I wanted to love this one, and while I found the plot interesting and well written I just couldn't bring myself to like the heroine or care what happened to her as she got on my nerves the whole book I didn't see that much growth for her.

Heavier than you'd think, David R. Gillham takes on the mental illness side of post-Holocaust recovery in the Shadows of Berlin. Full disclosure, I wasn't prepared for the weight of the story - I go through periods of reading where I'm looking for the darkness, but then I also have moments where I have to take a break and tell myself, "No more WWII stories." But I love World War II stories and this one had a different spin. I wanted more of the New York and I think that we often do not realize how trauma can lay beneath the surface. History is a funny thing - we often look at it as light switch and it is more like a slowly fading sun, dropping into the horizon. Recovery takes time and this story acknowledges that process.

This is a taut novel about how one survives and lives after unspeakable trauma and tragedy. The story pulls you in right for the very beginning, and is devastating because the author does such a great job of bringing you into the protagonist’s psyche.

Let's preface this review with the fact that the author David R Gillham and I have the same last night and have met and are VERY LIKELY distant cousins. That , in no way, has any bearing on my review.

I loved David R Gillham's "City of Women". He managed to capture two things that I often find very difficult--the heartache and voice of women and the pain of war. It's been done over and over but has it been done well? Not often. With his latest book "Shadows of Berlin", Gillham is back and at his best, putting a voice to survivors guilt.

Set mainly in post-war New York City, we follow Rachel (Rashka Morgenstern) as she adjusts to life with her new husband Aaron. While she struggles with her memories of her mother - and her time in Berlin, evading capture, and her husband deals with his guilt for never fighting in the war and never fully knowing what Rachel experienced.

Rachel's mother suffered greatly during the war, with all of her artwork being destroyed by Nazi's. However, when one of her mother’s paintings is found in a pawnshop, Rachel is taken back to her most traumatic experiences during the War. Rachel’s horror and guilt threaten to overwhelm her and she realizes that she must face her past to finally be able to live fully.

There is a way that Gillham is able to capture the time and place of post-war New York that just brings the reader right into the city. The Automats, the honking taxis, the streets. His research is unparalleled and takes his writing to another level. I can't wait to read his next book.

After the war Rachel and her uncle move to NYC to try to start over their lives, they are the only family members that survived the war. Rachel is married and struggling. The chapters alternate between NYC and flashbacks to wartime in Berlin. The author does a good job portraying the difficulties of moving on, especially for Rachel, who probably has PTSD from what she has seen and experienced as a Jew in Germany. She is frustrated that her new family cannot relate to her experience, nor do they want to hear about it.

The setting for this book is the 1950’s in Manhattan. It is the post WWII era and Rachel Perlman is a new bride trying to acclimate to her new life. Rachel has many demons and ghosts that haunt her and has had a recent “breakdown” that has her now seeing a psychiatrist.
Rachel is a Jewish refugee who as a child suffered, along with her mother, as they tried to escape the Jewish persecution and concentration camps. Rachel is a survivor but unfortunately her mother was not. Her method of survival has haunted her into adulthood and she suffers from survivor’s guilt.
Like many novels today the story goes back and forth from Rachel’s childhood in Berlin to the present 1950’s. As the story progresses we learn about what actually happened to Rachel and begin to understand why she is so so troubled and unstable.
I was quite moved by Rachel’s story. I was totally absorbed in this story and empathetic to Rachel’s plight. and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in WWII historical fiction.

I came across a quote from Barbara Kingsolver when I was right in the midst of reading Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham, just out on April 5. Barbara said, “Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.” This was so appropriate that it lingered in my mind as I finished the book.

Rachel had come to New York City with her Uncle Fritz as displaced Jews from Berlin who had somehow managed to escape the Nazis. Her husband Aaron, who labels himself “a Jew from Flatbush” tries to understand but can’t fathom the trauma she brings with her. In the 1950s, she adjusts on the surface to the world of work, instant coffee, and navigating the city. Underneath, she hides her compulsion to steal a roll from a meal to go in her pocket in case she can’t find food. She allows the sink to remain stopped up rather than call the super because of her fear, knowing he is of German heritage. Then there is the most important image her mother ever painted before she went to her death in the gas chambers. When her Uncle Fritz finds it, is he helping her return to her own painting or is he working a scam for his own benefit?

