Book Reviews
With the sensuous pace of a poet, she unravels an epic tale of two families, spanning the world of pre-war Berlin to late-20th century Melbourne, and counting the cost of the horror from both sides of the moral fence. It is a rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty. Canberra Times, Ian McFarlane 'this is a novel that seeks to provoke questions rather than provide answers; a novel about theft and appropriation in myriad disguises as much as it is an attempt to understand the Holocaust's dark shadow.
Bron Sibree - Brisbane Courier Mail (Australia)
An epic tale.... A rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty.
Canberra Times (Australia)
Goldsmith's gripping Holocaust epic begins with two German children: Heinrik Heck, born poor in 1910, and Alice Lewin, who is six when Kristallnacht shatters her elegant secular Jewish family. As an army deserter in 1945, Heinrick comes across Martin, a typhoid-stricken concentration camp survivor, and makes a desperate choice. "There's his own future to consider, he tells himself as he squats down and lays his hands one each side of Martin's head. He twists." Martin is Alice's father; Heinrik, having killed Martin, takes part of Martin's identity and reinvents himself as Henry Lewin, a Jew, and starts a new life in Australia. Alice, saved by the Kindertransport, lands in California, marries a non-Jew and erases the un-American lilt in her voice. But her son, Raphe, is obsessed with the Jewish grandfather with whom he shares a passion for volcanoes. His urging sends Alice to Australia, where she confronts Henry Lewin. Henry dies; Alice dies. Raphe, guardian of the truth, goes to Australia with such rage inside him, it seems he might murder Henry's daughter. Despite a melodramatic ending on the rim of a volcano and a few lapses in craft and language ("loathe" for "loath"), Australian Goldsmith's fifth novel has undeniable power.
Publishers Weekly
A riveting tale that takes on every piety about the Holocaust and holds it up to heartbreaking and unflinching scrutiny. It may technically be about the Holocaust, but at its heart, this is about what happens when a cataclysmic event has been too often narrated and too often dramatized on television and in films. Can an individual feel the burden of history? Should history be reduced to memory? At the center of this story is Henry, an impoverished, disenfranchised German thief, for whom the war is a godsend, and the Lewin family, cultured, educated and Jewish, and unlike Henry, unable to believe that Germany would turn its back on its most accomplished citizens. The German thief steals the identity of the Jewish family, and after the war, he builds a full, happy life in Australia—his son is an observant Jew, his daughter a worker for human rights. When members of the Lewin family come to Australia to confront the thief and his children, everyone is made to consider what good knowledge actually does in the world—how does knowing the truth of anyone's experience change one's own? Any account of the plot cannot give a sense of the story's beauty. Goldsmith's feeling for the subtleties and contradictions of individual characters evoke the stylized, layered sentences of Henry James, even Tolstoy. This is all compulsively readable, almost hypnotic in its ability to draw the reader in. A superbly crafted novel that's less interested in the historical events of the Holocaust than the ways in which the late-20th century inherited and struggled with its multiple legacies.
Kirkus Reviews