Cesare

by Jerome Charyn

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.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, War, World War II, Literary Fiction, Unfinished, Thriller

369 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 7, 2020

About the author

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."

Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.

Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.

In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."

Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."

Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.

Reviews

[Paromjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jerome Charyn takes an original and imaginative approach to a subject that receives endless attention, WW2, writing a literary noir thriller and a love story set amidst the insanity and madness of Nazi Germany, set in a Berlin where the ghosts of dead Jews walk, amidst Jewish Jazz and the White Mouse, and where even the angels weep at the horror and tragedy. There is a fever and chaos as the story unfolds of the Erik Holdermann removed from a Berlin orphanage by philanthropist Baron Wilfred von Hecht, with a daughter, Lisa, an older girl that Erik falls for, only to find himself being placed with his cruel Uncle Heinrich, who had hated Erik's mother. In 1937, a 17 year old Erik, a voracious reader, is a naval sub-cadet at Kiel, little more than being a slave whilst having to constantly protect himself from the potential sexual abuse from other naval cadets.

On a dark and windy night, Erik takes a walk by the seawall, and spies a group of thugs beating up a tramp whose life he saves, an act that will change the trajectory of his life. The tramp turns out to be the head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a man not slow in picking up the possibilities that Erik offers. Soon other naval cadets come to revere him and his relationship with an Admiral feared by other Generals. So begins a relationship depicted through the prism of a 1920 silent German film where horror after horror builds up, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with Canaris as the magician and illusionist Caligari, controlling Erik as Cesare, a sleepwalking Cesare who murders on command. There are numerous references to the grimmest of fairytales and classic children's literature, such as Alice in Wonderland, and the SS executioners, Hansel and Gretel, travelling from castle to castle with their guillotines, to a Berlin where the Abwehr under Canaris try to save as many Jews as they can from the Nazis.

Totally loyal and protective of Canaris, Erik acquires a fierce and fearsome reputation as a somnambulist assassin who sleeps in a coffin as he carries out missions under Commander Helmut Stolz, Berlin's own living golem. Despite Lisa being married to a SS officer, the two embark on an affair. So when she is taken for helping Jews to Theresienstadt, a camp in Czechoslovakia, used as political propaganda by the Nazis, to trick the world into believing Jews were being treated well and happy, Erik is determined to rescue her. Charyn's storytelling is extraordinary, utterly riveting, of a Germany that had lost its soul and any remnants of its humanity, where fair is foul, and foul is fair, a war torn Berlin, of heartbreak, sorrow, grief and death on a epic scale, and amidst this madness, there is the central relationship between Canaris and Erik, and Erik's love for Lisalien. Many thanks to Oldcastle Books for an ARC.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They would embroider, multiply, manufacture, until I was their Caligari with his slave, Cesare, who strangled enemies of the Reich at will and then returned to his coffin at Tipitz-Ufer." ~Admiral William Canaris in Cesare by Jerome Charyn

From the beginning, I knew I had entered a noir world of tales and terror where fantasy and fact spun a deeper journey into the known, for surely nothing can convey truth better than fiction.

Reading Cesare by Jerome Charyn I knew I had to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari again, for the imagery of the doctor and his sleepwalking murderer is central to the novel. It is set in a world gone mad and filled with madmen. Yes, I am talking about the movie--and I am talking about the novel.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 German film in which horror builds upon horror, the action set against contorted Expressionist Art sets. A doctor is monomaniacally obsessed with controlling a somnambulist, Cesare, who in his sleep murders on command. In the end, we are unsure who is really mad.

"We were all madmen at the Abwehr. We had to be. How else could we have survived the Furher's fiery wind day after day? "~ Admiral William Canaris in Cesare by Jerome Charyn

In Jerome Charyn's Cesare, we met the orphan Erik Holdermann, raised by whores who pool their money to send him to school. There he is discovered by a benevolent department store baron who sends Eric to his an estranged uncle--only to be treated like a household slave. But the Uncle's daughter, the imperious Lisalein, bewitches the boy. Lisalein is fierce and beautiful, a cruel Estella toward men; under the Nazis she becomes a crusading angel for the Jews.

