Champion
It would be a mistake to dismiss this novel on the grounds that it ploughs a familiar furrow. The incorporation of the parallel histories of the boxer Max Schmeling and of Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish boy – both of them experiencing in different ways the effect of the increasingly powerful Nazi regime, which was rapidly brutalising the Jewish community in Berlin – makes clever use of both of their storylines.
Stephen Deutsch writes with great skill here, managing to balance his obviously strong feelings of empathy toward his Jewish characters with a laudable ability to resort to a steely tone, which comprehensively conveys his contempt for the soulless cruelty endemic in Hitler’s followers and which triggers an act that moves Kristallnacht and the pogroms into closer and more aggressive focus.
Starkly shocking events are nicely contrasted with softer, but always telling, domestic situations which fill out the characters of the main protagonists in skilfully written sections, making them (even in some cases, the Nazis) almost endearing.
This novel very subtly explores an aspect of WW2 which defines mankind’s age-old capacity for cruelty set against the unlikely expectation that we shall ever get things right.
Champion is a compelling and rewarding read.
