Description of ‘Searching For Wallenburg’ by Alan Lelchuk:
After reading a graduate student’s thesis about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Budapest from 1944 to 1945, Professor Manny Gellerman–part-time detective, historian, and novelist–follows the twists and turns along unorthodox paths and uncovers some uncomfortable truths that may explain what happened when Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets in 1945, taken to Moscow, and left to fester in a Lybianka prison.
Now more than 65 years later, Gellerman begins unthreading these mysteries–and discovers that the deepest may be Wallenberg, himself. Who was the real man behind the legendary persona of noble diplomat and savior of Budapest Jews? Gellerman’s quest eventually leads him to a Jewish Hungarian woman, who claims she is Raoul Wallenberg’s daughter. At once a detective story and an unusual love story, this novel within a novel is filled with multiple layers and surprising characters that all lead to a deeper understanding of this enigmatic hero.
Praise for ‘Searching For Wallenburg’ by Alan Lelchuk:
”Part detective story, part philosophic inquiry, part historic revisionism, Alan Lelchuk delivers a thinking man’s thriller: Intellectual noir that is both painful and personal.” —Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize- and Oscar-winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and author of numerous novels, children’s books, plays and screenplays, including Carnal Knowledge, Harry, The Rat with Women, and Little Murders
”Sometimes we are better served by a novelist’s imagination than by a professional historian’s scholarship. Alan Lelchuk drives this argument home with a brilliantly constructed literary investigation into the mysterious life and death of Raoul Wallenberg. The strength of the fiction lies in its ambiguity: this is how it might have been–or maybe not.” —Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ,
”Anyone who cared to know has known for decades roughly what happened to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg after he disappeared into Russian hands in Hungary in 1945. But exactly what happened–and why, and when, and where?–nobody knows. Not knowing is the great subject of Alan Lelchuk’s remarkable novel about one man’s effort to learn to live on the border separating the known and the unknown.” —Thomas Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, “Heisenberg s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb”; and “The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA”
About Alan Lelchuk:
Alan Lelchuk is a novelist and professor, who was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. in World Literature from Brooklyn College in 1960, studied at University College (London) in 1962-63, and received his M.A.in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1965, both in English from Stanford University.
His critically acclaimed novels are American Mischief, Miriam at Thirty-Four, Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own Ending, Miriam in Her Forties, Brooklyn Boy, Playing the Game, and Ziff: A Life? He co-edited 8 Great Hebrew Short Novels and has written, for young adults, On Home Ground.
He is a co-founder of Steerforth Press, has taught at Brandeis University and Amherst College, and since 1985 has been on the faculty of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
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