The German Money

by Lev Raphael

Overview

Best known for Dancing on Tisha B’Av, the groundbreaking story collection exploring the lives of children of Holocaust survivors, Lev Raphael is also the author of five popular mysteries. 

Now he combines his talents in a story of emotional suspense.

Paul has spent his life running—from New York, the city of his birth; from his beautiful beshert; from contact with his own siblings; but mostly from his mother, a Holocaust survivor of inexplicable coldness.

Upon her mysterious death, the children face shocking questions. What caused her to die? Why did she divide their inheritance so that Paul, the least favorite son, was singled out to receive the most, the dreaded "German money,"a bequest of a million dollars accrued from German reparations to survivors . . . a gift as cynical as it is generous.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780967952000
Publisher:	Leapfrog Press
Publication date:	09/01/2003
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lev Raphael is the author of fifteen books and known internationally as the chronicler of the lives of the children of Holocaust survivors. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, among many prizes, his short works have appeared in two dozen anthologies. He performs all over the country at Jewish Book Fairs and has a weekly book show on NPR.

Editorial Reviews

"Lev Raphael is a daring writer—one who will not be -restrained by genre, but who tells his story with all the tools at his command. The German Money combines all of Raphael’s estimable talents, delivering an emotional thriller about a totally believable contemporary family coming to terms with fifty years of silence." - Edmund White

"Lev Raphael’s new novel is a powerful, haunting and erotic tale. The stunning narrative builds to a shocking -denouement and kept me turning pages faster and faster to learn the truth." - Linda Fairstein

From the Publisher

What a gift for a writer to be able to sustain unflagging, sweaty-palm suspense in a novel almost through character alone. This is what the prodigious Lev Raphael pulls off in The German Money, a mystery whose "shocking denouement," as one jacket blurb calls it, comes way late in the novel. Yet the moment is so organic to the whole thing that it feels as if a boiling volcano has finally let loose. — Richard Lipez

The Washington Post

A fictional take on Raphael's chronicles of the lives of Holocaust survivors' children. It seems almost as if Paul Menzus was born on the occasion of his mother's death. Returning to New York a few days after her funeral to meet with his siblings-beautiful, bitchy Dina, whose wealthy Quebecois husband got her to leave her job as a book editor, and screwed-up, bisexual Simon, who drives a cab in Queens-he says nothing of anyone or anything not intimately connected to his mother's demise, except to sing the praises of rural Michigan and to regret the loss of Valerie Hoffman, the girlfriend he abandoned to move there. His narrative, as airless as his parents' closed-up apartment on West End Avenue, focuses so exclusively on his memories of his mother, a bleak, carping Holocaust survivor, that it seems a miracle when Valerie appears, still unmarried, and accepts his dinner invitation. Even at dinner, Paul obsesses: Why wouldn't his mother speak of her experiences during the war? Why did a healthy woman die suddenly of a heart attack? And why did she leave him her reparations-the tainted "German money" Dina wants him to share, money that threatens to rip apart his remaining family? A constricted tale of unresolved mourning only partly redeemed by the clever twist Raphael (Burning Down the House, 2001, etc.) saves for the end.

Kirkus Reviews