The Severed Wing

Fiction. Martin J. Gidron's novel THE SEVERED WING imagines a world in which Teddy Roosevelt is elected to a third term and leads America into World War I much sooner. A world in which the terms of the Versailles Treaty propose a gentler reconciliation between Allied and Central powers. A world in which neither World War II nor the Holocaust ever occur. It's into this world that Gidron places Janusz, who's fled Poland to evade a military draft, and his lover Irena, daughter of a famous composer. When Irena travels to Greece for her father's funeral, things start going wrong for Janusz: people and places-all of them having a Jewish connection-begin disappearing without a trace. Then the Jewish daily newspaper where Janusz works switches inexplicably from Yiddish to English. The discovery that Janusz makes by the novel's end is as harrowing in its particularity as it is in its universality.