While at cadet school Eric unwittingly saved the life of Admiral Canaris, the head of the "asylum called the Abwehr," the German Military Intelligence. Canaris brings Eric into the Abwehr to eliminates their enemies, becoming Dr. Caligari to Eric's Cesare.

Eric is Admiral Canaris' liaison with the Nazi Gestapo and SS; the Abwehr was at odds with them, hiding and protecting select Jews, one Jew at a time. Eric was protected and feared by his reputation, for the enemies of the Abwehr disappeared.

"Hitler's mad dominions meant nothing to Erik. He was loyal to Uncle Willie and played Cesare for him. "~ from Cesare by Jerome Charyn

To rescue Lisalien, Eric enters the contorted reality of Theresienstadt, a PR facade constructed to hide the truth of the Nazi death camps.

The book reads like a twisted dark fairy tale, stepped in the details of a time in history so chillingly horrific some deny it ever happened. And like all good horror stories, it will disturb your sleep.

I was given access to an egalley by the publisher through Edelweiss in return for a fair and unbiased review.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Described as “a novel of war-torn Berlin”, Cesare’s blend of historical fiction and dark fairytale put me in mind of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, especially as we first meet its protagonist, Erik Holdermann, as a young boy.   Rescued by Jewish Baron von Hecht and his daughter, Lisalein, Erik immediately forms an attachment to Lisalein that as time goes on becomes an obsession, even after she becomes the wife of an SS officer. She remains an enigmatic character throughout. “She was Mata Hari one day, and Rosa Luzemburg the next. He could never really find Lisa. No sooner did he catch the baron’s daughter than she metamorphosed into something else.”

Having saved his life, Admiral Canaris (referred to as ‘Uncle Willi’) takes Erik under his wing and makes use of Erik’s ability to remain undetected to have him carry out assassination missions for the Abwehr. “The Abwehr had no mandate to murder anyone, but it’s enemies still disappeared. And that’s how the myth of Cesare was born.”  I found the glossary of German terms essential for unravelling the internal workings of Third Reich and the competition between different branches of the military.

Like pretty much everyone in the book, Admiral Canaris is at best a flawed and often paradoxical character. He’s a man who does everything he can to scupper the wilder schemes of Hitler, confesses, “I wanted to knock Hitler’s teeth out, poison his dog, piss on Goebbels, shit on Göring’s carpets”, who hides his daughter away for fear she will be caught up in the Nazis vile plans and goes out of his way to save a young Jewish girl, but whose officers are responsible for helping to hunt down and murder Jews. Even his desire to save Erik, to “cure his own magician of the Third Reich”, ends in failure.

The book features a cast of eccentric (some might say, grotesque) characters such as the hunch-backed “little baron” Emil von Hecht, the twin assassins Franz and Franze Müller, and Fanni Grünspan, one of the so-called “grabbers” who lure Jews out of hiding and hand them over to the Gestapo in return for either money, protection or other favours. Real life figures also feature such as silent film star, Pola Negri, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem installed in the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin against the threat of assassination by the British.

The sections that were most successful for me were the author’s forensic dissection of the hypocrisy of the Nazi regime. This is most obvious in the chapters towards the end of the book in which the “Nazi cabaret” of Theresienstadt (which existed in real life) is revealed in all its ghastly detail. A concentration camp masquerading as a haven for Jews away from Germany, it was in fact just a staging post on the way to Auschwitz.

The same hypocrisy is also apparent in Berlin where Nazi officers spend evenings listening to musicians playing “Jewish Jazz” in cabaret clubs, drink champagne in the Hotel Adlon, and receive expert medical care from Jewish doctors and nurses at the Jewish Hospital. “Even after all the roundups and the Sammellager (detention centres), and the paper stars that the Gestapo put on every door where a Jew still dwelled”, Berlin remains a Jewish town.

