Lew's AUTHOR BLOG

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A month or so ago, I was just about to publish A FLOOD OF EVIL as a POD book on amazon. But first I thought I would try to find an agent to represent me and sell the book to a real publisher. I sent out letters to agents who seemed interested in historical fiction and now 5 agents are reading my book. Doesn’t mean anyone will sign me up, but it is encouraging. For the moment, POD publishing is on hold.

Here is a synopsis of the book the agents are reading …

A FLOOD OF EVIL opens with a Nazi named Berthold Becker on trial at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials shortly after the end of WWII. He is saved from a certain death sentence by the unexpected testimony of a Polish Jewish woman named Anna Gorska.

Years later, the Nuremberg prosecutor and his daughter, now a history professor at Brandeis University, decide to work together on a book about the two people from his trial. They locate Berthold in Munich and Anna in Jerusalem and travel to them to learn their stories.

The reader meets Berthold, a Catholic, when he is thirteen years old and first exposed to the Nazis by his older brother. When the brother dies in Hitler’s failed beer hall putsch of 1923, Berthold is forever-after revered as the putsch martyr’s brother. As a result, even though he is repulsed by the Nazi violence and Jew-hatred, he is drawn into the Nazi orbit and gains unique access to the internal workings of the Nazi movement at the highest level.

Anna Gorska grows up in a Polish shtetl where her Orthodox Jewish family struggles against the forces of modernization. She leaves the shtetl to attend Warsaw University and, aided by her family’s connections with Polish strongman Josef Pilsudski, becomes a respected journalist with an international following.

Anna is sent to Munich to do a story on Jewish students in German universities. She meets Berthold and he offers to help with her student interviews. They fall in love and begin a lifetime of working together under severe duress to try to stop Hitler and the Nazis.

Through these characters, we meet many of the Nazi insiders, and also the people and institutions who could have stopped Hitler, but didn’t.

We learn Berthold and Anna’s stories not only from their recollections, but also by meeting them in “real time,” in the presence of the Brandeis professor and her father. Berthold and Anna, still sharp and intense in their 80s, thus provide the reader with a direct, first-person connection to supplement and comment on the story as they lived it.

A FLOOD OF EVIL is planned as a multi-volume historical novel. Book One, which is self-contained, begins in 1923 and ends shortly after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.