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Magda and the Rat Catchers

by Netta Murray Goldsmith

260 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #07-2643; ISBN 1-4251-5854-4; US$19.14, C$22.01, EUR14.92, £9.89

The graphic story of a boy and girl growing up in Nuremberg under the Nazis.

About the Book

Magda Senger is eleven on 4 July 1932. It is a glorious summer's day and all her friends come to the best birthday party she has ever had in the big garden of her home in Nuremburg. By winter Hitler has come to power. Everything changes. Magda and her cousin, the maverick Fritz, think of themselves as German but they are also Jewish. This is the story of what happens to them as they grow up under the Nazis who say Jews are vermin -- rats to be got rid of. Things come to a head one dreadful night in November 1938. After that we follow Magda and Fritz in their desperate and dangerous journey across Europe, looking for a country that will take them in.

Reviews

It's July 1932. The Senger family and friends gather to celebrate Magda's 11th birthday. Magda is especially thrilled with the bicycle her parents give her – something she's wanted so long.

Life is idyllic. The family is affluent, secure in its German-Jewish identity, imbued with German culture.

Subtly, the atmosphere begins to shift. A word here, a word there. For some reason, the elderly gardener secretly pities Magda for being Jewish. An antisemitic remark by a stranger makes Magda a tiny bit uncomfortable. Who is this upstart Hitler? Is he to be taken seriously?

Magda's school teachers are showing pro-Nazi sentiments. Her non-Jewish school friends are distancing themselves from her. The poison of Nazification is seeping into the life of Nuremberg, described by the author of this novel as 'more than Berlin… the Nazi capital'.

The years go by. Magda's friends and their families are leaving Germany for wherever they can get visas. But her father, Anton, remains stubborn. Her mother, Lisel, does whatever Anton thinks best. The Sengers remain in denial, in part fearful of beginning a new life elsewhere.

In romantic sub-plots, the American journalist Jacob implores Magda to come to the US and marry him. But she, now 17, is scared of the commitment of marriage and connised about her feeiings. Similarly, Magda's cousin Fritz, to whom she is especially close, is uncertain of his feelings for the half-Jewish Rachel. Just as Fritz feels an intensifying Jewish consciousness, so Rachel cannot bear her Jewish – and seeks to conceal it.

Following vicious attacks on the Senger family on Kristallnacht, Anton finally sees there is no option but to leave. His father in Buchenwald, Fritz too feels he has no choice but to flee. In desperation, the Sengers make their way to Portugal. Having reached Switzerland after a nightmarish journey, Fritz is rejected by Rachel for a wealthy non-Jewish man she doesn't love.

En route from Portugal to Chile, for which they have obtained visas at great cost, the ramshackle boat carrying the Sengers capsizes in a storm off the US coast. The conclusion of the novel is deeply ironical.

The writer says that her novel 'reminds its readers that folk are nice or nasty, irrespective of their racial origin'. It is true that acts of kindness are performed, sometimes by total strangers at great risk to themselves. Yet the novel portrays much more graphically than anything else the astonishing ease with which, as the title implies, mankind can descend to bestiality.

The writing throughout is fluid, minimalist. There are passages of striking beauty. There is little that doesn't ring true in the novel, while it remains unclear to what extent, if any, it is autobiographical. It would make a superb movie.

Howard Spier

The heroine of Magda and the Rat Catchers (Trafford, £9.50) is a Jewish girl growing up in Germany in the late 1930s. Netta Murray Goldsmith offers an accessible teenage perspective with all the normal challenges of adolescence, but complicated by Nazism (experienced first as classroom bullying and then as official discrimination). We empathise with the resilient Magda as she confronts them. Age 12 and upwards.

Angela Kiverstein

It is a fascinating account of what went on.

Elfriede Windsor

It contains deep insights on the Nazi period in Germany.

Daniela F. Eisenstein, Judisches Museum Franken

Caught the atomosphere of the times very well… Indeed the book would make a good movie.

Gerard Jochem, Stadarchiv, Nurnberg

About the Author

The author lives in Kent. Educated in England and America, she has worked in both those countries, as well as on the Continent. She has written books on eighteenth-century life and literature. This is her first novel.