The Collaborator: A Novel About an Israeli Accused of Conspiring with the Nazis

The Collaborator, a historical novel by S.L. Stebel, takes place in the aftermath of World War II. A high ranking Israeli official, Ernst Gottliebsohn, is accused of having conspired with the Nazis on the eve of his nation's first trade mission to Germany. Charged with defending himself, Gottliebsohn finds that he has no memory of anything that happened in his past; his life before emigrating to Israel is as much a mystery to him as it would be to a stranger. Unwilling to abort the trade mission, officials allow Gottliebsohn to carry on, but send a young Jewish-American psychiatrist -- avowedly "neutral" -- to travel with him, both to evaluate his claims of innocence and attempt to unlock whatever secrets Gottliebsohn may be hiding from himself. At the same time, a vengeance-seeking Nazi hunter, Captain Kohn, is avidly investigating Gottliebsohn's past.

Is he the victim of false accusations, or the victimizer of his own people in Nazi Germany? Feeling assaulted in both mind and spirit, Gottliebsohn begins to experience terrible dreams -- images of people he couldn't have known, places he couldn't have seen. As details of a past he does not recognize accumulate, Gottliebsohn finds himself facing an impossible choice -- one whose alternatives are as unthinkable as the events that shaped them.