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Had I known that the publisher pulled this book from shelves due to the findings being discredited, I probably wouldn’t have checked it out from the library. But I read it. It’s poorly written, with the dramatic rhetorical questions at the end of several chapters irritating me the most. The research supposedly pointed to one person, but there isn’t any actual evidence that would stand up in court. So the author and investigative team appear to be motivated by profit off of a tragedy, regardless of the impact on the family of the person they accused, and the families of Holocaust survivors in general. It’s very fashionable these days to investigate historic cold cases (eg the entire Ripperology subgenre) but writers and publishers should be especially careful when witnesses and their children are still alive.
I am in no way a YA, so not the target audience for the book. I appreciated the LGBTQ representation, the Jewish supernatural themes, and the historical research that went into the novel. The writing, though, was overwrought, clunky, imprecise, and if I can quibble, some really weird word choices were repeated throughout the book that made me wonder about the editor’s skills. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was extremely distracting, trying to mimic accents it sounds like he’d never heard before, and chewing the scenery in the process. As for the plot, it feels like the author read Devil in the White City and said “let’s make it Jewish!”
The author believed his work would disprove the racial basis for antisemitism and thus end antisemitism itself. Unfortunately his work and that of others has been picked up and misused by some antisemites and white supremacists. It has also been used by some anti-Zionists to argue against the conclusion that Jews are indigenous to Israel. The author argues that Israel’s right to exist originates with the UN mandate rather than a genetic or historical connection to the land, so he wasn’t taking an anti-Israel approach. Fascinating book with some questionable conclusions but worth the read.
