strikes they will have no choice.
Thomas puts his research skills to work elaborating Nazi propaganda. Sasha persuades herself that working as a literary editor of confessions for Stalin’s secret police is the only way to save her family.
When destiny brings them together, they will have to face the consequences of the decisions they have made.
Nir Baram’s Good People is a tour de force that has been showered with praise in many countries. It reminds us how fiction can present acute moral awareness of the individual in the context of towering historical landscapes.
Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams, Good People and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature.
‘A freezing depiction of moral decay.’ Berlingske
‘Quite possibly, Dostoyevsky would write like this if he lived in Israel today.’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘The novel is written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity…It expands the borders of young literature and opens new landscapes for it.’ Amos Oz
‘One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.’ Haaretz
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