My overriding emotion whilst reading Cesare was a combination of confusion and a sense that I just wasn’t clever enough to appreciate everything the author was seeking to achieve. Never having seen the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari, the inspiration for the character Cesare, probably didn’t help. Having said that, Cesare is a highly original blend of historical fact, fiction and fantasy that may appeal to readers prepared, as I did, to venture outside their comfort zone.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jerome Charyn has built his career writing historical fiction. His signature approach is to pose thought experiments wherein he places key historical figures alongside intriguing fictional characters. These “what if’s” reveal possibilities that sometimes emphasize little known facets of the historical record. In CESARE, Charyn gives us a chilling thriller that suggests Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Nazi military intelligence (Abwehr) director, may have been a closet subversive responsible for saving the lives of many Berlin Jews during the holocaust. Clearly, the Nazi’s had similar suspicions since they eventually executed Canaris.

The novel’s fictional protagonist is Eric Holdermann, a half-Jewish orphan who rescues Canaris from a mugging. The Nazi takes Eric on as his protégé, training him as an ersatz fixer, assassin, and master of disguises. Canaris calls him Cesare in reference to the sleepwalking murderer in the classical silent film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

Eric is rescued from the orphanage and later from a truly evil uncle by a benevolent department store mogul, Baron Wilfrid von Hecht. Eric becomes smitten by the baron’s beautiful daughter, Lisa Valentiner. Despite being half-Jewish, Lisa is married to a Nazi officer. The fierce and mysterious Lisa also is active in the underground, involved in rescuing Jewish children.

The setting is relentlessly grim. The Nazis are ascendant in 1930’s Germany and the country has clearly lost its moral compass. Charyn depicts much of it, including the truly horrific conditions German sailors endured on U-boats. He further evokes the time and place with passing references to Cabaret, Jewish jazz, and the murder of Rosa Luxembourg. Theresienstadt was the concentration camp the Nazis showcased to the world for its humane treatment of the Jews. Charyn reveals the meanness of this illusion, which offered the Jews little more than a temporary respite from the death camps.

The twisted plot owes much to classical dark fables where heroes rescued damsels in distress (a couple of traveling guillotiners are nicknamed Hansel and Gretel); Dickens’ rags to riches novels; Melville’s “Moby-Dick”; and even the Bard. The writing has its over the top grisly and hallucinatory sections, and Charyn seems to have few qualms about killing off his characters quickly and often quite brutally. Yet the novel can be bleakly entertaining.

[Paula Lyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nazi noir. This is a bleak look at Germany under Hitler during the second World War. A funhouse mirror showing the warped men and women who served the Third Reich and those that opposed it.
Brutal and fascinating.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dark, delirious book ostensibly about an Abwehr assassin working in Berlin in the middle of the Second World War and the strange, subversive woman he is in love with. Too full of absurd coincidences and credulity-stretching narrative shifts, but the intense delirium of the novel's atmosphere partially makes up for these shortcomings.

[Peter Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is this book drunk, or am I? An awful lot of the book was bizarre, bordering on incomprehensible. Almost no characters felt or acted like real people, and it felt like a fever dream from start to finish. Some of this is by design, but it didn’t work for me at all.
Also, the blurb in the edition I read contained a plot twist which comes 260 pages into a 350 page book. Not cool!

[Nissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book tremendously - I love to read books that are based on the war years and this book fit the bill. I would totally recommend this book and I was hooked after the first page. Once you start reading, you can't stop!

[Sue Sansone · Rating 5 out of 5]

the writer's style is first person, i got so involved in the two main character Cesare and Lisalein! I have read so many WWII histroy novels and I learn something new each time. This book is about the merging of nazis and jews to fiht the common enemy. The final Solution.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cesare is a story of love and war in Nazi Germany. One evening Cesare, a lowly naval sub-cadet, stumbles upon a man he thinks is a tramp. Cesare saves him from being beaten by thugs and later discovers this tramp is actually the chief of German military intelligence, Wilhelm Canaris. This one act of kindness changes Cesare’s life forever.

Here’s where it gets interesting, but also a bit confusing. Yes, Canaris is chief of Abwehr, the German military intelligence, but he uses this position to undermine the Nazis and help save the Jews in Berlin. Cesare aids him in his undercover work and becomes the main character in the novel.

