Two for the Devil (Small Worlds)

An interrogation cell in Stalinist Russia; a cattle car bound for Treblinka in Nazi-occupied Poland--there's an eerie symmetry in Allen Hoffman's third installment in his Small Worlds series, the continuing story of a community of Jews living in Poland during the first half of the 20th century. The first novel, Small Worlds, started in 1903 and revolved around the rabbi of the village of Krimsk, while the second, Big League Dreams, followed some characters from the previous book to St. Louis, circa 1920. Two for the Devil is set in darker times, however; the first half of the novel takes place in Russia during the Stalinist purges of the mid-1930s. The main character, Colonel Grisha Shwartzmann, is a member of the Soviet secret police and charged with fitting unusual crimes to the Soviet criminal code. A staunch Bolshevik and apostate Jew, Shwartzmann finds himself confronted with a man who confesses to recurring dreams in which he has anal sex with Stalin-with the great leader always on the bottom. As Shwartzmann struggles to fit this square legal peg into the appropriate penal hole, he gradually becomes aware that the very system he serves will eventually turn on him, as well.

Fast forward a few years . On Yom Kippur in 1942, Yechiel Katzman, late of the Warsaw Ghetto, finds himself in a cattle car bound for the death camp of Treblinka. During a brief stop along the route, Katzman is reunited with a fellow Jew from Krimsk, a retarded giant whom the Nazis are using to further their own genocidal aims. In such a time and place, there can be no reprieve, but there is a possibility for redemption, as Katzman's subsequent actions suggest. The gentle charm of the previous two books gives way to a blacker humor here, but the feeling that this is a world of wonders--however terrible--still remains. The related tales in Two for the Devil prove that, even in the midst of unspeakable evil, with faith there can be transcendence.