The Nazi Hunter: A Novel
by Alan Elsner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alan ElsnerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-06-06
ISBN: 1559708395
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Book Reviews of The Nazi Hunter: A Novel
Book Review: A first-rate book....
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Nazi Hunter: A Novel" is a perfect first novel by long-time Reutgers news correspondent, Alan Elsner. The mark of a really good writer is the ability to take events from his own life and the pages of history, then put them in the clothes of fiction to make function and style work together in presenting a page-turning story. That's what Elsner has done--and beautifully.
The book is historical fiction based on information from the Holocaust trials, which will inevitably reveal one monstrous example of some of the horrors associated with the camps and the officers in charge. Part of that horror is coated with the sweet sounds of German lieder (love songs) to make dying easier--not for the victimized Jews but for the ease of the SS officers who forced thousands of Jews to die at one time in the Belzec camp in Poland.
A lovely romance threads the pages of the book. Amongst murder and mayhem lies the life-defining act of a sexual coming together of two of the investigators. If this sounds tawdry, it is not. It is a defiance in the face of all that is ugly and degrading about humans to find that core of life that comes through love and sex.
The book is definitely a thriller with all the attempts to murder the narrator/protagonist and all people close to him. Political connections involving important Washington people make the investigations a dangerous political minefield. Even an insider from the bureau leaks damaging information, with the intention of tarnishing the good name of the director.
Marek Cain, called Mark, (yes, he was teased as a boy in school) is the Jewish lead counsel in the government's Office of Special Investigations. The day Sophie Reiner walks into his office, dripping water from her raincoat on a very wet day, changes his life for the next several months.
Joining him in his quest to ascertain the truth surrounding Sophie is Lynn, his young assistant. Their search takes them to the Ukraine, where they interview two surviving Ukrainian soldiers, both at Belzec, then on to Poland and Belzec, a camp where all but two Jews were "exterminated."
At the center of the mystery and investigations is Roberto Delatrucha, a recognized Argentinian master singer of German lieder, who, among others, is about to receive a special arts medal by the President himself. Is he indeed the horrific SS officer they are investigating?
But the most astonishing aspect of the novel is the Jewish theme that forms the strongest thread. Cain is a devout Orthodox Jew, who follows the discipline of his religion: food, prayers, love, ritual. For it is ritual and what it symbolizes that binds all Jews with their one God in continuity and unity. For just a few moments the reader becomes part of this quietening of the spirit as Mark prays.
Elsner tells the reader in the end page that his grandparents were both killed at Belzec and that finally--after fifty years of total neglect--a memorial was created to honor the dead who died there.
Summary of The Nazi Hunter: A Novel
Nicknamed "the Nazi Hunter," Marek Cain, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Justice Department, has for ten years been the point man for tracking down ex-Nazis who have fraudulently entered this country since World War II and bringing them to justice.One late afternoon, a distraught German woman eludes security and slips into Cain's office. "I have documents," she says, "important documents only for the Nazi Hunter." She promises to bring them the next day. When she doesn't
show, he dismisses her as just another crackpot. But when he reads in the Washington Post next morning that the woman has been brutally murdered, he
senses he's on to something big. He must find those documents. The trail leads from Washington to Miami, to Boston, back to the Belzec concentration camp in Poland, where half a million Jews were murdered in the winter of 1942, and into the lair of America's fascist militias.
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