A Feast of Ashes

Jeffrey Canton is Programming Co-ordinator at the Toronto Public
Library.

In this well-crafted and richly imaginative novel, Colwell explores the
horrors of World War II. The book contrasts concentration-camp life with
the bombing of Dresden.

Therapy brings together client Jan Nadelman, a Czech Jew, and
psychologist Christiane Vogel, the daughter of a wealthy Dresden
industrialist. Jan has sought out Christiane for his analysis because
she is the only remaining link to his past: before being interned in
Bergen-Belsen, he and his father had been taken in by Christiane’s
mother and employed in her family’s Vogelwerke. Jan, now in his
mid-fifties, cannot deal with the outbursts of sadism he experiences in
order to deal with the scars of Bergen-Belsen. (His life had been spared
in the camp so that he could take part in one of the inhuman medical
experiments of Hitler’s Final Solution.)

As Jan relates his story, he triggers memories in Christiane that she
herself has been unable to come to terms with. Colwell skillfully begins
to interweave her history with Jan’s. From the privileged position of
her father’s wealth, Christiane reinvents for Jan the Dresden that she
knew. Her story is peppered with vignettes of Richard Strauss and
Gerhart Hauptmann, her father’s mistress and her mother’s salon. But
the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 destroyed that world and changed
the course of her life.

As they share their memories, their formal relationship breaks down.
Together they learn to cope with the devastation of having grown up in a
world of “inhumanity, horror, outrage and injustice.”

Colwell writes with great sensitivity, and has produced an immensely
powerful novel.