Berlin Cantata [Kindle Edition]

Jeffrey Lewis's novel, "Berlin Cantata", is written like a cantata, a tale told in many voices. Set in Berlin in 1991, Lewis writes about a woman who returns to Berlin in order to claim some pieces of property her parents had lost during the war. As Jews, Holly Anholt's parents had hidden during part of the war til they had been betrayed and been sent to Auschwitz with their daughter, Helena, who died on the way. Somehow, Holly's parents had survived and moved to the United States, where they settled in California and had a second daughter. Holly, who has already traveled once to Berlin with her widowed mother at the invitation of the German government, returns after her mother's death to make her legal claims on the lost property.

Holly Anholt comes to live in 1991 Berlin, a city being reunited with the former GDR into a larger German nation. Berlin, always a quirky and edgy place, seems filled with local "characters", from all segments of Berlin society. Returning Jews, Soviet Jews, skin-heads from the east who are learning to be capitalists, writers, lawyers, and communists and Nazis - some repentant, others not; all seem gathered around Holly's quest to learn about her family from their lost Berlin property. The country house had been turned into a "writers' colony" under the GDR rule and the residents are upset that they're probably going to be asked to vacate.

Many of the characters in the book are hiding from their own pasts, both unacknowledged and unaccepted. Former relationships and alliances - both political and personal - dominate the book. There's not too much of a plot to "Berlin Cantata". Instead it is a caustic and penetrating look at how a "new" city and society - Berlin after the fall of the Wall and unification - tries to come to terms with its past and make some headway to the future.

It's a simple and beautifully written novel, even with all 13 characters talking.

"Berlin Cantata" may at times seem discordant: many characters lend their voices to tell this story, set in 1991 Berlin. An American Jew claiming land lost by her family; ex-Stasi agents; skinheads; survivors of the Holocaust; war heroes "sing" in this composition. Jeffrey Lewis's language reflects, as always, his unerringly sensitive ear, each first-person voice individual.
The characters, like the city, have arrived at a time of transformative change; their stories, however, transcend current events as they wrestle with guilt, grief, atonement, and reparation.
What might have been cacophony, becomes instead, by the end, harmony. Like the city, the characters will continue, the reader feels, to struggle with the past while doing their best to live in the present.
The lack of one reader-friendly narrator makes this novel challenging, but how else to do justice to the multiplicity of instruments that play the music of post-Wall Berlin?

I am a faithful - and admiring - reader of Mr. Lewis's earlier books. Berlin Cantata may be his best. I have read it twice now and the story gets deeper and the voices more compelling the longer I spend with it. The idea itself is a masterstroke -- a young American woman returns to Berlin to sort out her claim to her ancestral home, which has been confiscated first by Nazis and then by the Russians. Her story blends with those of others whose burdens and claims to the past are no less complicated - and intimate. In the end, the whole of these interconnected narratives is far greater than the sum of its equal parts. An entire city emerges, along with the plight of modern European Jews, gentiles, grandchildren of Nazis, survivors, etc. all straining to make sense of the chaotic past. I could go on and on here - the voices are rich and varied and surprising. The characters unfold little by little, as in life. This is a complex and fascinating story but it is not off putting or 'historical'. I recommend it highly. Five stars. Wow!