Among the spies and refugees in the war years, Stockholm | Gothenburg after

In his first novel, Dr. B.Outgoing director Daniel Birnbaum describes his grandfather's life and experiences during the war years. Stockholm – an international environment populated by refugees, spies, diplomats, businessmen, adventurers, kufar and mysterious beings.

You are now reading one of yours free articles on GP.se

Become a subscriber here

The journalist Immanuel Birnbaum arrived in Sweden in 1939 with his wife and two teenage sons, on a flight from Nazi Germany. It is therefore a documentary novel about refugees and exile. But at this point, it looks like a story of adventures before. Maybe a book by Frank Heller. With this mix of pleasant environmental and deadly intrigues.

READ MORE: Interesting about Jewish identity

The daily game of Immanuel The livelihoods and survival of the family include careful walks in Stockholm and encounters with a whole gallery of enriching knowledge: the friendly German publisher Bermann Fischer, who in exile continues to search for his publishing house and to publish works banned in German. The temperament musician Zuckerkandl from Vienna. The slightly cultured librarian Josephson and his son of short-lived clock player. The British spy Rickman. The Nazi explorer Pantenberg. The hot messenger Horst. And many others, Germans and British, relied on unclear missions. And then the Soviet ambassador, the author and feminist Aleksandra Kollontaj, who receives Emmanuel in his mysterious summer castle on the island, where he is tempted by a bitter skipper with a revolver in poached.

In the author's afterword, we learn that characters, places and human beings are real. They are perceived only as the inner experiences of the hero: dreams, memories, feelings, thoughts, sensations, bells, music, flames of fire, atmospheres …

The book begins on The detention of Kronoberg, where Immanuel was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy, was seized by the Swedish intelligence services from a letter he had sent to his German news agency. While in detention, he lives again the first year of his family and his family in Sweden. But what led him to write this letter?

We do not know it in the novel, which suddenly stops looking like an old-fashioned book of adventures. No enigma is released and intrigues mingle to give place to muffled memories and anguished dreams, which translate into a heavenly revelation, which may be true. the office in the synagogue of Königsberg. Then, instead of an adventure, the reader sees a difficult and contradictory exile in the middle of the war, in the midst of world politics, in the fraudulent peace of neutral Sweden.

I read the postface and I wonder if this novel can not be considered a very small novel, if the author tries to explain or understand the hero that he himself created by his grandfather , whose sympathetic role as an observer and emotional mediator paradoxically makes him the vaguest character in the book.