The DEVIL’s BOOKKEEPERS: Book 1: The Noose by Mark H. Newhouse – Jewish Historical Fiction, Jewish Holocaust Fiction, Jewish Literature

Mark H. Newhouse has created an intense, harrowing, story of love and loyalty surrounding life within the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, established to control a sizeable portion of the Jewish population under Nazi domination in the first book in the series, The Devil’s Bookkeepers: The Noose.

The author’s viewpoint is focused through the lens of Bernard Ostrowski, an engineer who will join three other men chosen for their related skills to report on daily happenings in the ghetto while secretly codifying incidents that the Nazis would not have wished to have recorded. Ostrowski and his cohort – the distinguished but embittered Oskar Rosenfeld, a noted Zionist, Julian Cukier, a journalist, and Oscar Singer, the youngest of the crew and the most impulsive. As Ostrowski opines privately, “Two Jews are a debate. Three, an argument. Four? A war.” Yet the four will co-exist, all trying in their separate ways to fulfill their assignment and please their highly controversial boss, Chaim Rumkowski.

Rumkowski was the real overseer of the Lodz Ghetto.

Some hated him since the people under his sway were starving and dying in disproportionately high numbers even as he commanded them to work for the German cause in German-run industries. Others, like Ostrowski and his companions, did their best to obey him despite many strong reservations, seeing him as the only hope, if faint, for their people’s survival. In their workday, the four men would learn of ever-increasing horrors taking place in the home where they’d been consigned. From very young people shot by German police or Jewish police under Nazi dominance to more people brought in by the thousand when all within the ghetto barely survived, strange, disturbing rumors arose about urns of Jewish ashes being sent to relatives in the ghetto from the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Ostrowski has other palpable worries as the story evolves in the chaos around him.

His young wife Miriam wants a baby, and her pregnancy makes their deprivations even more distressing. Though they love one another, she is suspicious, as are many in the ghetto, of Rumkowski and his motivations. As her husband willingly works for and accedes to Rumkowski’s wishes, a line between them grows. In his role as “the engineer,” Ostrowski believes he is helping to keep his co-workers more concentrated on hard realities from an objective, constructive viewpoint. Miriam’s criticism torments him. Singer secretly suggests to Ostrowski that he take Miriam, their new daughter Regina and flee the ghetto. As the “noose” tightens, this begins to seem like the only realistic plan. But carrying it out would risk their three lives.

An award-winning writer and educator, Newhouse was born in Germany, the child of Holocaust survivors.

Gifted by his mother with a considerable narration entitled The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (translated and edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki, Yale University Press, 1984) and seeing that his parents had had a personal attachment to the account, he read it, and within a short time, he had begun this trilogy, of which The Noose is Part One.

Much of the Chronicle was composed by unknown scribes. Newhouse decided on a fictional treatment speaking for its many authors and encompassing its vital, often horrific, truths. His wide-reaching story of conditions in and feelings about the Lodz Ghetto is educated and realistic. Newhouse deftly combines historical fact with a vibrant portrait of high-minded human beings caught in the trap of being “chosen” – but for what? – and trying their best to fulfill religious and family expectations while suspecting their efforts will all be in vain.

The Devil’s Bookkeeper series won the CIBA 2020 Grand Prize for Series.