Playing With Fire

So many authors are writing a book that includes some aspect of the Holocaust tragedy as a theme to drive their plot forward.  Terri Gerritsen has added her novel to the group.  I am not complaining, this is a genre that draws me in.  I personally cannot get enough of these kinds of books. And lately, some of these novels have had new different information and come at this topic from new and different angles that have not been explored before.  This book, Playing With Fire, uncovers what was happening in Italy during the war years.  It brings to the present day public the real event of a December evening in 1943 when the Jews of Venice were pulled from their beds and rounded up into a school which was used as a detention center for four days without food and then herded onto trains that would take them to Poland.  Even as they were being loaded onto the train half starved they wrote letters to their loved ones, saying that they were alright, still thinking this was a temporary situation. This novel will help us never forget what happened during those years of horror.

This story helps the reader understand how only twenty per cent of the Jewish population of Italy perished during the Holocaust.  Compared to other countries that is a small number and author Terri Gerritsen wondered why.  From her research she found that Jews in Italy were well assimilated and physically indistinguishable from their neighbors.  They had blended into the larger population.  Almost have of the Jewish marriages were to non-Jews and before the war they held high positions in government, academics, business, law and medicine.  During the war there were many who helped save the Jews at the risk of their own lives.  Gerritsen's characters show you the best and the worst of human behavior.

This is the love story of Lorenzo Todesco and Laura Balboni, two young musicians who, though from different religious backgrounds at the dangerous time in 1939, are going to play a duet in a local music competition.  The young musicians are also falling in love.  We are invited inside the family homes of the Balboni family who will try to convince the Todesco family to leave Italy and also help others escape out of the country.  The reader is also a fly on the wall in the Todesco family home and hears how it is that so many families ended up staying in their homes until it was too late to escape the Nazi's impeding takeover.

Based on true events in Venice during the war years this story unfolds in parallel with a modern day story of a violinist who finds a musical composition that intrigues her in an antiques store.
Julie Ansdell, a young mother, wife and violinist gets caught up in a plot she cannot understand after buying a book of music in an antiques store in Rome.  When she comes home to practice this extraordinary composition, her three year old daughter seems to become violent.  Is it the music or is there something else making little Lily do these terrible things?  As Julie fights to save her life and her keep her family together she searches for the origin of the music and uncovers the tragic love story of Lorenzo and Laura.

"Incendio", the musical composition that moves this novel forward is a haunting, mournful waltz.  So as an added bonus Terri Gerritsen not only has written this wonderful love story but she also actually wrote the piece of music she imagined that flows throughout book.  She contracted with Yi-Ja Susanne Hou, the internatioanl concert violinist to record the music she had heard as she was writing this book.  "Hou definitely has the passion to bring "Incendio" to life", wrote Gerritsen on her blog, "and she even added her own frantic cadenza to the end of the recording..."