“Wherever There Is Light”
Author: Peter Golden
Publisher: Atria Books, Simon and Shuster
Pages: 353
Price: $25.00 (Hardcover)
“Wherever There Is Light” is a truly ambitious novel. In the course of its 353 pages Golden moves his readers through three generations, forty years, one adventure after the next, as his characters play their parts in several of the major historical events of the mid-20th century.
This is Golden’s fifth published book and his third with an emphasis on international Jewry. Golden published “Quiet Diplomat” in 1992, the biography of Max Fisher, who is credited with facilitating the “emergence of American Jews into the mainstream of American politics" after WWII.
Golden also published “O Powerful Western Star,” a monumental, 569-page study of the exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel. In researching that volume Golden interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev, Lawrence Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Shimon Perez, Ronald Reagan, Yitzhak Rabin and many, many others.
Now, in his second novel, Golden has Julian Rose, a Jew from Berlin, who very wisely decided to come to America in 1928, as a teen. We learn his very different story: in Newark, New Jersey, Rose becomes part of a bootlegging operation and, as time passes, a gangster, with some colorful Jewish and Irish gangster buddies. By the late ’30s, Julian is in real estate, mostly legit, very rich, still a tough guy, and perhaps even a killer. Although we have met Meyer Lansky in “The Godfather,” the Jewish gangster is still a fresh subject for fiction.
As the thirties unwind in Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism intensifies with Kristallnacht, street violence and the firing of all Jewish professors from the universities. Julian finally persuades his parents to emigrate, and his father, Theodor, is hired by a small black college, Lovewood, north of Miami.
The connection between black colleges and Jews fleeing Nazism is another fresh subject. Immigration quotas in America were low. To get a U.S. visa, an applicant needed a job in America. Princeton University got Albert Einstein, sure, but by offering professorships to European Jewish intellectuals many small colleges got scholars they would never have otherwise.
On a visit to his parents in their new home in Florida, Julian falls in love with Kendall Wakefield, the president’s daughter, and Golden opens up yet another thematic vein.
Their interracial love affair is nearly suicidal in Florida, at this time the lynching capital of America.
So Golden moves them to the northeast and explores the varieties of prejudice there, especially in housing , even in Greenwich Village , which we might think of as the most liberal and liberated spot in the United States, and then to Paris, a truly liberated and largely colorblind culture.
As in Golden’s previous novel, “Comeback Love,” the course of TL will not run smooth. Kendall, damaged from her childhood traumas, is defensive and fiercely independent, while Julian, however well meaning, is stubborn and overprotective.
Kendall achieves fame as a street photographer, a flaneur, in Harlem, then Paris; her photographic career is modelled partly after that of Lee Miller, the protagonist of Dana Gynther’s novel “The Woman in the Photograph.” Golden has researched the eccentrics of the Village ’30s and no novelist can go wrong placing characters in the Parisian art scene. He enjoys describing the street scene and the interiors, right down to the “balloon-backed, crimson- velvet chairs that looked as if they had been swiped from under the pointy nose of Louis Quatorze.”
Kendall’s career becomes her priority, and with the War, the bilingual Julian becomes an intelligence officer, in the OSS in fact. (“Wild Bill” Donovan has a small part.) Julian sees some action during the Battle of the Bulge and, in a way reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s experiences, interrogates German POWs. Kendall reports on the war and photographs the newly liberated death camps. The action continues in post-war Paris, when Julian buys a nightclub. There’s lots more, but one shouldn’t spoil the read.
This novel is rich in detail, fully furnished. The main characters are convincing, in no way stale. Golden is a smooth storyteller and “Wherever There is Light” is a page turner. My complaint, a small one, maybe, is that there are too many plot turns, reversals, surprises, some of which stretch credulity, but I think the general reader will love it.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
