Alvah's Books

The Second Son: A Novel
By Jonathan Rabb
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
304 pages
List price:  $26.00; Amazon price: $15.50; Kindle price: $12.99

The Second Son is the final installment to Rabb’s Berlin noir trilogy. Set in 1936, during the Olympics held in Berlin, Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner has just been ousted from his position because his mother was Jewish.  His forced retirement comes at an opportune time for him to travel to Spain to search for his son Georg, a Pathe Gazette cameraman, who is filming the People’s Olympics in Barcelona.

When Hoffner learns that Pathe Gazette is in fact a front for British Intelligence and that Georg was in Spain following a list of names, Hoffner decides to travel to Spain with the aid of his gangster connections.

Once in Barcelona, the hunt for Georg  becomes a quest of where the names lead to and how far Georg has traveled through Spain in search of a mysterious cache of weapons. In Barcelona, Hoffner meets Piera, a Catalan Communist, and his daughter Mila, a doctor, who helps the former cop in getting through checkpoints in both Nationalist and Republican territory.

In writing about Civil War Spain and its major players like the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durutti, Rabb’s research is exemplary. He plots Hoffner’s moves like pins along a map, marking each spot in Spain with historical facts about the war that will push many readers to learn more about this period.

Many of the relationships that Hoffner has held in the past are plagued with Hoffner’s sens of guilt especially with his older son Sascha, an angry young man who joined the Brown Shirts and later became a disciple of Joseph Goebbel. Rabb subtly weaves Hoffener’s indirect connections with the Nazis, leaving readers with the hope that the street smart detective will somehow escape the inevitable end to Germany’s half-Jews.

Other relations like his affair with Mila is deftly handled without the sentimental schmaltz that could weigh down the story. And Hoffner’s friendships with gangsters, may come across to some readers as a flaw in Hoffner’s character, yet these scenes add color and a touch or realism of how police officers used all their contacts to their advantage.

Questions of political  intrigue are all handled with expertise. The story’s tempo builds and crescendos with a surprising denouement that will leave readers satisfied.

Fans of Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and Olen Steinhauer will feel very much at home with Rabb’s The Second Son, and readers of the Spanish Civil War will nod their heads in approval of how well Rabb researched this very important time in history when the world was at the cusp of a long and tragic war.

The Aryan Jesus
By Susannah Heschel
Princeton University Press,
384 pages
$29.95

Reviewed by Randall Radic

“Jesus loves me, this I know… because the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life tells me so.” Anyway, that’s what they were singing in Germany in 1939. And the reason Jesus loved them was because they were Aryan. Just like Jesus.

Susannah Heschel, who is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, has written an exceptional and necessary book. It’s called The Aryan Jesus, and it tells the squalid, true story of a group of German theologians who called themselves the ‘German Christians.’ In reality, they were scholars, liars and wastrels in equal parts. Their job, as Heschel points out, was to “de-Judify Jesus,” which is a nice-nellyism for “make Jesus Aryan.” And that’s what they did.

They sanitized the Gospels of the stink of Judaism. Of course, to do this they had to prove that Jesus was not a Jew. No problem. They simply reminded everyone that the Assyrians had conquered Galilee 800 years before Jesus was born. Which meant Jesus was not Jewish he was Assyrian. And, since Assyrians are Aryans, then it follows that Jesus is Aryan too. Moreover, those rascally Jews – the ones that wrote the Gospels, along with the Apostle Paul, who was a Jewish dude—had deliberately stolen and perverted the Aryan teachings of the Aryan Jesus!

A Jewish taint lay across the whole Bible. The stench transcended all ordinary degrees of fetor. And the only way to get rid of it was to toss out the Old Testament, which was full Jewish venality, and purify the New Testament of anything remotely Jewish. Fortunately for the German people, the Institute – a paragon of gentility – was there to cleanse Holy Scripture of this pervasive, Jewish arrogance.

Thank you, Jesus!

The Institute fulfilled their divine destiny. They published a “People’s Bible” in 1940. In this de-Judified version of the Bible, the sayings of the Aryan Jesus included such stirring phrases as “keep the blood pure” and “honor the Fuhrer.”

The architect of the Institute was Walter Grundmann, who, along with his cohorts, decided that to get along, they needed to go along. So they sold their souls to the Nazi Devil. The funny thing about the Devil, though, is that he has his own agenda. The Nazis never officially recognized or sponsored the Institute, because the Nazis found Christianity distasteful. The Nazis were Occultists, who much preferred Odin and Thor and paganism.

When the war ended, the Institute rats were the first to jump ship. They temporized and made excuses and maintained that – really – they were trying to preserve Christianity by what they did. If they hadn’t hedged, the Nazis surely would have declared Christianity a nuisance, which ultimately must be abated. There would have been no Christian Church at all. Really, then, the fellows of the Institute were heroes.

All in all, The Aryan Jesus is an enormously profitable read. The reviewer had only one complaint. Professor Heschel is a veritable fount of knowledge. She is so erudite it takes the reader’s breath away. Her voice is safe – the voice of didactic reflection. She is a writer without vice – in short, her writing style is boring, the most torpid style imaginable. Do all these professors attend the same graduate writing classes? Where they are taught to write only for other brainiacs? If so, their lives must be very grim.

The reviewer contends that if Professor Heschel had jazzed her story up a little, dropping the formality and the sedentary presentation of data and the mechanical concluding statements at the end of each chapter, this book would be on the bestseller lists. Because for all its dryness, it’s a wonderful and very engaging story. All it needs is an injection of spice, a splash of opera, a dash of melodrama.

That being said, don’t let the reviewer’s caviling prevent potential readers from enjoying an excellent book.