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Estd. 2020
Approved by the Shaw Family
1967
Arthur Goldman is Jewish and a Nazi death camp survivor. Now a rich industrialist, he lives in luxury in a Manhattan high-rise. He banters with his assistant Charlie, often shocking him with his outrageousness and irreverence about aspects of Jewish life. One day, Israeli secret agents kidnap Goldman and take him to Israel for trial on charges of being a Nazi war criminal.
Goldman's trial forces his accusers to face not only his presumed guilt, but theirs as well.
At the end, it appears that Goldman is not a Nazi or a war criminal after all; he falsified the dental records which the Israelis used to identify him to bring about the trial. When the deception is revealed by the Israeli prosecutor, Goldman is left standing in the trial court's bulletproof glass box, a broken man. The stress shatters his mental health and he becomes catatonic.
He then relives in his mind a Nazi firing squad execution and dies as those in the courtroom whisper the Jewish prayer, "Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad" ("The LORD is our God, the LORD is one").
Robert Shaw (The Hiding Place--his first and best) conducts another post-Auschwitz investigation of guilt and survival sickness which makes its point very clearly even though it is pursued through the vagaries of an old man's confused mind.
Goldman, the old man, is first introduced in America, a rich entrepreneuer in real estate attended by a butler, a chauffeur, a doctor; inconsecutively, rather incoherently, he talks about football or a thirty-two million dollar deal or pays respects to his wife in her tomb or indulges in private jokes; he proceeds through various health rituals, rewrites his will, entertains splendidly, and throughout claims that he is being followed by one Dorff, a Colonel in the mobile killing units of Hitler's SS.
In the second part, Dorff comes up for trial, subsequent to Eichmann's, in a glass booth in Israel and Goldman, as Dorff, says ""what no German has ever said in the dock"" in an indictment which transcends national boundaries, racial issues, time--centuries.....The novel which relies on every kind of playful turnabout (figments of the imagination; figures of speech; switches of scene and identity) still is basically a polemic as much as an exercise in irony. Still one wonders if it will get the message across to the general reader.
