The Warsaw Anagrams

May 23, 2011
Zimler, who examined the slaughter of Jews in 16th-century Portugal in The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, explores a different dark period in the Jewish people's history in this solid mystery thriller. In 1940, psychiatrist Erik Cohen moves into the Warsaw ghetto before the Nazis force him to do so, along with his niece, Stefa, and his beloved great-nephew, Adam, who appears to be about nine. Cohen is frantic when the boy vanishes and is beyond distraught when Adam's corpse is located with the child's right leg severed from the knee down. Determined to track down the killer, Cohen has further cause for alarm after discovering that Adam was not the murderer's only victim; that Benjamin Schrei, a representative of the ghetto's Jewish Council, knew the killing was part of a series; and that a Jew might be responsible for the butchery. The highly unusual setting adds tension to the investigation, and Zimler successfully manages to convey the horrors of the Holocaust through the experiences of one family.