Tea at Trianon: The Ambassadors

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 19, 2015

The Ambassadors

Television producer George Lerner’s debut novel The Ambassadors tells the turbulent story of a Mossad operative who in his determination to save the world loses his family. Traumatized by witnessing the Holocaust and other World War II experiences, Jacob Furman must also face a family tragedy, which proves to him that, even in America, Jews are not safe. He becomes an agent for the Mossad and spends his life traveling around the world trying rescue Jewish communities in crisis.

He marries a Shoah survivor, a brilliant anthropologist named Susanna, whom he leaves late in her pregnancy in order to go on a mission. She must bear her son alone. Later, when he travels with her to Ethiopia and abandons her in a dangerous situation, she decides to divorce him. Although he continues to live in the basement of their house, Jacob becomes more and more estranged from his son Shalom. His last mission takes him to Rwanda which is in the throes of a genocidal civil war. In the meantime, Shalom goes out of his way to disappoint both of his parents, abusing drugs, alcohol and women along the way.

The narrative is told from the point of view of all three characters, Jacob, Susanna, and Shalom, leading very different lives, until illness unites them at last. The novel is full of international intrigue as well as quiet human pathos and inner transformation.

This review originally appeared in the February 2015 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(*NOTE: The Ambassadors was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.)