Customer Reviews

A Prayer for Gershon Levin

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Muriel Moulton has had a distinguished career teaching at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the Francis W. Parker School, and the University of Illinois-Chicago campus. She also taught in Israel at the University of Haifa. She has had experience working as a journalist and as a volunteer for Magen David Adom and the Citizens' Guard. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as THE HARVARD REVIEW, and in many mystery magazines, such as ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Someone murdered Gershon Levin, a holocaust survivor, with a cyanide pill, but the police and even his rabbi think he committed suicide...the most grievous sin for a Jew. Only Uri Levin, brother in arms from the concentration camp he and Gershon survived, knows better. He descends on Gershon's neighbor, Armand Holly, pulling him into a world of American Nazi activity that defies every decent ideal held by citizens of our country:

"It was precisely what Dorf had said it was. Page after page of memoranda and letters on Nazi Party stationery. The sheet with 'The Project. Trial Run. O.K.' scrawled across it, was there. And clippings. Neatly mounted, labeled and dated in Hallek's writing. Not a definitive collection. A selection, as Dorf had said. Among the clippings were six brief obituaries, four or five lines each. All six mounted together on a single sheet of paper. Labeled and dated in a handwriting they didn't recognize. There didn't seem to be any reason for them to be there."

Muriel Moulton is a teacher, an activist, and a heroine herself in the fight to keep the memory of the concentration camps alive. Never let them forget! She writes this dark tale in a brisk, no nonsense, understated style that glues the reader to the story. Her mixture of Nazism, then and now, paints a bleak picture of people with unreasonable and cruel beliefs who will never give up. The realism in this story can only be borne of experience, and Moulton's gift to us, besides a riveting tale, is the history of the holocaust. Plot, characters, action all follow upon the precept of disbelief. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Let us never forget, and let us revere those like Ms. Moulton who provide the gritty details of a time we would deny.

Shelley Glodowski
Senior Reviewer