Delusion chronicle
An Israeli novelist asks how anyone could serve Hitler or Stalin
Good People. By Nir Baram. Translated by Jeffrey Green. Text Publishing; 421 pages; $15.95 and £10.99.
“OUR job is to write a story,” a Soviet agent tells a Nazi collaborator early in 1941, shortly before Hitler’s opportunistic pact with Stalin ended in the German invasion of Russia. “If we believe in it, maybe others will too.” The two years of Nazi-Soviet co-operation after 1939 prove that the bloodiest regimes of modern history could spin any yarn and forge any myth. In “Good People” an Israeli novelist, Nir Baram, asks what kind of people would.
novel of dramatic events and big ideas, but gifted storytellers fuelled by ordinary motives of love, loyalty or ambition. Blessed or cursed by the “elasticity of the human soul”, they wield this suppleness of spirit as “the hidden hand that smoothed out every wrinkle in the flag of truth”.
Born in 1976 into a family long established in Jerusalem, the son and grandson of Labour Party ministers in Israeli governments, Mr Baram seems an unlikely apologist for the compromises that might lead bright young folk to work for the architects of terror and genocide. “Good People” traces the parallel tracks of its fictional protagonists, a German advertising guru called Thomas Heiselberg, and a Russian-Jewish aspiring poet, Sasha Weissberg, with a keen-edged surgeon’s knife. Yet, the reader is made to feel pity for their all-too-human fate.
The “perfect impostor”, Thomas switches from PR wizardry for an American firm in 1930s Berlin to ideological mumbo-jumbo on behalf of the German occupiers in Poland. Sasha’s mildly dissident parents are seized by Stalin’s secret police and sent to the gulag. To save her twin brothers, she agrees to edit the confessions tortured out of prisoners into “a complete, coherent and convincing story”. With cunning and verve, Mr Baram brings these virtuosi of the lie together in Brest-Litovsk as the sham alliance between their tyrants collapses. Jeffrey Green’s translation does page-turning justice to the progress of “a pair of talented forgers” whose artistry abets the worst crimes of the century.
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