In a bit of magical realism, Rachel communes with the ghost of her mother and the vision of a young girl that brings survivor guilt. The scenes rotate between the world that haunts her in war-torn Germany and the new life she is trying to make in New York City with a maverick sister-in-law and a mother-in-law who wants nothing more than a grandchild.

To go back to Barbara’s point, this book gives understanding to what a young girl caught in the machinations of the Nazi regime and trying just to survive must have felt and to how hard it must have been to shake all that off and start a new life. Be prepared as you read for the temptation of “one more chapter.”

Rachel was Jewish girl from Berlin that managed to escape the Nazi death machine. After the war she relocated to New York, but she is still haunted by the past and the ghosts of those who didn’t make it.
Shadows of Berlin is definitely a slow burn, but the pacing feels very appropriate in getting to know the characters. It’s a dark, compelling story that will appeal to historical fiction lovers and leave readers pondering what choices they would make if their survival was at stake.

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Rachel Perlman is married to Aaron, a "Flatbush Jew." It is the early/mid- 1950s. She is a displaced person from Berlin, Germany, a Jew who survived the Holocaust and is left with the knowledge her mother perished in a gas chamber. Rachel has suffered deep trauma over part of what she did to survive. Rachel's uncle (Feter Fritz) also survived after internment in a camp and he also lives in New York. He was her mother's art agent and was something of a raconteur.. Shadows of Berlin brings together the fragments that are Rachel's life, from childhood, when she was jealous that the cat had taken to her mother's beautiful model to that model becoming dangerous to them, as well as other Jews in Berlin when she becomes a "catcher" for the Nazis, identifying and arresting underground Jews.

We experience chapters focused on this model/muse, Rachel's mother, and others caught up in trying to survive, tumbled up Rachel's memories and ghostly interactions, throughout the novel. We are privy to a fifties marriage where the nice enough Aaron wants his wife to keep the apartment clean and have a baby. Instead she cracks up at work and spends a night at Bellevue and now she needs to see a costly shrink. We are let into the past and the present that is Uncle Fritz, who lives in poverty and continues to look for the main chance to be the mover and shaker he was in pre-war Berlin. We meed Aaron's family, witness a Seder with the typically odd mix of extended family, his sister Naomi who is a rebel and smokes pot, his mother whose gifts to Rachel always reflect something where Rachel is personally lacking. Aaron has family. Rachel has ... Uncle Fritz, who always wants something from her.

I like the choices Gillham made when he wove the story from present 1950s to pre-war and war years in Berlin-- not long ago-- yet treated in New York almost like ancient history. Rachel's life included starving on the streets of Berlin trying not be be caught, facing transport to camps and having to sell at least part of her soul to live one more day, with no future guaranteed. When she looks back, she is forced to reconcile decisions made in a completely deprived past with a bountiful life in the United States. There is excess of everything and to those around her the knowledge of Nazi atrocities is abstract. Most of them saw it in movies shown of camp liberations. Aaron didn't even serve overseas, but in California, working on USO shows. People around Rachel are horrified, but they are not damaged like Rachel and their efforts to understand her fall short..

The characters are well-developed, often humorous, and most are just trying to make it in their world, some with less success than others. This was definitely a "can't put it down" novel for me in part because of the array of characters and the choices each make. Some of those we get to know best are Rachel's ghosts, among them her mother whose voice is strong in Rachel's mind and not always kind. The novel touches on psychoanalysis and the Millville pill, on a true part of WWII history where a few Jewish people collaborated with the Nazis to turn in Jews, on race relations in the US, and on what it means to figure out how to live our lives, even if they include devastating trauma that can only be imperfectly managed.

I've read a lot of WW2 historical fiction but as I read this one I realized how few I have read that had AFTER the war as the main focus. In Shadows of Berlin we meet Rachel who has moved to the states after surviving the war as a Jew in Europe. She has married a Jew from Flatbush and is struggling to deal with her survivor's guilt as well as guilt stemming from her life in Europe. She is in therapy as a result of a breakdown that required a short stint in a mental facility.
Her only living relative, Feter Fritz is a bit of a slick character with whom she has a complex relationship. When he approaches her for favor tying back to her famous mother she is forced to face this part of her history and her past. As we progress through her current story we see flashbacks to life before and during the war. We also see from other key individuals in her life's story.

