1940

"History, medicine, Nazi racial theory, and some of the most fascinating and well-drawn characters to be found in recent literature. . . . [A] beautifully crafted novel."-Sherwin B. Nuland

On the eve of World War II, Elisabeth Rofman returns to New York to discover her father has disappeared. She befriends Dr. Bloch-a fascinating historical figure, physician to the Hitler family when Hitler was young, and the only Jew for whom Hitler arranged departure from Europe. Dr. Bloch aids in the search, also hiding Elisabeth's son, who has escaped from a Maryland institution.

Jay Neugeborenis the award-winning author of fourteen books.

"Neugeboren's (The Stolen Jew) first novel in 20 years presents a fictional account of an obscure historical figure in this intelligent, densely layered novel. Dr. Eduard Bloch, an Austrian doctor who achieved notoriety for being Adolf Hitler's childhood physician, accepts favors 'granted to no other Jew' and finds himself at the beginning of WWII living out his twilight years in the Bronx. Inspired by a visit from the striking Elisabeth Rofman, an inquisitive medical illustrator, Dr. Bloch decides to write his recollections of the Hitler family. He soon finds himself in the middle of a spat between Elisabeth and her pompous ex-husband over the proposed castration of Daniel, their institutionalized mentally ill son. In the midst of this dispute, Elisabeth's father disappears, and Daniel arrives at Dr. Bloch's apartment, seeking shelter. Through Dr. Bloch's diary entries, he charts the inevitable convergence of his romance with an increasingly unhinged Elisabeth, the unstable yearnings of Daniel and his own surreal remembrances of the teenage Hitler. Neugeboren's characters are nuanced and complex, especially the strong-willed Elisabeth. There are no shocking revelations, but the great characters and the author's thoughtful examination of good and evil pack a cerebral punch." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A lot of ink has been spilled trying to figure out the mega-monsters of the 20th century, particularly Hitler and Stalin. In Hitler's case, special interest has been focused on the source of his raging hatred of the Jews. Among the more reductive explanations is a psychoanalytic one tracing his obsession to Eduard Bloch, a Jewish physician in Linz, Austria, who treated Hitler's mother as she was dying... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of breast cancer.

If Hitler hated Bloch, it was, as the Freudians concede, a profoundly repressed and unconscious hatred. Not only did the young Hitler express eternal gratitude to the doctor; and not only did he say of Bloch, on a triumphant return to Linz as chancellor of Germany, that "If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question"; but above all, so far as is known, Bloch was the only Jew ever to be granted safe passage by order of Hitler himself. In any event, the murder of millions of Jews seems a rather outsize burden to lay on the back of a "Jewish doctor who did his best once upon a time to care for a dying woman," Jay Neugeboren writes in "1940."

Bloch is the central character of Neugeboren's intelligent and absorbing new work, his first novel in two decades. Neugeboren has by no means been idle over the past 20 years, publishing among other books an account of his brother Robert's mental illness and a memoir of his own open-heart surgery, both of which inform this richly researched work of historical fiction.

The novel spans a period of about three weeks at the end of 1940, soon after Bloch, almost 69 years old, arrives in New York, settling in the Bronx. The event that sets the story in motion is the meeting between Bloch, a widower for the purposes of this novel, and the fictional Elisabeth Rofman, a spirited divorcee about 20 years his junior. Elisabeth is a gifted anatomical illustrator at Johns Hopkins Hospital, trained by Max Brodel and commissioned to draw children's hearts for research on "blue babies" by Helen Taussig, both of whom were actual medical pioneers and luminaries.

When Elisabeth arrives from Baltimore to visit her father, an electrician who took part in the construction of the New York subway system, she discovers that he has disappeared from his Bronx apartment. Her son Daniel, 18, diagnosed with "childhood schizophrenia" (but whose condition seems to manifest many of the characteristics of autism), also disappears, escaping from a "home" in Maryland when he learns of plans to sterilize him and finding his way to his mother in the Bronx.

Bloch himself, an exile from Austria who is experiencing a "feeling of displacement," has, in effect, disappeared, too. Soon, of course, most of his fellow European Jews will disappear as well.

In interspersed chapters that take the form of a journal written by Bloch in his stiff Germanic English, we learn of his growing romantic involvement with Elisabeth. It is also in this journal that Bloch records his impressions of the young Hitler, both to satisfy people's curiosity (the real Bloch submitted to interviews with Collier's magazine and the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, sources from which Neugeboren has drawn) and to defend himself against "the outrageous accusations" of his "alleged responsibility for Adolf Hitler's hatred and persecution of Jews" (though these accusations emerged well after Bloch's death, in the work of Brandeis historian Rudolph Binion).

The link between Bloch's past with Hitler and his present with Elisabeth is the threatened sterilization of Daniel, with its evocation of Nazi atrocities that began with "the sterilization of individuals declared mentally retarded, feeble-minded, or insane" and ended with mass murder.

What is striking about the Hitler sections of Bloch's journal is the author's unflinching refusal to rewrite history. The picture Bloch paints of the young Hitler stubbornly adheres to his memories, most of them positive, without reinventing them in the shadow of the man Hitler became. Bloch remembers a sensitive, reclusive, rather effeminate boy who was exceptionally tender to his mentally ill half-sister, Maria Anna, and who loved his mother so intensely that when she died, as Bloch recalls, "I have never, I state at once, in all my years as a physician, seen any individual so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler."

More pressing for Bloch than the risk of being perceived as a Hitler apologist is the unfathomable mystery of how the "quiet, well-mannered" youth he had known had metamorphosed into the megalomaniac the world was coming to know. There are no easy explanations.

Complexity is the underlying motif of Neugeboren's subtle and affecting novel — the complexity of the human hearts Elisabeth draws, of the subway system her father helped create, of the subterranean world under the city streets that so attracts Daniel, and, most important, of the roots of evil hidden in Bloch's memories of Hitler. Of this last matter, Neugeboren writes: "those mysteries of human character — of how and why we become who we are — that are forever beyond our understanding."

Reviewed by Tova Reich, whose most recent novel, 'My Holocaust,' has just been published in paperback, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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The award-winning novelist's first novel in two decades.