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On a street in modern-day Norway, a writer kneels with his son and tells him that according to Jewish tradition, a person dies twice: first when their heart stops beating, and then again the last time their name is read or thought or said. Before them is a stone engraved with the name Hirsch Komissar, the boy's great-great-grandfather who was murdered by Nazis.
The man who sent Komissar to his death was one of Norway's vilest traitors, Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Nazi double agent who set up headquarters in an unspectacular suburban house and transformed the cellar into a torture chamber for resisters, a place to be avoided and feared.
That is until Komissar's own son, Gerson, and his young wife, Ellen, take up residence in the house after the war. While their daughters spend a happy childhood playing in the same rooms where some of the most heinous acts of the occupation occurred, the weight of history threatens to pull the couple apart.
In Keep Saying Their Names, Simon Stranger uses this unusual twist of fate to probe five generations of intimate and global history, seamlessly melding fact and fiction, creating a brilliant lexicon of light and dark. The resulting novel reveals how evil is born in some and courage in others—and seeks to keep alive the names of those lost.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 19, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593169865
- File size: 263971 KB
- Duration: 09:09:56
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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March 23, 2020
Stranger’s English-language debut blends fact and fiction in a haunting tale of a Jewish family impacted by the horrors of WWII. The narrator, an unnamed writer, is the grandson-in-law of Hirsch Komissar, one of 10 prisoners executed randomly by the Nazis in 1942 in reprisal for acts of sabotage by the Norwegian resistance. Hirsch’s murderer, Henry Oliver Rinnan, was, historically, a notorious Nazi collaborator who perpetrated atrocities in the Gang Monastery, an interrogation house in Trondheim. After identifying Rinnan, the narrator proceeds with “a story so monstrous and unlikely that at first I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was true”—in a ghoulishly ironic twist, the monastery became the home of Hirsch’s son, Gerson, and his family after the war. Stranger interweaves the narrator’s account of Rinnan’s despicable rise and fall with the story of Gerson and his wife, Ellen, whose marriage gradually crumbles under the weight of their home’s malignant legacy. Despite the grim subject, Stranger succeeds in shining a light of hope by keeping the memory of the dead alive. This tale of triumph and compassion is a testament to courage in the face of the darkest evil.
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