Cesare
A Novel of War-Torn Berlin
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves
“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. . . . [Cesare is] provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post
On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies.
Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.
Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared.
Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 F hrer'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 prot g 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.