Aside from Canaris and Cesare, there’s also Baron von Hecht, the Jewish industrialist and his nephew, Emil, Colonel Joachim, a brutal member of Hitler’s bodyguard and later commandant of the concentration camp, Theresienstadt, and of course, Lisalein, the daughter of Baron von Hecht and love interest of almost everyone in the book, not least of all, Cesare. This names only a few of the many characters in this novel. It helped to have the Dramatis Personae and the Glossary of German Terms at the beginning of the book and I found myself constantly flipping to the front to remind myself who was who.

The story moves from Berlin, briefly to the U.S., and ends in the Theresienstadt, where Cesare reunites with his lost love, who for years he has thought dead, burned to death in a forest. I found this part of the novel most interesting, perhaps because of its description of the concentration camp, a sham and a showcase for the visiting Red Cross and also, because I have visited the camp and know its history. While what I saw was the real thing, albeit many years later, the author’s fictional account of life there made it vividly come alive.

I liked this book, but I found it too intricately confusing to totally enjoy. I could never quite grasp all of the characters, what “side” they were on, and to be honest, many times what exactly was happening and why. It’s probably best read by someone who routinely reads and enjoys spy fiction. They would enjoy the twists, turns, and nuances. They wouldn’t struggle like I did.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through most of Cesare I wondered if Jerome Charyn was right to write a Jerome Charyn book about Nazi Germany. By the end I found that it was absolutely right. It may be his best book. It may be the book he was born to write, after fifty years toil.

I first read Charyn very late into his career, Johnny One-Eye, a picaresque set during the American Revolution. I ended up diving into Charyn’s backlog and discovering many treasures, and though I have really still only scratched the surface, it left me with one of my favorite authors, one I continue to read and cherish as he continues to write new books.

Much of Cesare mirrors Johnny One-Eye, many of the tropes and travails. But where Johnny One- lampoons the treasures of American mythology, Cesare laments the lost tragedies of the Holocaust.

By now, we know all about the Holocaust, know it well enough that we can even have history’s carpetbaggers attempt to parrot the old myth that it never happened. Charyn doesn’t visit a concentration camp in Cesare, at least not as it has been understood in recent times. He spends most of the book in Berlin as it hollows out, not embroiled in the tragedy but among its haunted witnesses. This is not a book about “good Germans.” This is a book about those who shouldered the burden of watching tragedy play out, even having their own sad roles to play.

It is, therefore, quite unthinkable, except in the magician’s hands, and I think it’s okay to admit, now, that Jerome Charyn’s whole literary career has been one magnificent sleight-of-hand, with the best act (relatively speaking), the magic, saved for last.

By the last act of Cesare, Charyn has delivered the reader to the Nazis’ most fiendish plot, a Jewish Paradise to fool the world stage, even as WWII raged around it. How still Hitler perform as the man behind the curtain? Because we were all lulled into fantasy, and we happily remain there today, shrinking at the horrors but refusing to admit that we let them play out right before our eyes.

And so Charyn breaks his own rules. His angels weep. The end.

[deep]

PW Starred: "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.)"

[Francis X DuFour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghoulishly fascinating novel.

What a collection of misfits, but closer examination reveals everybody in the book, no matter how minor their part, is a misfit. A tale of love during mankind’s most evil period of history, it gives hope of a happy ending that you know can’t ever happen.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book that sounded a lot more interesting than it turned out to be. Plot and characters were both rather absurd, and the whole thing just didn't grab me. Also, if you absolutely must scatter a downright ridiculous amount of random German words across the entire text at least make sure they're spelled correctly...

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

In pre-war Germany, young Erik Holderman has had a mean childhood as you would expect for a half-Jewish orphan. But his life takes a turn when he comes to the rescue of a man getting beaten by a group of thugs, for he has saved the spymaster Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. "Uncle Willi" loves his country but as for Hitler, not so much. The nazi party has come to control the nation, full-scale war has begun, and European Jews are being rounded up and sent to the concentration camps. Erik, now known by several nicknames (Cesare, the magician, the somnambulist) has a particular set of skills, and he quickly becomes Uncle Willi’s not-so-secret weapon. His duties include disappearing monsters of the gestapo and SS and helping to save Jews from the camps.
There are love affairs, brutal beatings and an abundance of German terms and phrases that sometimes had me confused about what exactly was happening. "Cesare" is divided into sections, and I found the sections “North Atlantic” and “Berlin, U.S.A.” to be particularly puzzling.

