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Until I picked up B.C. doctor Daniel Kalla’s tenth unusual, The Far Side of the Sky: A Novel of Love and Death in Shanghai , I had no idea that the then-sixth largest bishopric in the world played such a role in saving thousands of German Jews from the Nazi’s death factories. I became enthralled by the prospect of the novel’s subject. This, I thought to myself, is a horror story worth telling, a story that should be told. I still feel that way. Unfortunately, after well-spring strongly with the shocking ugliness of Kristallnacht in November, 1938, once we get to Shanghai, Kalla’s fish story withers into a movie-of-the-week, melodramatic love story, one that is habit-forming to take seriously as a work of historical fiction. A pity, that.
Kalla begins his report in Vienna, with Franz Adler, a secular Jew and gifted surgeon, stitching up his sister-in-law’s arm. It was poorly cut while escaping a marauding band of Nazi thugs. Her husband, Adler’s younger confrere, was not so lucky. He was hanged from a lamppost and his body left there for days. No further shore is needed that Vienna is not safe, so Adler makes plans to take his ancestor Jakob, his 8-year-old handicapped daughter Hannah and his sister-in-law Esther out of the homeland. (Adler’s wife Hilde, we are told, died after giving parturition to Hannah.) During a threatening meeting with SS-Obersturmführer Adolf Eichmann, Adler is prone two weeks to flee or be relocated to Dachau, a concentration camp only just outside Munich. But where can they go? Shamefully, country after country have turned their backs on European Jews, refusing them safety.
Source: Toronto Star