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Recent news stories of WWII Nazi executioners living placid middle-class lives in the USA will give momentum to Blum's eerie tale of the hunters & the hunted. Like Hermine Ryan, the Queens housewife recently extradited to W. Germany, Tscherim Soobzokov, Valerian Trifa, Andrija Artukovic & Boleslavs Maikovski arrived here as displaced persons fleeing the communists. The Immigration & Naturalization Service--whether it knew of their previous identities or not--was, allegedly, more than willing to let them live unmolested. Soobzokov prospered as a Patterson, NJ, Democrat & leader of that town's Circassian community; Trifa became a Bishop of the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate in MI. The men obsessed with tracking & unmasking them as mass murderers were an equally unlikely bunch. Tony DeVito, an INS official involved in the Ryan case, was a monomaniacal crusader; a Rumanian Jewish dentist pursued Trifa for 32 years; Maikovski's nemesis was a NYC waiter. As they compiled their dossiers on the neighborly, Americanized East Europeans, these men--DeVito most especially--succumbed to paranoia. Or did they? INS files mysteriously vanished; mounds of evidence forwarded to that bureau were received with indifference if not hostility; eyewitness testimony from Jewish survivors was deemed insufficient for government action. DeVito & others grew certain that "the fix" was in, that an "Odessa organization has infiltrated the inner reaches of our government." Does author Blum believe this? He chooses not to say; like a good novelist he writes from inside the tormented heads of DeVito, dentist Charlie Kremer & the rest. Suspense runs high as Blum drops frightful bits of circumstantial evidence without ever sticking his own neck out. Blum also notes that many of those "willing to forget" are Jews. As this stands it's an engrossing detective drama with the coverup left moot & the moral issues shelved. But one thing is sure--you'll be hearing more about these cases.--Kirkus