[Ronald Roseborough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cesare, Caesar, a name that evokes an image of the all conquering hero of ancient Rome. German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris dubbed him such when the seventeen year old naval cadet saved Canaris’ life. Ever since, Cesare has been groomed to do what he does best. At times he steals through the night saving Jews from the Nazi death squads, gaining the reputation of a golem protecting his people. At other times he brings death to those who would harm his mentor Admiral Canaris. Like his mentor, he wears the uniform of his country but he is appalled at their criminal behavior. The two have a symbiotic relationship, each protecting the other. Each knowing the dark secrets that they keep hidden from those who would destroy them. Eventually the disease that corrupts the highest ranks of the German government reaches out to put a stop to even the most legendary of heroes. Well researched observation of the everyday horror of a society gone mad.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charyn has a unique narrative style. He is not a slave to making timelines and locations flow with precision and so "Cesare" can travel from situation to situation as suits the characters and their ultimate destinies. Rather than fully drawing in a reader, "Cesare's" characters take turns telling a story of Berlin and elsewhere during the Third Reich. They are a conflicted and damaged bunch, some spies, some Nazis, some Jews or half-Jews, all living in a tangle of grey areas; none of them fully committed to Hitler's plans or thwarting them as they try to survive the war and help others survive. Some of the writing has a dream-like quality even when it's not actually describing dreams, which it also does. Not cheerful, "Cesare" borders on hopeful as it punctures evil German Nazi stereotype with the possibility of love stories and noble heroes among their ranks.

[Philipa Coughlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes chaotic often disturbing this is an extraordinary read from an author who clearly likes to stretch not only his imagination but the ability of his readers to keep up with his plots. I had no idea about some of the things mentioned surrounding the Nazi regime when most of us feel we know most of the horrors already. That Cesare and Caligari emanate from the first real horror film in 1919 Germany also add to the nightmarish and fable like telling of this tale.
Erik guides us through his tumultuous life with his passions, violence and need to save the many Jews continually being hounded or exterminated. This is an epic within a small space of an imagined hero and a part of history with which perhaps we can never be resolved.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not everyone in Germany supported Hitler’s policies about the Jewish population, even those who otherwise supported the war. One such person is the hero of Jerome Charyn’s unusual and chaotic “Cesare” (Bellevue Literary Press). Erik Holdermann (also known as Cesare) is not Jewish, but, as a child, was helped by Jewish prostitutes who arranged for him to live safely in a Jewish orphanage.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...

[Robin Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Germany's defeat in the Great War and the last Kaiser's exile to Holland a darkness descends. Jerome Charyn's novel takes one to the history of those years combining fact and fantasy. This is a dark and disturbing novel that looks at the corruption and violence of the Nazi regime through the eyes of its central characters. For once those infamous Nazi celebrities - Hitler, Goebbels and Goring - are mere bit players.
Cesare is a somnambulist and a magician. His friendship with Admiral Canaris shapes his destiny. Neither man can stop the holocaust. The tragedy of Nazi Germany has never been more poignant and heart breaking.

[Erin Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dark tale of Nazi Germany and all it's evil atrocities. I had a very hard time with this book, so much brutality and death. I think it is very well written but the subject matter and story itself are deeply disturbing. But is is WWII so I should not have been surprised. I learned even more about Nazi's and their craziness than I ever wanted to know. It's insane what war will do to people. Recommended if you have the stomach for it.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as I hoped for. And not all that much about war-torn Berlin either. I found the focus on Jews who helped the Nazis informative, however the Canaris parts were a bit too bizarre and left me wondering if the reality portion of this work of fiction was more than minimal.

[Exapno Mapcase · Rating 4 out of 5]

A noir story in the midst of World war II, Cesare takes the reader through war, struggles, and love triangle. It is both heart rendering and mind twisting.

Free review copy.

[Greg Barron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always interesting, has literary merit, but I didn't always believe the plot. Worth a read though.

[Dora · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a well written book, I liked the concept. I just couldn't care less about the characters and it was hard for me to get immersed in the plot.

[Stuart West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing!

[ROBERT · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to read Charyn's book. this was not a happy book