Between These Walls

by Michael Newman

Overview

May 1945

In the dying days of WW II on the American occupied side of Germany's Elbe River, US Army Medical Corps Colonel Samuel Singer comes upon the shot-up wreck of a smouldering SS Staff car, with a badly injured driver, nearby a dead German Army officer carrying the ID of a Nazi war criminal, and a young blonde woman, also dead in the back seat.

July 1988

Art curator Daniel Singer, the adopted son of Colonel Singer receives a mysterious package-a large brown envelope, sealed with security tape-from West Berlin. He can't help but think that there's something important within the envelope. But what?

Daniel's quest to learn about the package's contents leads him on a surprising voyage of discovery about his own roots, including an encounter with the Mossad, Israel's top secret spy agency. As he searches, he unlocks the history and secrets of three families-one American and two German-following them through tumultuous times, from the dying days of WWI to the rise of Adolf Hitler, WWII, the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel and three Middle East wars.

As Daniel learns about duty, honour, sacrifice, and the familial ties that bind us all, he will be faced with a life-altering choice-and the opportunity to right the most heinous of wrongs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781525548840
Publisher:	FriesenPress
Publication date:	03/26/2020
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

A Hungarian refugee and the son of Holocaust survivors, Michael has received first-hand accounts of what happened during WWII in the concentration camps, particularly Mauthausen, where his father was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944/45. Newman had the opportunity to travel, surreptitiously, to Israel during the Second Lebanon War, an experience that was written about in both the National Post and the Toronto Star. He has travelled to Europe and visited Berlin, the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden near Munich, Hitler's wartime summer home, and Mauthausen concentration camp, locations that are featured prominently in the book.

Michael lives on Toronto's waterfront with his wife, Dixie, and their cocker spaniel, Sandy. They have five kids and eleven grandchildren.

Editorial Reviews

2020-02-27
In Newman’s (Getting Rich Doing What You Love, 2005) historical novel, an art curator receives a letter from Germany that shines a light on the cloudy circumstances of his birth.

In 1988, Daniel Singer, an expert on European Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, receives a mysterious letter from Germany. It looks like official correspondence, although it’s hard to be certain as it’s written in German—a language that Daniel doesn’t speak. He wonders, however, if the letter contains key information about his past; his parents, Samuel and Agatha, told him long ago that he was adopted; his biological father, they said, was an American soldier that died serving in World War II, and his mother died soon after childbirth. However, although Daniel had seen his adoption certificate, he was never able to locate any documents that verified the details of his birth. From this setup, Newman constructs an impressively imaginative but convoluted tale that revolves around the enigmatic character of Daniel’s genesis. It involves a series of historically divergent tales; for example, the book chronicles the life of Jewish lawyer Arnold Weisz, who’s forced out of his profession when the Nazis take power and compelled to hide his family in Berlin. It also tells the tale of Bruno Schmidt, an ambitious German lawyer who rises to a position of great authority in the SS. Adding to an already overly packed plot, Newman details Samuel’s service as a military surgeon in World War II and the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 as well as Daniel's later service with the Mossad. The historical authenticity of the work is admirable; the author’s research is scrupulously rigorous, and much of the book is enjoyably edifying, as it offers a peek into several tumultuous conflicts in the 20th century. But overall, the story feels muddled and finally implausible, and the author’s prose style is rather wooden; for instance, upon receiving the peculiar letter, Daniel wonders to himself: “What could all this be about? I can’t help but think that there might be something important here.”

A historically astute but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to braid too many stories into a unified whole.

Kirkus Reviews