Cesare, Jerome Charyn
Cesare, Jerome Charyn
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Cesare
A Tale of War-Torn Berlin

Author: Jerome Charyn

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 11 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/07/2020


Synopsis

On a windy night in 1937, a seventeen-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him "Cesare" after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies.

Canaris is a man of contradictions who, while serving the regime, seeks to undermine the Nazis and helps Cesare hide Berlin's Jews from the Gestapo. But the Nazis will lure many to Theresienstadt, a phony paradise in Czechoslovakia with sham restaurants, novelty shops, and bakeries, a cruel ghetto and way station to Auschwitz. When the woman Cesare loves, a member of the Jewish underground, is captured and sent there, Cesare must find a way to rescue her.

Cesare is a literary thriller and a love story born of the horrors of a country whose culture has died, whose history has been warped, and whose soul has disappeared.

About Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. He has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his novels have been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy on July 02, 2019

"They would embroider, multiply, manufacture, until I was their Caligari with his slave, Cesare, who strangled enemies of the Reich at will and then returned to his coffin at Tipitz-Ufer." ~Admiral William Canaris in Cesare by Jerome Charyn From the beginning, I knew I had entered a noir world of tal......more

Goodreads review by Greg on December 28, 2019

Jerome Charyn has built his career writing historical fiction. His signature approach is to pose thought experiments wherein he places key historical figures alongside intriguing fictional characters. These “what if’s” reveal possibilities that sometimes emphasize little known facets of the historic......more