In the Shadows of Enigma
By Alex Rosenberg
Top Hat Books, £13.99
Reviewed by Mathilde Frot
In the Europe of the aftermath of the Second World War, Rita Feuerstahl, a traumatised Jewish refugee, puts pen to paper and writes about the horrors she has endured. She recalls the loved-ones she lost, including Stefan — her son — who was smuggled out of a Polish ghetto and left behind for his own safety. But another spectre haunts her life: a state secret kept under wraps for 30 years that she stumbled upon during the war.
Alex Rosenberg’s latest piece of historical fiction — a stand-alone sequel to his The Girl From Krakow — is a Cold-War romp through Europe, Australia and America, which culminates in a feverish chase across the snow-capped hills of the French Alps.
It reimagines a scenario in which the Soviet Union takes possession of the Nazi military’s Enigma machine unaware that its code has been cracked, thereby offering a crucial source of intelligence to the Western Bloc.
Rosenberg takes us back to the war, where a terrified Rita finds out — through Erich Klein, a mathematician from Warsaw who sought to convince her that the Allies would defeat the Nazis — about the code-breaking feat that saved millions of lives. But more than a decade later, in a Europe still split in two by the Iron Curtain, this knowledge puts Rita’s life at risk.
The story also features Otto Schulke, a former low-level Gestapo detective now working in German intelligence, who underwent denazification but whose life is now dedicated to finding Rita Feuerstahl, the Jewish woman he arrested during the war but then released. She becomes a vector for his unresolved grievances, the reason for his middling career.
Otto is one of the sometime formulaically written characters whose actions and experiences do little to capture the era-defining anxiety of the Cold War. And the interaction between personal crises and the monumental public stakes of that period does not always convince, in the way, for instance, that Joe Weisberg’s American TV series about the lives of two Soviet KGB agents in the USA, The Americans, does.
On the other hand, there are compelling moments when Alex Rosenberg zeros in on an intimate period in the lives of its characters, such as during Rita’s immigration trials or her problems at work. And Rosenberg does convey a sense of the historical context in an entertaining blend of fact and fiction, while the book’s sweeping expanse through time along with an easily digestible plot, make this a decent summer read. But, overall, it doesn’t quite deliver all that it promises, leaving a fleeting footprint in the Alpine snow of what might have been an icily chilling, Cold War thriller.
Mathilde Frot is a JC reporter
