Berlin, and its last Jews, during wartime

The capital of the Third Reich was at once the heart of Nazi power and the least Nazi-supportive area in Germany | Bettmann/Corbis

BERLIN AT WAR
Roger Moorhouse

On Feb. 27, 1943, the final roundup of the Nazi capital’s remaining 10,000 Jews took place. Some 1,800 so-called “privileged” Jews—mostly males who had an Aryan parent, or were married to non-Jews or were decorated veterans of the Great War—were corralled in the Jewish welfare office. What followed next was one of the most astonishing spectacles of the Third Reich: arriving alone or in small groups came the men’s German wives, at times swelling the crowd to almost 1,000. For a week, in the words of a contemporary diary, the women “called for their husbands, screamed for their husbands, howled for their husbands, and stood like a wall, hour after hour, night after night.” The Gestapo threatened but in the end blinked, and released the prisoners. It was only a tiny wobble in the inexorable progress of the Holocaust—the other 8,000 Jews rounded up went straight to Auschwitz—but a striking moment in the life of a city that was at once the heart of Nazi power and the least Nazi-supportive part of Germany.

Moorhouse opens his engrossing story of life in Berlin during wartime with Hitler’s 50th birthday party in April 1939, an event marked for the 4.5 million Berliners by a public holiday, parties and a parade of military might that stretched for 100 km. It ends six years later with Stunde Null (zero hour), as survivors—including 1,400 Jews hiding in Berlin’s underground—emerged into a city reduced to rubble after relentless Western bombing, and now subject to the Red Army, which arrived in one of the most ferocious displays of fire and sword (and rape) ever recorded.

In between, Berlin at War offers tales from the black market and from the blackouts (including tales of serial murderers), and such vignettes as the air raid shelter encounter between William Shirer (the anti-Nazi American chronicler of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) and Lord Haw-Haw (the Irish pro-Nazi propaganda broadcaster). “An interesting and amusing fellow,” Shirer recorded, if you could get past him being a “scar-faced Fascist rabble-rouser.”
- BRIAN BETHUNE

The Stray Sod Country
Patrick McCabe

Novelist Patrick McCabe gives us another so-called “Bog Gothic” set in Ireland, this time revolving around daily life in Cullymore, a small town full of characters from central casting: the pretentious banker’s wife, the affable barber, the level-headed policeman, the young man returning from England to claim his sweetheart’s hand in marriage. Cullymore has an equal number of Protestants and Catholics, but “we’re all the same,” everyone makes a point of saying. It’s 1958, and the violence of the Troubles is still 10 years away.

Yet something is amiss. The local priest, Father Hand, seethes with envy of an Irish-American priest who hobnobs with celebrities. The barber’s wife harbours homicidal fantasies, while a disgraced Latin teacher polishes his rifle and prepares revenge against an old colleague. As the town gears up to perform an Easter play, Tenebrae, cracks start to show in the Irish pastoral.
McCabe creates and sustains a sense of menace mostly by keeping readers off-kilter. We poke around inside the disquieted minds of the townsfolk, wondering who’s narrating this tale and how does he know so much.

The “inscrutable chronicler” is the devil himself, we finally learn, who steps into the story at will to brag about his evil machinations. These intrusions are a bit heavy-handed, but always worth the comic payoff. Working with his best tools—jealousy, greed, vanity—the devil makes decent people do terrible, funny things.

This is an anti-nostalgia book about Ireland’s past. McCabe expertly mocks the canon of Irish clichés: the Catholic priesthood is lampooned mercilessly, as are the paranoia and entitlement of the Protestant bourgeoisie. Nobody’s innocent and sanity is tenuous in this unsettling tale about human foibles.

McCabe is said to dislike the term Bog Gothic. Isn’t that rich? A successful author merits his own new literary genre, but takes issue with its name. Sounds like the devil at work in Cullymore.
- JOANNE LATIMER

I REMEMBER NOTHING: AND OTHER REFLECTIONS
Nora Ephron

Ephron is the most underrated of America’s overhyped writers. Her long-standing success as a journalist, novelist (and pioneer of the divorce-memoir genre), playwright, rom-com screenwriter and director has imbued the multi-tasker with near-institutional stature as a witty observer of life’s shallow end.

And certainly, her new essay collection bristles with trademark Ephron-esque breeziness—a cleverly mendacious title (she remembers plenty), quotable aphorisms (“the senior moment has become the Google moment”), candid disclosures (she loathes egg-white omelettes and big dessert spoons), and celebrity dish (she recalls her angst when Vanity Fair editor and restaurateur Graydon Carter named a meatloaf entree after her). Add to that a fondness for including recipes—among them egg salad (with extra yolks!)—and it’s obvious why Ephron’s not accorded the genuflection given, say, Jonathan Franzen.

Yet so stealthy is Ephron’s skill that it’s easy to overlook how masterfully she folds her life’s arc into a mere 135 pages. An early story about her mother ejecting New Yorker writer Lillian Ross from a dinner party is a minimalist masterpiece about growing up the child of an alcoholic, wishing her mother dead while she was alive—yet wanting to protect her even now. Ephron knows well the tragedy of fractured friendship, revealed in a sharp recounting of her doomed relationship with Lillian Hellman. And a piece that reduces New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to a “panellist” is a lesson in drive-by media criticism.

At age 69, Ephron writes with bracing humour about the rudeness of aging—her best friends dying, the hair on the back of her head shaping itself into “an Aruba.” She even provides lists of what she will and won’t miss when she’s dead. She won’t miss “email” and “washing my hair.” She will miss “my kids”—and ordering an extra dish “for the table.” The first choice is obvious, of course; the second is Ephron at her best, serving up small life details that pierce the heart.
- ANNE KINGSTON