The Sonderberg Case

June 14, 2010
Wiesel (Night) returns to the moral questions that characterize the post-WWII generation in this slim novel that is both overstuffed with plot and skimpy on motive. Yedidyah Wasserman, a well-regarded theater critic in New York City, is split between his parents' generation of Holocaust survivors and that of his sons, young American men who have chosen to move to Israel. Yedidyah imagines himself in the comfortable middle until he is called upon to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate. He is enthusiastic, but the trial is an unsettling opportunity for him to search the past and his family history, and also inexplicably angers his wife, Alika, a stage actress. The novel is told mostly via Yedidyah's personal reflections and each component of the story is so divorced from the next—there are no scenes, for instance, that show Yedidyah with more than one family member at a time—that it's difficult to assemble a larger view of his life. The ambitious scope of the story, spanning generations, is compelling, but limited by the novel's length.

May 15, 2010
The latest from the Nobel Peace Prize–winning author of Night(1960) asks big questions about good and evil, art andreality, yet ultimately finds its narrator concluding,"Suddenly, I don't understand anything anymore. Why life? Why death?"

The Jewish protagonist is a New York newspaper drama critic who finds himself in the unlikely position of covering a murder trial. (Both of the reporters on the court beat for the paper are conveniently unavailable.)The case is both simple and unfathomable.A 24-year-old philosophy student from Germany receives an unexpected visitor, an older German who introduces himself as the student's uncle.They decide to go away for a week together in the Adirondacks.The student returns without the older man, whose dead body is later found, leading to the murder charge.Though some had heard the two argue, there is no motive, no weapon, no deeper understanding of their relationship. Was the death an act of murder, suicide or an accident? The defendant is no help, proclaiming himself (as a philosophy student would),"not guilty but not innocent." The critic's obsession with the case (which doesn't really commence until a third of the way through the novel) upsets his theater-loving wife, but it leads to all sorts of grand pronouncements about the courtroom as theater as well as larger questions such as,"Was life a string of roles?" Long after the end of the trial, a meeting between the critic and the defendant resolves some mysteries, yet by that time other, related mysteries have arisen concerning the critic's own identity.For no apparent reason, the first-person narrative occasionally shifts into the third person, as the protagonist ponders"the vague feeling that his life or the meaning of life had escaped him," and asks,"Since I'm not the man I thought I knew, who am I?"

A slim novel that's heavy on philosophy.

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May 15, 2010
"Was life a string of roles?" "How can fear be incarnated?" "Where does God fit in?" Wiesel's latest novel is full of questions, the central one being whether German expatriate Werner Sonderberg murdered his uncle during a walk in the Adirondacks. Sonderberg returned home alone, and his uncle was found dead at the bottom of a cliff. When Sonderberg is charged with murder, he pleads that he is "guilty]and not guilty," a puzzler that in a thriller might suggest some supernatural twist but in a novel by the distinguished author of "Night" and numerous other works on the Holocaust, fiction and nonfiction, will inevitably lead us deep into moral quandary. Sonderberg's plea is pondered especially by Yedidyah, an actor turned theater critic who is asked to cover the trialnot a bad choice, finally, given the inherent drama and Yedidyah's position as a child of survivors. As he contemplates the trial, Yedidyah reviews his own life, which opens up to deliver its own rude shock. VERDICT Is Sonderberg guilty? The answer is satisfying if not surprising, a good description of this musing, almost fablelike work, which reminds us that we don't have to play the roles we've been assigned. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/1/10.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2010
An old ex-Nazi falls to his death from a mountain in the Adirondacks. Accident? Suicide? Murder? His nephew, Werner Sonderberg, a young German student at New York University, pleads guilty and innocent. Is it possible to be both? Court reporter Yedidyah is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and he is haunted by the big questions. Could I be the one in the dock? Could I possibly be the murderer of an old Nazi? And where was God in all this? From the first clear, simple sentence, melancholy hangs over the story, always permeating the authors voice. Along the way, though, there are some awkward notes. Despite the built-in suspense of a courtroom drama, the ruminations from the omniscient narrator and from a Jewish reporter get a little ponderous at times. In addition, a visit to Jerusalem seems uncomfortably welded onto the main story, adding only a superficial view of the contemporary Palestinian conflict. But the theme of the Jew today confronting his own family history remains powerful. There is no easy relativism. The climax, including the historical facts about the Holocaust and its gas chambers, destroys any nuances about Nazi guilt and innocence. And yet, the issues remain, urgent and contemporary: Is the Nazis German grandson also a victim of the Nazi curse? And always the universal question: What would I have done? Personal and collective, it is all about guilt. Sure to be in demand for book groups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)