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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Family Secrets, March 22, 2004
This review is from: The German Money (Paperback)
There should be a statue of limitations on complaining about our parents and what they did or didn't do to us or for us. By age 30, after we've gotten our noses bloody a few times and wallowed in as much pleasure as our bodies and bank accounts can stand, we may have learned just enough to realize that either our parents knew more than we're willing to admit, or that they were truly hopeless and more to be pitied than to be censured. And that should be it. Time to grant them absolution and move on. Then, there are the cases like Paul's. His father bore the scars of being orphaned early in his life; his mother was a Holocaust survivor who came to America, married and left her past in Europe. He realizes that they were not the stereotypical Jewish families: "We were anything but lively and outspoken, not a perpetual carnival of conversation at all. Dad could be social and glib, but not with us, never with us. And serious subjects just weren't on our map." With his sister and brother, Paul grew up in a home ruled by mysteries, subject to his mother's sometimes implacable silences and inexplicable anger. Small wonder he fled the urban jungle of New York City for the wilds of Michigan to escape his past as well. He had hoped he could abandon his Jewish heritage, his fiancé, Valerie, and bury himself in his dead-end job as a university librarian. But Paul is drawn back to New York City after his mother dies of a heart attack, and he learns that, of his three siblings, he alone would inherit "the German money," the compensation his mother collected and never spent. The amount, nearly a million dollars, creates a split in the family, and Paul -- beset with a form of survivor's guilt -- becomes consumed with learning why he was chosen. But unlike Nick Hoffman, the college professor turned detective in Lev Raphael's witty and acerbic mystery series, Paul is no investigator. His quest to divine the secret of the German money moves in fits and starts, in between coping with his sister's claims on his inheritance, his father's Alzheimer's and his attempts to rekindle his relationship with Valerie, who, it turns out, has some secrets of her own. Raphael has written short stories and novels dealing with Jewish, Holocaust and crime, and "The German Money" can be seen as a distillation of all of them. He lets the story unfold slowly, giving the reader time to become acquainted with the characters before reaching deep into the emotional undertow and bring to the surface the tensions that bind and divide a family. Paul's journey into his past doesn't reveal everything, and Raphael resists tidying all the loose ends, giving "The German Money" a necessary messiness that reminds us that ties of blood and kinship are not keys into the realm of perfect knowledge. Sometimes, we simply have to go on as best we can, and let the secrets be.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent book for reading groups, September 7, 2003
This review is from: The German Money (Paperback)
I am careful about the books that I recommend to reading groups. It isn't enough that the book be a "good read" (easily enjoyed and as easily forgotten). People join book clubs for a variety of reasons, sometimes social ones, and often because they are starved for a decent conversation. But the conversation will only be as good as the book, so there isn't any point in choosing something easy. I agree with Kafka when he says "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us", especially when it comes to book club reading. If you don't find your world rocked and your assumptions challenged, then what will there be to discuss? Nothing kills a discussion faster than a book that everyone likes, but no one can complain about. By this defination "The German Money" by Lev Raphael is an excellent "book group book". The author, an award-winning writer and a book reviewer for The Detroit Free Press, is perhaps best known for his wickedly satirical mystery novels. But this book is something entirely different: The German Money-- in Paul's family it refers to money paid by the German government as reparations to his cold and enigmatic mother, a survivor of the Holocaust. When his mother suddenly dies, Paul is shocked and bewildered to find she has left him the entire amount of "the German money". Shocked, because there is over a million dollars. Bewildered, because it was left to him with no explanation, even though Paul hadn't spoken to his mother in years, unlike his brother Simon and sister Dina, who don't receive a dime. Feeling like a reluctant prodigal son, Paul endures the simmering hostility of his sister, and the quiet grief of his brother, while he tries to come to terms with this troubling and mysterious legacy. But the more he finds out, the more he starts to have doubts about his mother's death. Rose was a bitter woman but healthy one, with no reason to die of a sudden heart attack. So what really happened? And why don't his brother and sister want to know? This is an intense novel that insists its reader fall into Paul's world- a world filled with secrets and silences, where the past was too painful to accept and was ruthlessly expunged. The world, in fact, of many children of Holocaust survivors. His mother filled Paul's childhood with a disastrous string of furious, inexplicable outbursts, and equally furious, implacable rejections. He was a child astray in his mother's emotional minefield. It was inevitable that he would be maimed. The book is written entirely in Paul's point of view-the author never breaks ranks from the first person, a stylistic feat in itself. But this is no gentle reminisce by a friendly narrator. The story is relentless and Paul's anguish and turmoil inescapable.. Readers will know what it is to be an angry and embittered young Jewish man who has spent the better part of his life running from something that happened over fifty years ago, to a completely different person. Even a million dollars can't make it all worth while. There is enough here for hours of good discussion, and a few places to indulge in a truly heated argument. Do children always have to pay for the sins of their parents? Can something as ephemeral as money ever hope to compensate the victims of the Holocaust? And most importantly, is forgiveness possible?. The German Money wields a sharp axe at a vast frozen sea, indeed.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling read, April 21, 2004
This review is from: The German Money (Paperback)
As a child of Holocaust survivors, I approached Lev Raphael's book with both eagerness and trepidation. Eagerness, because I have been an avid fan of his Nick Hoffman mystery series, and have always enjoyed the quality of his writing. Trepidation, because as the child of survivors, I have always had a difficult time dealing with this issues that created for me, vis-a-vis my relationship with my own parents. Not surprisingly, all of my expectations were fulfilled in The German Money. The book is tightly written, more of a novella than a novel, but is full of deftly drawn characters who come vividly to life. We see a family in shambles because of the secrets kept by Paul's mother. Who was she? Why did she keep herself hidden not only from her children, but from her husband? How did she accumulate such a fortune, and why did she leave it to the one person who overtly rejected her? Raphael creates an intellectual and emotional mystery, and the power of this book is that the mystery is only partly solved at the end. The reader is left to draw her own conclusion about some of the "whys", and this takes Raphael's book to a whole different level than the run-of-the-mill family saga or mystery. Although I found the book slow going in spots, it was more because I had to step away from it to process my own feelings rather than because of the quality of the writing or development of the plot. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the effects of the Holocaust not only on those who survived the horror but on the generations that follow them.
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