A couple of years ago, at a Herzliya beachside café in Israel, I shared a coffee with NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher. I had interviewed him via Skype earlier in the year for a story, and when I said I was going to be in Israel, he suggested we meet for coffee.
During our conversation, he mentioned he was going to write his first novel, but was searching for the story that compelled him. He tossed around ideas but clearly had not found the one. I recently asked him how he chose the topic for his gripping new book, Jacob’s Oath. He says a friend asked him: “Why would a German Jewish Holocaust survivor decide to stay in Germany?” Fletcher thought that was a great question. And that is how his new book came to life.
Fletcher, an NBC News special correspondent, has won five Emmy awards, a Columbia University du Pont Award, five Overseas Press Club awards and a National Jewish Book Award. He served as the NBC News bureau chief in Tel Aviv for many years.
He is a masterful storyteller whether he is on the front lines of a war with a camera crew or sitting in front of a computer creating a cast of characters from his imagination. Jacob’s Oath is set in Germany at the conclusion of World War II. The book’s characters jump off the page directly into the reader’s heart with their emotions and struggles to return to the lives they lived prior to the war.
Fletcher explains, “Not much has been written about the aftermath of World War II. Novels are usually about the more dramatic periods of the build-up to war, the war itself and then the new world after the war. What fascinates me about the first few months after the end of the war in May 1945 is the period of anarchy, the transition, the bewilderment of 20 million refugees clogging the roads of Europe trying to go home, yet ultimately, there is no home. Refugees can’t go home because there is no home. Everything has changed. What was that like? That’s what interests me, partly maybe because my reporting career was so much about that, in wars and disaster zones across the globe for 35 years.
Fletcher understands the emotions of people experiencing war and devastation; in his news stories, he often focuses on the human suffering. In Jacob’s Oath he’s applied real life emotions to his characters. One of the most powerful aspects is their will to survive despite enormous tragedies. He explains that often in life the human spirit survives tragedy not by great achievements, but rather by taking one step at a time forward into the future. While Jacob’s Oath touches on a similar topic to his last book, The List, this is his first foray into historical fiction. “My family is from Austria, although my mother was born in Germany and moved to Vienna when she was 9. They were dominant as I wrote my last book, The List, about the experience of Jewish refugees in London,” Fletcher says. “In this book, Jacob’s Oath, I researched the period and the place, but my own family history was not part of it. But coming from the kind of background I come from, the Holocaust is always present, and as I wrote in the acknowledgements, the story sort of wrote itself – it sprang from somewhere deep inside me – especially the development of the characters. I felt I had been there.”
Fletcher also brings to light the little known but important actions of the Jewish Brigade’s unit called the Tilhas Tizig Gesheften (commonly known by its acronym TTG). The TTG was formed immediately following World War II. Under the guise of British military activity, this group of the Jewish Brigade engaged in the assassination of Nazis and facilitated the illegal emigration of Holocaust survivors to Palestine. These assassination squads killed former SS and Nazi officers who had participated in atrocities against European Jews. Jacob’s Oath is a thriller filled with twists and turns telling a story of love and revenge as two Holocaust survivors try to find their futures while dealing with the destruction of their past lives. The characters tug at your heartstrings while shedding light on a time period that was filled with chaos and uncertainty. “It’s my first venture into pure fiction, but fiction based on a very authentic story, time and place, based on massive research,” says Fletcher.
Masada Siegel, author of Window Dressings, can be reached at masadasiegelauthor.com
