Children of radium A buried inheritance

"My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste." So begins Dunthorne's mind-spinning family history. After failing to get his gruff grandmother to talk about her Jewish family, including her intrepid chemist father, Siegfried, their lives in a small town near Berlin, escape from the Nazis, and subsequent life in Turkey, Dunthorne turned to Siegfried's massive unpublished memoir. After hundreds of pages of ancestral history, Dunthorne was shocked to learn that his great-grandfather worked for the Nazis in Germany and Turkey, producing gas masks and chemical weapons. Dunthorne's unnerving inquiry brings him to a town spiked with hundreds of unexploded WWII bombs, missing records about the secret poisonous-gas factory, and one citizen going to court to prove that rampant cancer cases were caused by radioactive contaminants in the soil. With his flinty mother's assistance, Dunthorne contrasts Siegfried's complex and tragic story with that of his courageous sister, Elisabeth, who defied the Nazis to establish an orphanage and school in Munich. Rueful, determined, and funny, Dunthorne presents a galvanizing and revelatory saga of prickly personalities, desperation, denial, and the overriding drive to survive.

In this riveting memoir, poet and novelist Dunthorne (Submarine) parses his family's complicated legacy in WWII-era Europe. What begins as a study of his grandmother's escape from the Nazis in 1935 soon evolves into an unsettling interrogation of the author's great-grandfather, Jewish chemist Siegfried Merzbacher, whose development of radioactive household products eventually led him to produce chemical weapons and gas mask filters used by Nazi forces. Combing through 2,000 pages of Merzbacher's memoirs, plus his personal letters and diary entries, Dunthorne pieces together a fractured history of the chemist's prolific work, which began in the toothpaste industry, and his deep guilt, which haunted him until he died. In unvarnished prose, Dunthorne recounts conversations with families affected by Merzbacher's weapons and his own visits to sites across Western Europe with concealed radioactive waste. Along the way, he unearths his family's buried legacy and struggles to understand his great-grandfather's motivations. Dunthorne strikes a near-perfect balance of history and personal reflection, and his questions about Merzbacher's moral dilemmas resonate. This is a must-read. Agent: Georgia Garrett, RCW. (Apr.)

A descendant charts a Jewish family's unusual course through the years of the Third Reich. In 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered that the Munich synagogue be demolished, and its rubble was bulldozed into the Isar river. Years later, writes English novelist Dunthorne, workmen noticed that the "rubble buried in the riverbed was unusually ornate" and began the long course of excavating it to restore the building. It's a perfect metaphor for his book, which, among many other storylines, charts his Jewish great-grandfather's problematic career as a chemical manufacturer who promoted the received wisdom of the day that thorium and other radioactive elements constituted "a miracle cure and the source of mysterious powers," used as ingredients in things as various as toothpaste, energy drinks, and even lingerie. Great-grandfather Siegfried also made poisonous gases, some quite diabolical: One penetrated a gas mask and prompted retching, driving the wearer to take off the mask and inhale still more deadly components. Siegfried's laboratory was in Oranienburg, a center not just of scientific research but also of the SS, the chemical plant next door to a concentration camp, and a production facility that made uranium oxide for the secret Nazi atomic bomb project. Siegfried and his family left for Turkey when anti-Jewish laws were promulgated, but in exile he still worked for the chemical firm, one of whose poisonous gases was used against Kurds in eastern Turkey, killing some 13,160 civilians around the town of Dersim, which, Dunthorne writes, "has led to rumors that the Nazis saw Dersim as a proof of concept." That Siegfried was aware of the implications of his work may have led, after he emigrated to the U.S., to a mental breakdown. Dunthorne's winding story embraces other family members whose histories were less freighted with guilt, but Siegfried's lies at its heart as a cautionary tale of accommodating evil. A thoughtful, troubling addition to the literature of the Holocaust. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.