Puppet

Wiseman, Eva      Puppet      

 Tundra Books      2009  243p  $11.99     

978-1-77049-296-7   E-B    ms/hs       Historical fiction       

In this historical novel, based on a real trial, young readers will learn that atrocities committed against Jews did not only occur during World War II.  What the reader experiences in this novel parallels what he/she might experience reading a novel about the Holocaust, with one exception.  Puppet is set in Hungary in the 1800s, when Jews were feared for their differences as well as their economic prosperity. 

In Tosza-Eszlar, Hungary, a young girl suddenly disappears.  Instead of investigating, town leaders listen to the ramblings of some mourners who immediately blame the Jews for kidnapping her to bleed her for their religious rituals.  The protagonist, a young village girl named Julie, is herself a victim of an abusive and negligent father who, upon the death of his wife, has given his younger daughter Clara to an aunt to raise and farmed Julie out to the local prison to be a maid.  Taught by her mother to judge people fairly, Julie knows in her heart that the Jews did not kill her friend Esther.  Local leaders have tortured young Morris Scharf to wring a confession from him that his father and several others were involved in the kidnapping and murder, and Julie is unable to help Morris because he is being brainwashed by Warden Henter.  Henter manages to procure a confession from Morris in exchange for a promise that Morris’s father will not be put to death. 

The reader will be drawn into the plot, the character development, the internal as well as external conflicts and the injustice that is perpetrated on the Jews of Tosza-Eszlar.  Author Eva Wiseman reaches her readers by pushing and pulling her characters through situations that evoke sympathy one moment and hatred the next.  This is a powerful novel.       

E-BN        Martha Squaresky        Antisemitism, Hungary-History, Murder trials