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Five Amber Beads
By Richard Aronowitz-Mercer

An accomplished first novel about roots, identity and art.

For his first venture into fiction, Richard Aronowitz has borrowed heavily into his own life. Like him, his main character Charley Bernstein is a researcher specialised in Impressionist and modern painting. Like him, he has translated his great-uncle’s diary from German into English, kept throughout the war while in was in work camps, and he is trying to piece back the dramatic history of his family.

Victim of a traffic accident in New York, Charley meets an old man in hospital. The poor fellow has lost his memory and has been renamed Christopher Street after the place where he was found. He speaks English with a faint accent, is fluent in French, German and Polish and looks 75 or so. They share a room while Charley recovers and Christopher desperately tries to remember his past.

Charley tells him of his own family. How his mother was saved from the Holocaust by the kindertransport and has cut herself off from her German past. He finds out about his great-uncle’s life in the work camps: how he was made block leader, the choices that he had to make, the terrible news he received from the family left in the ghetto; the fears but also the friendship.

Back in England and recovered, Charley is sent on an assignment to Israel to check the provenance of a Modigliani. He decides to bring his girlfriend and Christopher. They first have to get him a fake passport borrowing Charley’s grandfather’s name.

In Israel, Charley meets his great-uncle’s best friend who eventually escaped from the camps with him, bringing back more memories and particularly that of the young German who helped him survive. Christopher is moved by the landscape and emotions are deeply stirred. The questions raised by the Modigliani’s provenance give us a glimpse of the amazing work done by the Looted Art Commission.

I won’t say anymore because it would spoil the reading of this very ambitious book which brilliantly succeeds in bringing together the themes of identity with fascinating parallels between a nation and an individual’s past and the needs to know one’s roots in order to live. Beautifully written and movingly told, Five Amber Beads is well worth a read.

Richard Aronowitz-Mercer will be talking about his book at Jewish Book Week on Thursday 2nd March at 5.15pm
Click here to view this session

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