Tag: Jews

Warburg in Rome, by James Carroll

This is a religious thriller, and a good one, from one of my favorite authors, James Carroll. But this 2014 novel is not the literary work that I had hoped to read. What happened? My theory stems from the fact that of Carroll’s recent works, only one was a novel, and, indeed, a literary one. Whereas, the others were works of history—with the emphasis on Church history and power, the Church’s relations with the Jews, and American military might.

This novel represents a blend of those issues, and I sense that Carroll either thought his subject here did not reach the scale of his previous non-fiction works, or thought it would reach a broader audience as a novel. And he did want/need a broad public to be aware of this slice of Vatican history.

The story he tells is ironic, that the Vatican, with the collaboration of the American army, established a pipeline to help Nazi military officers and government leaders escape to Argentina. They worked together, in history, because both groups feared that Soviet military power would establish atheistic Communism in Europe; and had determined that these escaping Nazis could become a bulwark to help prevent this from happening. While the irony is that the same U.S. government that is allowing the Germans to escape is, in Carroll’s fiction, also helping to fit into the post-war world the Jewish people whom those Nazi leaders persecuted.

And so, in addition to its exposure of Church duplicity at the highest level, this work also raises both refugee issues and moral issues. These include the violent acts of terrorists, by both Germans and Zionist Jews; the guilt of the fictional characters who become involved in the intrigue among the Germans, the Jews, and the Vatican; and the commitment of these various characters to their ideals, in the wake of these revelations.

The basic story of the Vatican pipeline is true, says Carroll. His fictional story to complement it involves five main characters. These are an American government official, David Warburg, a Jew; an ambitious priest, Kevin Deane; a Red Cross worker, Marguerite d’Erasmo; an American military officer, Peter Mates; and an English nun, sister Thomas Aquinas. Some of these collaborate with each other, some work at cross-purposes. Two couples emerge from this intrigue, but they reach different resolutions.

Warburg has been sent by the U.S. government to Rome to aid Jews who have escaped German and Italian internment, and to help them settle in the U.S., Palestine, or other countries. He meets Marguerite, who is helping all refuges in Rome, especially Jews, and Father Deane, who serves Cardinal Spellman, and is as ambitious as Spellman, but who also expresses sympathy for the plight of the Jewish refugees.

The novel’s fictional story concerns the discovery by this idealistic trio of the reality of the pipeline, the involvement of the Vatican in providing the Nazis with the papers to emigrate, and the Americans, such as Mates, looking the other way for their own purposes. Whereupon, complications ensue, for violence intrudes on this “discreet” Vatican scheme, first when retreating German forces murder Jews and then when vengeful Jews seek to advance their cause through terrorist bombings in both Rome and Jerusalem.

It is this violence that challenges the idealistic beliefs of our trio. For one the challenge is to a belief in a vague Jewish faith; for another it is one’s conviction to remain in service to the Church; for another it is the ability to remain an idealist in the face of corruption everywhere; and for another the challenge is to retain one’s vocation in the face of failure and betrayal. And it is here that the novel reaches for the level of literature. If it does not succeed in doing so, it does lend more depth to all of its characters.

As a former priest, Carroll is adept at capturing both the emotions and the consciences of both good priests, like Father Deane, and bad priests. Among the latter is Father Roberto Lehmann, a Franciscan who is the key Vatican contact for the pipeline. Carroll establishes the mood and the thoughts of Deane, both when he is saying mass and when his conscience grasps his involvement at the fringes of the Nazi pipeline. Meanwhile, Carroll explores the rationalizing conscience of Father Lehmann, even as he comes to understand he has been sexually seduced to betray his pipeline friends.

At times, the political maneuvering among the Vatican officials, the Nazi sympathizers, the Jews, and the Americans can become complex and confusing. Indeed, I find such maneuvering often to be confusing in a thriller like this. Which only re-enforces for me that this is a thriller, that the emphasis is not on the characters themselves, as well delineated as they may be. No, it is story that matters here—the maneuvers themselves, and the message that the story carries. Namely, that the Vatican was more than complicit, was deeply involved at the highest level, in a pipeline designed to help Nazi officials escape Allied justice after World War II—the purpose being to use these officials later to combat the advance of Communist Russia.

In passing, I would note that despite the complexity of the plot, each time I picked up this novel I needed little help in recalling the overall situation. This is testimony to Carroll’s skill as a novelist and to the tightness of his structure. But more significant are the moral issues that the novel raises. Is it right to bomb a building, even without killing people? Is it right to assassinate one evil person rather than kill scores of innocent people? Is one culpable when betraying a person in order to reveal evil? Or in betraying one person in order to save another? And how much should one accept/believe in an institution or a vocation which contradicts one’s own beliefs?

Another theme of this novel is love. Both the love of mankind and love among individuals. Both spiritual love and sexual love. Both idealistic love and practical love. Both love of self and love of others. And the diverse resolutions of the human loves here bring home the complexity of love itself.

