Around the Ponds

The storm clouds of the swastika gather in the distance, a father is gunned down under mysterious circumstances, symbols flutter down like confetti from a cherubim's chariot, and multi-generational dimensionality multiplies. Who said Dan Brown and Tom Clancy had cornered the market on theintellectual thriller?

Tony Morgan's Incident at Heidelberg is a mixture of many parts - the profane and the sacred, humor and sadness, family history and a detective story - a novel full of rapid dissolves. It is about a mission with, more Kabbalah twists than a pretzel, with clues sprinkled like cookie crumbs to a witch's oven. It is destiny wrapped in supernatural mystery, but subject to such banal intrusions as a weiner on a bun and a snakey scrawl. Snatches of popular American songs counterpoint rabbinical wisdom, the broadly idiomatic dances with religious epiphany. As with most good fiction, Incident at Heidelberg is about discovering ourselves, coming to terms with family legacies, and sensing how things can fall apart, never to be made whole again. What if you read the tea leaves right and realized that Hitler would be a total shoah for European Jews? What if you fit the pieces together in the early thirties

and knew, really knew? What if as a

young university student at Heidelberg, you and your buddies had the opportunity to shoot Hitler during one of his speeches? "What-ifs" comprise much of our fantasy life, personal and communal. "What-ifs" are a tried-and-true formula in much fiction, fulfilling our need to try to make a difference, vicariously. What if you'd fired the shot heard round the world? Would it have made the difference you intended?

The novel probes this question with intensity.

However, if you thought Morgan was rolling the table with just "what-its," guess again. He's dealing from the bottom of the deck and up his sleeve is the alternate universe joker. Characters get reshuffled in myriad permutations: Dutch Schultz and Thomas E. Dewey get make-overs, a tennis heiress

vanishes from the first version to be replaced by a doll of a moll in the new telling, the incident at Heidelberg is seen in a brand new light. Why it's enough to make a prophet renounce his calling or a tennis player throw his old wooden Bancroft racket at the perpetrator author. Yes, even more uncanny

surprises await the reader. Gabriel come blow your horn!

Tony Morgan employs these devices with consummate skill, quickly pacing the narrative to the demands of plot and making us care about his ill-destined protagonists. Many will find his forays into Jewish history fascinating and wrenching, from early immigrant experience to his clear distinctions between the rival organizations of the Haganah, the Irgun and the Sternists at the birth of a nation. And for the criminally inclined, Meyer Lansky makes more than a cameo appearance. Buy this book and save yourself a trip to Mohegan Sun. Morgan has assembled all these diverse parts into a getaway vehicle to the imagination.

For me, a sign of good fiction is the need to ask the novelist how much of his writing is taken from life. Though much of modern criticism tries to remove the storyteller from his tale, don't we all want, even if it's an outright lie, for him to confess that all the "what-ifs" were really drawn from family legend. O.K. Tony, confess!

"Paul, when people say to me, 'Oh, you're a writer,' I find myself very uncomfortable. At best I think of myself as a storyteller."