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NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW: A Novel about Two Sisters, their mother, and a Nazi Thief ~Claudia Hagadus Long

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NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW is a compelling story about the Holocaust 80 years later.  When two sisters discover their mother’s family menorah in a museum in New York City they set about retrieving it and getting it back into their family.  Their mother has died, and she was just a young teenager when the Nazi’s raided her Polish family home and had stolen all the art and treasures of worth.  She was a very beautiful young girl and her family had placed her in a Catholic school in hopes of hiding her from the occupation.  Her classmates expose her, and she is arrested and sexually abused.

Lilly and Zara’s mother refuses to talk about her young life and she has made it to the USA through marriage.  The girls are not allowed to speak of being Jewish and Zara has been raised Catholic and gone to Catholic schools.   With the death of her mother, she is now having “visions” of her mother’s experiences.  Lilly is just trying to cope with many changes in her life, but she has heard the stories from their extended family.  The menorah brings the sisters together and creates a deeper bond between them.  It is an interesting study of how a huge trauma effects the next generations.

When the menorah is stolen from the museum a line of events is revealed and a Nazi art thief is discovered to be currently working at claiming the treasures which were categorized and filed.  Other traumatized people in their generation are coming to light and sharing their stories. The story has compelling overtones about emotional health.

Long is writing an interesting and sometime humorous story that forces us to think wider and broader about childhood trauma in our contemporary experience.   The mind is found wandering into what happened to children in Viet Nam, Iraq, refugees, and Afghanistan and the reader cannot be deluded about what is happening on our own southern border of the USA.  Compound trauma compounded again.

Interesting story about contemporary times built on the past and may assist the future.

Claudia Hagadus Long has written about early 18th Century Mexico, The Roaring Twenties in San Francisco, and modern-day New York City.  She lived in Mexico until she was eleven, went to high school in New York, and graduated from Harvard University and Georgetown Law

She currently practices law as a mediator for employment and business disputes and lives in Northern California with her husband and far too many animals.  This is her fifth novel.

www.claudiahlong.com

Related:
A Life Rebuilt
No Past Tense
When We Believed in Mermaids
The Things We Can Not Say


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