"Reminding us that history is made up of infinite individual choices, Shadows of Berlin is a masterful story of survival and redemption." — Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman with the Blue Star A captivating novel of a Berlin girl on the run from the guilt of her past and the boy from Brooklyn who loves her 1955 in New York City: the city of instant coffee, bagels at Katz's Deli, ultra-modern TVs. But in the Perlman's walk-up in Chelsea, the past is as close as the present. Rachel came to Manhattan in a wave of displaced Jews who managed to survive the horrors of war. Her Uncle Fritz fleeing with her, Rachel hoped to find freedom from her pain in New York and in the arms of her new American husband, Aaron. But this child of Berlin and daughter of an artist cannot seem to outrun her guilt in the role of American housewife, not until she can shed the ghosts of her past.
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2022 by David R. Gillham
Cover and internal design © 2022 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Olga Grlic
Cover images © Lee Avison/Trevillion Images
Internal design by Ashley Holstrom/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gillham, David R, author.
Title: Shadows of Berlin : a novel / David R Gillham.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021037069 (print) | LCCN 2021037070 (ebook) | (hardcover) | (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3607.I44436 S53 2022 (print) | LCC PS3607.I44436
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037069
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037070
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PART ONE
New York City
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
PART TWO
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
PART THREE
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
Author’s Note
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
Every angel is terrifying.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
PART ONE
New York City
1.
She imagines the final moments as white, pure white, as the plane plunges through the blizzard. The snow obscures the cockpit glass until the mountain emerges in a split second of clarity, the cliff face surging forward in the instant before impact.
Her shrink tilts his head. Slightly. “Why only plane crashes?” he wonders. “Why not floods or train wrecks or any number of other disasters?”
She recalls the headline of the story that she had carefully scissored from the newspaper that morning with her sewing shears. JET HITS MOUNTAIN IN SNOW SQUALL. Below the headline, a photo of the wreckage revealed the result. A twisted, torn fuselage in pieces. Chunks of smoking steel.
“I think the crash of an airplane is different,” says Rachel.
Dr. Solomon frowns reflectively. An arm and a leg he’s being paid, so it’s his job to ferret out this young woman’s madness, isn’t it? Just as it’s her job to be just mad enough to be cured. “Different?”
“Because they are so sudden,” she explains. Quietly. “So complete. And so very few survive it. How is the decision made?”
The man tilts his head again. She can tell he’s not quite sure what she means. How is
“Only a handful may live through it when most do not. How is that decided?” she asks. She began collecting the clippings from the newspapers sometime after she and her uncle had arrived in the States and taken up residence in the hotel for refugees on Broadway. She was always buying newspapers at her uncle’s insistence. To improve their English, he maintained, though what did he end up reading, her Feter Fritz?