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In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Adolf Eichmann’s executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and with no trained executioners in Israel, it would fall to one of them to end Eichmann’s life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw.
Decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he ate, the way he slept—and the sound of the cord tensing around his neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself. When one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past.
In the tradition of postwar trauma literature that includes Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Eichmann’s Executioner raises provocative questions about how we represent the past, and how those representations impinge upon the present.
“Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references. . . . Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced.” —Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 19, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781620973028
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781620973028
- File size: 1125 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 1, 2017
In 1960, agents of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for his part in the extermination of Jews during World War II. The Nazi official had been charged with arranging the transport of Jews from European cities to the death camps in Poland. Dehe, a journalist and translator, and Engstler, a university lecturer, both from Varel, Germany, present here a fictional recounting of Eichmann's final days in prison and the part played by, among others, Shalom Nagar, a prison guard who spent countless hours watching the prisoner and to whose lot it fell to execute him. The tale moves back and forth between the trial and execution and Shalom's life years later on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Shalom tells his story to anyone who will listen, especially his good friends Moshe and Ben, describing Eichmann's words and actions in minute detail. But with all this retelling, he comes to doubt what actually happened. The weaving of past with present, fact with fiction brings Eichmann alive and even humanizes him, a feat that impressively expands our understanding of the Holocaust. VERDICT An admirably translated work, highly recommended for students of that tragedy and readers of historical and literary fiction in general.--Edward B. Cone, New York
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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