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Prodigal Sons is a thriller, based on fact, with a romantic sub-plot and a moral bite. The place is Munich, 1950, Occupied West Germany. Horst Vogle, a curator reassembling the art museum’s collection, meets an aspiring pianist, Greta Furster. She introduces him to a group of ambitious war veterans who are seeking to restore German pride and also help German refugees from the Communist East. Horst discovers that they are also caretakers of gold and art stolen by the Nazis.
Horst harbors his own secret. He is actually Joshua Goldberg, part of a clandestine Israeli hit squad assassinating elusive Nazis. The trauma of the War and the death of his family in the Lodz Ghetto, launch him on a journey of survival; as a partisan in the Polish forest, an illegal immigrant to Palestine, and a soldier in the Israeli War of Independence. His mission in Munich is complicated by his love for Greta. A bold Israeli raid to recover the war booty puts Horst’s life at risk.
In my writing I attempt to entertain, inform, and even transcend the reader’s reality. I try to keep the pages turning with a careful plot, a good story, well realized characters, and also feed a reader’s appetite for new and intriguing facts. Die Spinne, the clandestine Nazi organization, as well as the Jewish intellectuals who returned to Germany to kill Nazis, are fictionalized historical fact.
Beyond its entertainment value, the novel explores the polarities of revenge and reconciliation, the blinding impact of ideology and the redemptive quality of love. Goldberg Variations is also an encounter of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Wagner’s Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods). Readers of Alan Furst or even Graham Greene might enjoy the novel.
Early Reviews:
“An Israeli secret agent hunts Nazi war criminals in this rich psychological thriller. By day, he’s Horst Vogle, a mild-mannered curator and a Wehrmacht veteran with the shrapnel scars to prove it. By night, he’s Jan Goldberg, an undercover Israeli assassin and a Polish Jew who got those scars blowing up German transports with a partisan band during World War II and then battling Arabs with the Haganah. After a day spent poring over art catalogs, Horst/Jan heads out into a dark and still-dilapidated Munich , circa 1950, to shoot and garrote his targets, leaving behind photos of them in their SS uniforms to underscore the point. He considers these assignments a just payback for the murder of his family, but he’s starting to have misgivings. Fueling them is Horst’s relationship with Greta, a beautiful young pianist who reminds him of his sister. She introduces him to her friends at the Kultur Bund, a crypto-Nazi organization publicly dedicated to building the New Germany while it secretly uses stolen art and gold looted from Jews to fund terrorism. With his fair hair, Nordic looks and steadiness under pressure, they consider Horst such fine Aryan stock that they try to recruit him. Jan’s handler is eager for him to infiltrate the group, but the effort adds a new and fraught layer of duplicity to his already tangled double life. Greene (Burnt Umber, 2001, etc.) keeps the action flowing with gripping battle and heist scenes and taut hitman procedural, but he also makes readers care about his characters. Even the Bund-ers are three-dimensional people with hidden complexities. Horst/Jan may be a killer, but he’s never coldblooded—in his longing for a home in a Germany that he’s sworn to wreak vengeance upon, he’s a fascinating study of the rootlessness of the Holocaust survivor. A page-turner with emotional depth.” Kirkus Discoveries Reviews
“…This book is a thriller that will captivate all World War II fans as it is based in fact and is an engrossing play on the Nazis in post war Germany . …Mr. Greene is right up there with John LeCarre for must-read, edge of your chair excitement. This book has everything a dyed in the wool spy fan will like including anger, revenge, murder, art, intrigue, a million-dollar robbery and romance. .. It grabs you from the first to the last pages. I am on my way to the library to pick up Mr. Greene’s previous books.” Oct 10 2009 Mary Lignor, Book Pleasures
“…, you will rarely find a novel that is written as well as this one. It is one you know you will enjoy after reading only the first few chapters.… you will find yourself surprised when you reach the end. Sheldon has written an engrossing novel about an interesting time in central European post-war history.” Oct 10 2009 Marty Dodge in BC |
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Burnt Umber is a novel on the grand scale about the passionate lives of two real artists. It unfolds through the intertwining stories of the German painter Franz Marc, the American sculptor Harry Baer, and the strong‑willed women they loved. Marc abandons his wife Antonia, on her wedding night, is obsessed with Marguerite, a lesbian and early feminist, and enlists in the German Army believing that the war will be good for humanity.Masterfully woven with Marc’s story is that of Harry Baer (based on the art and milestones in the life of Harold Paris). Baer finds Marc’s war time sketchbook in an abandoned farmhouse during World War Two and is haunted by it. Moving to Paris after the war, Harry marries Aurora, an intellectual assaulting the elite French academy. She launches his artistic career in the prestigious left bank galleries. Harry moves to Berkeley to teach and sculpt and encounters a new breed of women. Karine, the African‑American activist loves him but won’t live in his shadow. Darah, the daughter of a Congressman, embodies the confidence of the feminist generation. She and their young daughter challenge Harry to give as much of himself to those who love him as to the art he creates.
Burnt Umber is a novel about two unforgettable artists who struggled to express their personal vision of the defining moments of the 20th Century: the trenches of World War One, the liberation of the concentration camps, the turbulence of post‑World War Two Paris, the Civil Rights Movement and Viet Nam‑era Berkeley.
“Proustian… a beautifully written account of artists caught up in turbulent times.” Book List
Kirkus Reviews says, Burnt Umber is “… an engaging vision of the life of art…” |
