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Also in the combat zone of the spirit is Stefan Kanfer's Fear Itself (Putnam; 215 pages; $12.95). Set for the most part in Europe, New York and Washington, his novel is a deeply felt portrayal of Nazi savagery, the specific horror of the Holocaust, the courage of the few, and a slumbrous, insensitive America. It is largely the story of Niccolo Levi, a talented young Jewish actor who, by late 1943, has joined the underground in his native Italy because, as he says, "nobody promised anything except survival, which is what an Italian Jew did best."
Levi's extraordinary memory and a chameleonic talent for impersonation enable him to evade capture for a while. When the Germans do catch him, he is sent to the same Polish death camp where his child has been killed and his wife is dying. Her final moments permanently change Levi's life: "He understood everything now. He looked past the chimneys at the dull sun. It was at its midway point. Noon. Poland's winter. 1944. He was to remember it as his last sane moment."
At the same time in Washington, F.D.R., weary and wasting, cannot understand why Jews are making such impassioned efforts to have him halt the Holocaust. "Always as if no one else were suffering," sighs the President. "What about the French? What about the Chinese? What about our own boys at Anzio and Midway?"
Or New York, where American and German agents hunt and are hunted? Manhattan-based OSS Agent Carl Berlin picks up a trail that leads to something big. Berlin, a German-born Jew, learns that Levi has escaped the death camp and is already in the U.S. His purpose: to stamp the plight of the Jews on the world's conscience by assassinating Roosevelt. This seems incredible: the Italian actor is in Hollywood beginning a movie career even though he can barely speak English. However, Levi's disappearance from a film studio sets off a cross-country chase. With a sackful of disguises, Levi makes his way to Warm Springs, Ga., where F.D.R. is soaking his paralyzed legs. The showdown brings on Nazi agents and a three-way shootout, though that is not the way the story ends.
For all the blood between its pages, Fear Itself is a celebration of life. Kanfer, Books editor of TIME and author of The Eighth Sin, a 1978 novel about Nazi efforts to exterminate gypsies, writes with wit, subtlety and passion. Not all the ire is directed at the death-camp butchers. In passages as sardonic as any ever written about war-bloated Hollywood, Kanfer describes the unconcern of some successful American Jews for their doomed brethren in Europe. It is a part of the terrible secret that Fear Itself embodies in an exciting work of fiction.
—By Michael Demarest