I do not expect more literary fiction from Carroll, but I will welcome any works that offer further insight into the Church and its spiritual mission in a world of pragmatic human beings. (March, 2015)

The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco

The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco

This 2010 novel is a difficult book to review. Captain Simone Simonini is writing a memoir about the prejudiced grandfather of his youth, and then his early adventures involving Gariboldi’s effort to unite Italy. But it is a beginning that appears mainly to establish Simonini as a ruthless man and a brilliant forger. Because the work quickly introduces a spiritual, philosophical intrigue among the Vatican, the Freemasons, and the Jews. Which converts this novel about nationalism and politics into a novel of demonization and subversion, a novel of the infighting among believers and nonbelievers, clergy and heretics, among the powerful and the manipulators and their victims. And the purpose of this intrigue? To defame the Jews.

We realize early on that Simonini is a forger and a murderer. He is also the grandson of an (historic) figure named Simonini who has imbued in his grandson a hatred of the Jews. What is intriguing at this point is that the grandson has an interesting relationship with Abbe Dalla Piccola, with whom he exchanges messages, and who remembers recent events that Simonini cannot; and vice versa, Simonini remembers things the abbot cannot. Their psychological partnership is further enhanced when Simonini recalls a long conversation he once had with a man he calls Froide.

While this opening section is being told by Simonini in his memoir; there are occasional responses to his writing by the abbot. But soon a narrator appears, as if Eco has realized he cannot advance his story in a manageable length unless he uses this narrator to condense and interpret the complicated events which we are about to read. Moreover, Simonini’s youthful adventures in Italy with Garibaldi, quite confusing to the reader who does not know that history, will soon be matched by a more complicated intrigue.

Exiled to Paris for this criminal behavior in Italy, Simonini enters the primary events of the novel. This is the intrigue among the Church (primarily the Jesuits), the Freemasons, and the Jews to discredit one another. But particularly to discredit the Jews. And because he is such a skilled forger, Simonini decides to seek a client who will pay him to forge a document that purports to expose the Jews’ plot to dominate the world by subverting its morals, its politics, and its finances. This deception is to be in the form of a transcript of a meeting by 12 Jews in the cemetery at Prague, where they plot their strategy. Simonini knows he is the perfect man to forge this document, which he begins to call his protocols, because of his grandfather’s documents and his own awareness of how novelists such as Eugene Sue and the elder Dumas have filled their work with anti-Jewish diatribes.

Gradually, the reader realizes he is reading a possible scenario of how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was created. Which takes the edge off the continual slurs against the Jews that assassinate their character, expose their evil motives, and condemn them as a people— invective that fill this book. In fact, the protocols blame everything that is wrong with Western society on the Jews. What Eco achieves here is a daring strategy to fill this book with zealous vituperation, and yet cleverly show that these insults do not reflect the author or this book, but originate with these characters. And this is enforced when Eco reveals at the end that all the characters, except Simonini himself, are actual historic figures.

I must confess that I was lost in the complexity of this religious intrigue. Mainly because it was difficult to identify these multiple characters as they reappeared on the scene. What was their relationship to Simonini, I kept asking myself. And because they were not fully fleshed out, instead representing a specific argument, it was difficult to recall their multiple motives and the allegiances, and which aspect of the protocols plotting they stood for.

Perhaps this is because Eco’s remarkable research led him into recreating too much of this elaborate intrigue—so much that the characters exist in their relationship to the protocols plot more than they do in their relationship to one another. And Eco himself obviously recognized the difficulty in following the novel’s story, for at the end of this book he summarizes the events of each chapter. He writes: ”for the benefit of the overly meticulous reader, or one who is not so quick on the uptake, here is a table that sets out the relationship” [between the novel’s events and the telling of those events].

Eco has clearly chosen a sensitive topic here. In fact, he has taken on the most sensitive subject in the world’s cultural history, the defamation of the Jews—and shown the ruthlessness and the intrigue behind this merciless campaign. Indeed, he has illustrated how men are willing both to deceive themselves and to excuse their defense of this historic injustice.

I only wish Eco could have presented these events more clearly. That he had not chosen the elaborate combination of a memoir and a narrative—although I was grateful that he used contrasting type faces to delineate those different perspectives. And perhaps he also stuck too close to history, which prompted the introduction of such a broad range of characters. Yes, the protocols were created as a result of a complicated and interrelated series of factors. But I am not sure the verisimilitude achieved was sufficient to justify this approach to a work of literature.

To sum up, this is a remarkable story told in a remarkable way. But Eco was motivated more by history than by literature. The creation of the protocols was too complicated a story, I believe, to allow the unity required for literary art. And as a result of this complexity, the multiple characterizations suffered. What works is that this is a credible story, at the same time that it is a confusing one. And it has a strong central character, Simonini, even if a despicable one.

Rereading this novel would surely bring a closer understanding of the story, and how the various characters interrelated. But the original reading experience has not been enjoyable enough to entice me to do this. (May, 2014)