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Synopsis
Five Amber Beads is the story of two men whose lives are woven together as they seek to discover the truth about their pasts. Charley Bernstein works in the London art world and is tracing a family history erased by the Holocaust. In his possession is a diary written by a relative in a labour camp during the Third Reich, and Charley must follow the threads leading from its haunting pages to his own present.In New York an old man is found lying semiconscious on the pavement. There are no witnesses to what has happened to him and he has no form of identification. When he wakes up in a hospital bed he finds he doesn’t recognise the city or his own skin. In a state of total amnesia, he must embark on a struggle to regain his memory. Richard Aronowitz was born in 1970 to an English father and a German-Jewish mother and grew up in rural Gloucestershire. He studied Modern Languages at Durham and Heidelberg universities and Art History at the Courtauld Institute in London. After working for Sotheby’s for several years, he joined the staff of the London Jewish Museum of Art. His poems have appeared in many magazines and are anthologised in Anvil New Poets 3, but Five Amber Beads is his first novel.
Richard Aronowitz’s Five Amber Beads is another first novel, and a good one. Charley Bernstein, the narrator, is an art detective who tracks down paintings stolen by the Nazis. His mother came to England as a Kindertransport refugee and married an Englishman. Charley has assumed his mother’s Jewish surname (”amber” in German). In New York, after an accident, he wakes up in a ward with an old man who has lost his memory. He is European, perhaps German, and was clearly involved in the second world war. But how? Charley adopts “Christopher” and procures a passport for him in the name of his Jewish grandfather. They both go hunting their lost identity.The narrative follows three convergent tracks. One is the murky provenance of a Modigliani painting, now in Israel. The second is the gradual uncovering of Christopher’s mysterious past. The third is the diary of Charley’s great-uncle, an Auschwitz survivor. Everything finally links, as in the amber necklace that is Charley’s relic of his mother. A postscript confirms that Five Amber Beads is as much autobiography as fiction - which is how it reads. Very effectively.
John Sutherland
... the writer's distinctive poetic voice offers a welcome fresh perspective.
Rachel Hore
...very ambitious book which brilliantly succeeds in bringing together the themes of identity with fascinating parallels between a nation and an individual's past and the needs to know one's roots in order to live. Beautifully written and movingly told, Five Amber Beads is well worth a read.
Geraldine D'Amico
'An impressive debut, which deals with the themes of identity, Jewishness and the legacy of conflict with immense skill and subtlety. Richard Aronowitz has a great future ahead of him.'
D.J. Taylor
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