Mohr

(Paperback, First Trade Paper Edition)

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When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimesand only sometimeshe can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story.
Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era.
With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germanyphotographs from the 1920s and 30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist Max Mohr; Kthe, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened.
The interplay between Reusss revealing prose and the real faces in nearly 50 photographs offers a reading experience that may be unprecedented in novels. From the first paragraph and that first creased image, which Eva may have taken, of the Mohrs at their table in Germany just before Max walked away from their lives, this beautiful and powerful novel works as deeply on the reader as a family photo album.

Reviews

"His aerialist's sense of history, his sleight of hand, his animal knowledge of political practice, his silver tact and his cool tenderness make his performance nothing less than Orphic. Listen to it. "--JOHN BERGER, BOOKER PRIZE WINNER "[A] quiet triumph...what he has done -- first by following his own curiosity and then a trail of photographs and letters -- is re-embody a couple pulled apart by a world of conflict. His book almost heals that rupture, though in the end all it can do is give it a voice."--The San Francisco Chronicle "Using the innovative format of speculative fiction based on a newly-discovered cache of fifty 1920s and '30s vintage family photographs from playwright Max Mohr, novelist (Horace Afoot, The Wasties) Reuss weaves a story of loss and longing, switching between Mohr, a German Jew who exiled himself to Shanghai, and his wife Kathe and daughter Eva still in Germany as the Nazis are coming to full power...Told with skill and beauty and haunted by the duo-toned photographs, Reuss captures the distanced writer bounding between heroics and fatalism, his spirited wife and child, and their lives both separate and apart during a time of the world gone mad. "--Historical Novels Review "[An] unusual and thoughtful novel."--The Boston Globe "[An] unusual wartime love story...I was truly taken with the story's beautiful dreamlike descriptions and haunting foreboding of tragedy."--Jewish Book World "[R]eads like the best of Graham Greene, with the happy difference that Reuss does not wear his politics on his sleeve. He is more concerned with how circumstances magnify the virtues and flaws of his well-drawn characters. He imagines a life for Mohr which, if not verifiably factual, has the ring of deepest humanity."--The St. Louis Post Dispatch "Very highly recommended reading as an original story of one man's most intimate struggle with himself and with the family he leaves behind."--Midwest Book Review "[A]n unusually close collaboration between fiction and fact. The book is driven, on one level, by a psychological conundrum the documents cannot resolve. Mohr was Jewish, and for him to want to leave the encroaching darkness of Nazi Germany seems understandable enough. And yet: How could he possibly have left behind a beloved wife and daughter But Reuss chose to highlight a different level of question, as well. For he didn't just use that trove of photographs to inspire his storytelling -- he layered them into the novel itself. "Mohr" is constructed around a selection of almost 50 images through which the story flows."--The Washington Post "In 1934, facing Nazi persecution...Mohr packed his bags, said goodbye to his loyal wife and daughter, and [left]...Reuss has spent 20 years trying to figure out why." --Washington City Paper