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As his train pulls into New York City, a police detective from North Carolina notices the black smoke rising in the harbour - the Normandie, a French luxury liner undergoing conversion into a troopship, is on fire and the detective, Woodrow Cain, learns that sabotage is widely suspected. Indeed he is to discover that the whole city is on edge, for it is February 1942, just two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and no one really knows what to expect.
Cain is on edge for a lot of reasons, the war being quite low on his list. He is relocating from the South thanks to the intervention of his powerful father-in-law, who has arranged his transfer to a police station house in lower Manhattan. Cain was involved in a killing at home and though he's innocent, he is widely viewed with suspicion. Though his father-in-law detests Cain, he really doesn't want him dead, or worse, disgraced further, and so here he is in New York.
He's in many ways out of his depth in the big city but he is smart, anxious to learn, and committed to proper policing, attributes that are a bit thin on the ground in a police service corrupted by political influence. But he rapidly finds an ally in a rather mysterious figure who calls himself Danziger and who knows everything there is to know about a "certain sixteen-square block around Rivington Street," which is where Cain does his policing.
Danziger tells his own story in rich, sometimes purple prose. He is a writer, but not of books, but letters. Fluent in a number of useful European languages, he writes letters for those who cannot write and is proud of his ability to keep a secret. He does, however, keep a record of his correspondence, largely as an archivist. The world to which these letters have gone and from which they came back is rapidly going up in smoke, destroyed by the invading armies of the Reich. Thus Danziger has come to view his occupation as "a trust, an obligation, to all those who are vanishing from our midst." Danziger has his own secrets to keep as well. Danziger is not his real name; he has a dubious past that he is anxious remains forgotten; if his existence were to be more widely revealed, he might not survive. But paradoxically, he is a man for whom truth and justice are important and so he helps Cain penetrate into a shady area that everyone wishes he would stay away from.
There is a great deal wrong with this book. Fesperman is not an historian and his research could be sounder. There are a number of minor anachronisms and one very major one that jolt the reader out of the period (and, frankly, these are items that an editor should have caught). The underlying premise explaining Cain's presence in New York is dubious at best, especially since next to nothing is made of his Southern roots, nor is his broken marriage or his relationship to his father-in-law especially convincing.
Still, there is a great deal right with it too, especially in the quality of the writing and in the character of Danziger. From his earliest novel (THE SMALL BOAT OF GREAT SORROWS) onward, Fesperman has always been able to evoke in the reader both pity and the feeling of loss generated by the ongoing series of tragedies that was the 20th century. Letting Danziger, that Old World polyglot, tell his own story in his individual style, a style intimately connected to the experience of European Jews before the Holocaust, goes a long way toward making up for any deficiencies of detail. A long way, but, sadly, not quite all the way.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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