While Rachel's story was a heavy one, I appreciated how the relationship with her husband and his family was written. It is not that their relationship was light and airy, but it felt like a real, complicated marriage relationship. I also liked the look at the 50s married life with the pop culture type references to advertisements and meals.

This was a solid historical fiction read, while it did feel a bit slow and long, it was interesting and intriguing. The narrator did an amazing job with this. She really made the characters and stories really come to life.

The story follows a Jewish woman Rachel who lives with her American husband, Aaron, in NY.

It was interesting how the story when back and forth between Rachel’s life now and during WW2. What it was like to live while humans were being exterminated and how she was able to escape. How she met her husband, how she is dealing with the past. It touches on mental health and survivors guilt.

If your a historical fiction, and enjoy WW2 and post WW2 reads I think you will enjoy this one. I definitely recommend the narration as well.

David R. Gillham is an expert at writing about World War II and the Holocaust from the eyes of the Jews that survived. He did this perfectly in Annelies where he told the story of Anne Frank as if she had survived the camps, and he does so again with Shadows of Berlin.

In this book, Gillham tells the story of Rachel, a survivor of the Nazi regime. She was never sent to a concentration camp, but as a Jew in 1930s and 1940s Germany, she felt the terror of the time all the same.

Rachel and her mother were what were known as U-boats. Jews who escaped capture from the Nazis and hid out anywhere they could.

But when we meet Rachel, it’s years later and she’s living as a married woman in New York City. She’s married to Aaron Perlman, a man who spent most of the war at a military base in the U.S. and although he’s Jewish, he can never understand what she went through.

Read more at https://culturess.com/2022/04/05/shadows-of-berlin-story-survival/

Another atmospheric and intriguing WWII book from Gillman. Rachel is trying to find her way as a married Jewish woman in NYC but find her world crumbling when a painting resurfaces to remind her of the past she is desperate to forget. The characters are fleshed out, the writing meticulously rendered--immersing readers into emotional and unforgettable scenarios. This book is suitable for book club discussions,

I was instantly intrigued by the interesting plotline we have here in Shadows of Berlin, however, I had trouble with the way it flowed and the story never truly grabbed me.
I also wish the dates were included in the book when Rachel went back in time. This is a good survival story though and I would recommend it to all of my historical fiction friends.

Shadows of Berlin is an apt title for this book as the shadows of the atrocities and betrayals visited upon the Jews in Germany (and elsewhere) follow Rachel to America and affect all the days of her life. She marries, but her survivor guilt and what is now called post traumatic stress infiltrate this relationship.

It took me a while to get into and appreciate this book. It is at its best with its detailed descriptions of New York in the 1950s and when Rachel’s reflects back to the unimaginable horrors of Berlin under the Nazis. Characterization was well developed, although I felt the husband was quite unlikable, presented almost as a caricature.

This is a well written, worthwhile book. If you have initial difficulty reading it, I encourage you to stick with it.

The past few years, I’ve read quite a bit of historical fiction about the World War II era and its after effects. At first, I saw them as lessons for our times, but now, with what is going on in the world, I keep asking: How can this be happening again?

Thanks to #netgalley and #sourcebookslandmark for the DRC.

An at times tough to read novel of a woman beset by the ghosts of her past. Rachel survived the Holocaust and made it to New York with her uncle Fritz. Now, in 1955, she's married to Aaron ("a Jew from Flatbush") and struggling with what happened not only to her but also to her beloved mother, an artist. And then Fritz finds one of her mother's paintings in a pawn shop. This moves back and forth in time and perspective to tell not only Rachel's story but also that of Angelique, the subject of the painting and the one responsible for Rachel's and her mother's fate. How does one deal with what Rachel and Angelique did? Not well and Rachel sees a psychiatrist who tries to help her. This might feel a bit disorganized at first but stick with it as it settles down into a heartbreaking story that's carefully and beautifully written. It also bores into a difficult area- complicity. The atmospherics, not only in Berlin but also in New York, are terrific and the characters leap off the page. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. Highly recommend.

It's 1955 and Rachel and Aaron Perlman have been married for 7 years. Aaron wants to start a family, but Rachel's past --the things she had to survive as a Jew in Berlin during WWII-- haunt her; she knows how terrible the world is and doesn't want to bring a child into it. The story focuses on Rachel's present, navigating life as an emigrant in NYC and her survivor's guilt, with flashbacks to her past: her childhood in Berlin and the terrible thing she herself did to survive. Aaron tries to be the understanding husband, but how can he really understand what Rachel went through when he spent the war stateside? The characters are vivid, the story is poignant and thought-provoking, but hopeful.

