In a recent novel, Alexis Landau follows the lives of a German Jew, his Gentile wife, and their two children through World War I and the 1920s. Adam Kirsch writes in his review:
Picking up a book with the lush title The Empire of the Senses, you probably wouldn’t guess that it was a historical novel about German Jews in the early 20th century. Given the inevitable conclusion of any such story in the Holocaust, a title with words like “darkness” or “shadow” or “fate” might seem more appropriate. But in her richly appointed debut novel, Alexis Landau deliberately defies such expectations. Life at any time and place, her title and her prose seem to say, is full of sensual beauty, if you choose to live it that way and write about it that way. And her book functions as a kind of extended séance, conjuring up the look and feel of experiences from the glamorous—a decadent party in Weimar Berlin—to the arduous—a field hospital on the eastern front. . . .
For German Jews, the period Landau writes about was an Indian summer. Never were they more prosperous or seemingly accepted; under the democratic Weimar regime, Jews made great strides in law, academia, medicine, and business. Yet there are plenty of signs of trouble on the horizon, from the “Jewish census” conducted during World War I to make sure Jews weren’t slacking in their military duty, to the postwar street battles involving young members of the SA, the Nazi militia.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/189758/alexis-landau-kirsch-review