Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin

by Jerome Charyn

Overview

A spy navigates the labyrinthine horrors of Nazi Germany, on a mission to save the woman he loves

“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. . . . [Cesare is] provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him “Cesare” after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr’s enemies.

Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin’s Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.

Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared.

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, he has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn lives in New York.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942658504
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	01/07/2020
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/04/2019

Charyn’s spectacular latest (after The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King) captures the madness of Nazi Germany in a fiercely inventive merging of fiction and fact. Erik Holdermann’s parents both die before his ninth birthday in 1928, after which he is raised in a Berlin orphanage. When philanthropist Wilfrid von Hecht and his daughter, Lisa, make a visit to the institution, Erik is smitten by Lisa, a “mischling,” or partially Jewish, teenager a few years his senior. Their lives diverge when Lisa marries an SS colonel and, at 17, Erik rescues a seedy-looking man being attacked by thugs. The man is Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, director of the Abwehr espionage unit. Canaris has Erik trained in killing and disguise, nicknaming him “Cesare” after the somnambulist assassin in the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Though Erik’s covert work becomes the stuff of whispered legend, few know that he’s helping Canaris—whose loyalty to Hitler has frayed in the face of the Führer’s increasingly erratic leadership—to sabotage Nazi attempts to exterminate Berlin’s Jews. After Erik re-encounters Lisa at a dinner party, the two begin a fevered affair. When she’s sent to Theresienstadt, where a “Jewish Paradise” designed by Nazi propagandists hides an Auschwitz way station, Erik risks his life trying to save her. Charyn’s nuanced depiction of the bond between the eccentric Canaris and his protégé balances the novel’s many macabre moments, and the searing ending is a masterpiece of unsentimentalized tenderness. This extraordinary tour de force showcases the prolific author at the top of his game. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Cesare

Wingate Prize Long List

“Charyn’s blunt, brilliantly crafted prose bubbles with the pleasure of nailing life to the page in just the right words. Cesare is by no means lightweight fare, but it’s provocative, stimulating and deeply satisfying.” —Washington Post

“It’s a dark art to make a subject this grotesque quite this much fun.” —Wall Street Journal

“Darkly resonant. . . . [A] convention-upturning tour de force.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Spectacular. . . . This extraordinary tour de force showcases [Charyn] at the top of his game.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[An] edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Charyn’s] taut story line is full of surreal visuals and elaborate illusions.” —Booklist

“A complex and detailed story of the inner workings of the German Third Reich during World War II. . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Charyn has created a terrific cast of original characters who speak in a language that reflects the selfish and predatory nature of that time. . . . He tells a fascinating story of resistance against evil with a great deal of energy.” —Historical Novels Review

“Deftly written and original. . . . Unreservedly recommended.” —Midwest Book Review

“Charyn conjures up a narrative punctuated with powerful imagery. . . . In a novel full of its share of the grotesque, it takes an artist with a precise touch such as Charyn to achieve such artful results.” —Comics Grinder

Select Praise for Jerome Charyn

“Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.” —Tom Bissell

“Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” —Michael Chabon

“Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination.” —William Giraldi

“[Charyn’s] sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” —Jonathan Lethem

“One of our most rewarding novelists.” —Larry McMurtry

“Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy―a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New Yorker

“One of our most intriguing fiction writers.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Absolutely unique among American writers.” —Los Angeles Times

“A contemporary American Balzac.” —Newsday

“Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively. . . . The result is at once surprising and very entertaining.” —BookPage

“For half a century, [Charyn] has been an unpredictable, unclassifiable, and above all exactingly smart author.” —Open Letters Review

“Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction’s panache.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Wherever he takes us, Charyn’s mind is always agile, and his prose is stunningly electric.” —Jewish Book Council

From the Publisher

★ 2019-09-30
In Nazi Germany, an orphan boy of lowly origins grows up to become an enforcer for German military intelligence and the helpless pawn of a vixen-ish mystery woman.

Half-Jewish orphan Erik Holdermann was raised by prostitutes from the age of 9 before being sent to an orphanage. When it is discovered there that he has a living uncle—albeit a cruel and distant one who disowned Erik's late mother for marrying a postman—he is sent to the uncle's farm, where he is regularly beaten up by boys wearing Nazi pins and nearly dies after becoming trapped in a barn during a frigid winter storm. Erik's life takes a momentous turn during cadet school when, with a show of brute force, he saves a man being beaten by a gang of street toughs; that man turns out to be Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military intelligence service. Canaris takes Erik under his wing, dubs him Cesare (a reference to the "magician" in the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and counts on him to threaten or disappear anyone who gets in his way. That can mean someone from the Gestapo or SS—even as he serves the Nazi regime, Canaris is dedicated to saving or safely exporting Jews. Erik's half-Jewish mystery woman, Lisa Valentiner, with whom he has been obsessed since he was a boy, is both a member of the Jewish underground and the wife of a Nazi officer. It's a nebulous world in which the Gestapo, which recognizes the need for Jews in any spy network, employs half-Jews to lure other half-Jews out of hiding. The 82-year-old Charyn's latest work in a distinguished career is subtitled "a novel of war-torn Berlin," but that doesn't begin to prepare readers for this edgy, hallucinatory, full-throttle fable. Cabaret, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, Rosa Luxembourg, "Jewish jazz," traveling executioners dubbed Hansel and Gretel, a hump-backed baron—they're all in the mix.

A darkly entertaining, eye-opening novel.

Kirkus Reviews