The Enemy Beside Me by Naomi Ragen; New York: St. Martin’s Griffin © 2023; ISBN9781250-840905; 384 pages plus acknowledgments; $19.
SAN DIEGO – Naomi Ragen is a powerful writer. Counting this one, she has written 14 novels. I’ve previously reviewed for this publication two of them, The Devil in Jerusalem and An Unorthodox Match. This one, about Holocaust denial and distortion in Lithuania, may make Jewish tourists rethink any idea they may have about taking a roots journey to Lithuania, where the part played by the local populace in the murder of our people goes largely unacknowledged and covered up.
The plot is simple. The fictional Milia Gottstein-Lasker, the Israeli-based director of the Survivors Campaign who is known in Lithuania as a public enemy, receives an invitation from Darius Vidas, an idealistic Lithuanian professor, to keynote a conference titled “Our Neighbors, Our Friends” about the historic Lithuanian Jewish community that was all but totally wiped out in the Holocaust.
Vidas believes his countrymen need to know the truth about the so-called “partisans” who gleefully murdered almost all the country’s men, women, and children and then divided up their victims’ possessions.
Gottstein-Lasker is wary but believes if she can deliver an uncensored speech at the conference to be covered by the Lithuanian and international press, it will open the populace’s eyes to the concerted campaign by the government, academia, and various Lithuanian history commissions to minimize their countrymen’s involvement in the mass murders. She hopes to expose how officials in Lithuania have sugarcoated and twisted that Baltic country’s history. She wants Lithuania’s true history to be exposed, so the citizens can come to terms with it, and perhaps forge a true reconciliation with the Jewish people.
Before she leaves for the conference, which also will include touring and speaking at high schools throughout Lithuania in advance of her keynote speech, she learns that her husband, an admired surgeon, has been having an affair with a pretty, yet vapid, acquaintance with whom they have dined socially. The unsettling news was delivered by the husband of the other woman.
Perhaps the reason was Milia’s never-ending focus on the depressing topic of the Holocaust, or perhaps her husband was just an egotistical male wanting to have a woman fawn over him.
Whatever the case might be, Milia, on the rebound, finds herself both intellectually and physically attracted to the divorced Darius, who shares her ideals and is also quite strong and handsome. Ironically, he is someone the Nazis might have considered the physical picture of an ideal Aryan — blond, blue-eyed, tall, and well-muscled.
When Milia gives her first speech at a rural high school, half the students walk out in protest as does the official translator, so offended are they by her myth-busting. But half of the students stayed, and Milia exulted that at least she may have reached some of them. Her message might take root somewhere. A video of Milia’s speech thereafter went viral, setting off alarm bells in official Lithuanian circles, at the university where Darius teaches, and among Darius’s children, who anticipate that Darius will suffer revenge.
In Israel, meanwhile, the video also causes concern among Milia’s family. When the interpreter deserted the podium, Darius took over her job, placing his hand on Milia’s in a sign of reassurance – or did the gesture signify something more?
The story of the evolving relationship between Milia and Darius is a vehicle for author Ragen to pound away at the true, documented history of Lithuanian culpability in the Holocaust. Wherever Milia and Darius go, there are bitter reminders of that history. Suspense builds as the day nears when Milia is scheduled to deliver the keynote address.
As a descendant of Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 1880s, I had been playing with the idea of visiting my ancestral town of Sirvaint, which is near the capital of Vilna. Now, it would take a lot of persuading that Lithuania really wants to address its past – as indeed Germany has – before I would ever make such a journey.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com