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Book Club: Wednesday, May 16
Kol Hadash Office
7:30 PM
Everyone is welcome to join the Kol Hadash Book Club at any of our meetings. We meet every other month and enjoy member-led discussions. If you're interested in joining or have questions, contact Beth Gilbert.
The May selection of the Book Club is
In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove. Booklist says:
Another magisterial alternate-history novel from the master of the form
features a modest, middle-class family in near-future Berlin: Heinrich
Gimpel; his wife, Lise; and their daughters Alicia, Francesca, and
Roxane. He is a middle-level, civilian bureaucrat at army headquarters,
and the only wrong note to contemporary this-world ears is that
Heinrich's Berlin is the capital of a world-spanning Third Reich. The
Gimpels, however, are covert Jews. From this dissonance, Turtledove
builds a complete symphony expressing how the Third Reich's remaining
Jews hide in plain sight, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Heinrich's disguise nearly shatters when a coworker's impeccably Aryan
wife tries to escape her troubled marriage by seducing him. Fortunately,
the authorities soon not only lack evidence of his Jewishness but also
have other fish to fry, one of them the new fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, who
remarkably resembles Mikhail Gorbachev. The countermeasures that the SS
and the party hacks take against Buckliger resemble the efforts to
overthrow the aforesaid Gorbachev, but even when one grasps the
resemblance, the suspense of the confrontation of good and evil remains
intense in Turtledove's hands. So does the impact of his handling of
more cerebral matters such as the devolution of dictatorships and the
survival of Jews and Jewish identity.