This is a Historical Fiction. I just could not make myself care about the characters in this book, and I could not get into the storyline/plot of this book. I ended up DNFing this book. I received an ARC of this book. This review is my own honest opinion about the book like all my reviews are.

In 1949, twenty-one-year-old Rashka Morgenstern emigrates to New York from Berlin following the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Her only surviving family is her mother’s brother Friedrich Landau, her Feter Fritz, an Auschwitz survivor. Her mother was a prolific artist who perished in the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camps and her father had passed away when she was only two years old. With the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Rashka and her Feter Fritz find a place to live in New York and attempt to acclimatize to their new circumstances in the aftermath of their harrowing experiences during WW2.

The novel begins in 1955 where we meet our protagonist Rashka, now Rachel Perlman, married to Jewish-American Aaron Perlman, who works as a manager in a seafood restaurant. Aaron had served in the Army but had not seen combat having been posted stateside in California. He admits that his knowledge of the plight of Jews during the Holocaust in Europe is limited to what he has seen in newsreels. He is a loving husband but is unable to fully comprehend the extent to which Rachel’s experiences during the Holocaust have cast a shadow on her present life. Rachel is unable to reconcile with her new life and is haunted by her memories of her years in Berlin – the anti-Semitic sentiments and Nazi policies that led to the loss of her home and the destruction of her mother’s art, her time scrounging for food and shelter on the streets of Berlin evading capture, their subsequent arrest and her Eema's deportation and subsequent death. Rachel is also an artist but is unable to pursue her passion on account of her personal demons. The burden that lays heaviest on her soul is the memory of what she had to do to stay alive and avoid deportation. Her memories are easily triggered and though she regularly sees a psychiatrist and is on mild medication, her anxiety and guilt find their way into every aspect of her life – from a breakdown in a posh department store where she used to work that leads to a brief stay in a psychiatric ward, her unwillingness to have children, to her discomfort around her building super who is a German immigrant. She considers herself not only an outsider but also refers to herself as an “oysvurf” a person with a “dead soul” a fact she admits to her sister-in-law Naomi’s black boyfriend who she assumes will understand her state of mind, himself being on the receiving end of racial discrimination and prejudice. When one of her mother’s paintings, thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis, resurfaces in a pawnbroker’s shop it takes her back to her most traumatic experiences during the War and Rachel’s horror and guilt threaten to suffocate her and she realizes that she must face her past to finally be able to have a future.

The narrative is set in 1950s New York, with flashbacks from Rachel’s past in WW2 Berlin that give us insight into the plight of “submarine Jews” (commonly referred to as U-boat Jews) who submerged beneath the surface of the city in a bid to escape deportation, removing the Judenstern ( the Star of David that was mandatorily sewn into their clothes)in an attempt to avoid identification and arrest and the black marketeers who exploited them for shelter, forged papers and ration slips. We also get to know more about “Der Suchdienst”, The Search Service , that granted select Jews(commonly referred to as the “Grabbers” or “Catchers”)special permissions and tasked them with patrolling the streets, parks and other establishments frequented by fellow Jews (U-Boats hiding in plain sight) and arresting them.

Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham is a compelling novel that revolves around the themes of grief, mental illness, survivors' guilt and the far-reaching effects of past trauma. This is a slow-paced novel that took me a while to get into and is not an easy read. The tone of the novel is dark and sad for the most part but also sheds a light on the inner strength and resilience of Holocaust survivors in starting over after everything they had been through. Heart-wrenching and profoundly moving, this is a memorable novel that I would recommend to readers who enjoy historical fiction set in the post-WW2 era.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for providing the digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

After surviving the horror of WWII, Rachel moves to America with her Uncle Fritz. She marries Aaron and tries to blend into a normal life. However, her past constantly creeps in, making her depressed, difficult to live with and unpredictable. When her Uncle finds one of her mother's paintings, the past threatens to overwhelm Rachel.

I had a hard time with this book. I thought that it was rambling, all over the place. Some of the characters felt stereotypical and the plot was pretty predictable. This is not a book I would reread or recommend.