Two for the Devil [Paperback]

This searing third novel in the critically acclaimedSmall Worldsseries records the cruel fate of the villagers of Krimsk as they encounter the twentieth century's greatest agents of evil: Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

In Moscow at the height of the 1936 Stalinist purges, Grisha Shwartzman discovers on Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year and Day of Judgment—that he is in danger of liquidation by the secret police he serves. In 1942, Yechiel Katzman finds himself on a train of imprisoned Jews as it leaves the Warsaw ghetto on Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—for resettlement in the East. Stalin and Hitler decree certain death, but in the course of their experiences Grisha and Yechiel discover Jewish fates. Through memory, both men gain community, dignity, and the awareness of sanctity, Grisha's Soviet Rosh Hashanah and Yechiel's Nazi Yom Kippur are truly Days of Awe.

Excerpt from:Two for the Devil

Chapter One

Who could doubt the truth of such a building? Certainly not Colonel Hershel Shwartzman! Inspiring confidence, symbolizing stability, the great massive structure had been the Rossiya—Russia Insurance Company. The Rossiya had successfully insured bourgeois lives against death, a mere physiological necessity, but eventually it failed; nothing could insure bourgeois life against a historical necessity, proletarian revolution. The tsarist Rossiya fell in a blaze of red glory to the Great October Revolution, but the imposing, massive edifice remained. Purged of its parasitic despoilers, it began a new life that only a revolution can bestow—and vigilantly served all the people in the noblest of pursuits, safeguarding the Communist revolution.

To compare the new Soviet workers communal society with the preceding rotten exploitative capitalist one was an outrage. Where once there had been darkness, there was now light. How could one compare darkness and light? lÓ#