Prodigal Sons
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rodigal Sons is a thriller, based on fact, with a romantic sub-plot and a moral bite. The place is Munich, 1950, Occupied West Germany. Horst Vogle, a curator reassembling the art museum’s collection, meets an aspiring pianist, Greta Furster. She introduces him to a group of ambitious war veterans who are seeking to restore German pride and also help German refugees from the Communist East. Horst discovers that they are also caretakers of gold and art stolen by the Nazis.
Horst harbors his own secret. He is actually Joshua Goldberg, part of a clandestine Israeli hit squad assassinating elusive Nazis. The trauma of the War and the death of his family in the Lodz Ghetto, launch him on a journey of survival; as a partisan in the Polish forest, an illegal immigrant to Palestine, and a soldier in the Israeli War of Independence. His mission in Munich is complicated by his love for Greta. A bold Israeli raid to recover the war booty puts Horst’s life at risk.
In my writing I attempt to entertain, inform, and even transcend the reader’s reality. I try to keep the pages turning with a careful plot, a good story, well realized characters, and also feed a reader’s appetite for new and intriguing facts. Die Spinne, the clandestine Nazi organization, as well as the Jewish intellectuals who returned to Germany to kill Nazis, are fictionalized historical fact.
Beyond its entertainment value, the novel explores the polarities of revenge and reconciliation, the blinding impact of ideology and the redemptive quality of love. Goldberg Variations is also an encounter of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Wagner’s Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods). Readers of Alan Furst or even Graham Greene might enjoy the novel.
