Every family holds to secrets, but some are far darker, reach deeper, and touch a rawer nerve than others.
Vanesa Neuman is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and her childhood in the cramped intimacy of south Tel Aviv is shadowed by her parents’ unspoken wartime experiences. The past for her was a closed book… until her father passes away and that book falls literally open. Vanesa must now unravel the mystery of the diary she has received—and the strange symbol within—at all costs.
Set against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation and the Jewish Museum of Prague—Adolf Eichmann’s “Museum of an Extinct Race”—Galerie is fast-paced historical fiction in the tradition of Tatiana De Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key. From Jerusalem’s Yad V’Shem Holocaust research center, to the backstreets of Prague, and into the former “paradise ghetto” of Theresienstadt, Vanesa’s journey of understanding will reveal a darker family past than she ever imagined—a secret kept alive for over half a century.
Genre: FICTION / HistoricalGALERIE continues to do well several weeks after becoming an Amazon #1 Bestseller in 3 separate categories. Published in October 2015, it has already sold almost 5,000 copies in English, and the project to translate it to German has already begun. Additionally, it won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award - Fall 2015 - Best Book in Fiction. Additionally, the author, Steven Greenberg, is a professional marketer who has the resources and skill to promote the book in all languages and markets.
Despite the basement room’s damp November cold, the boy dripped with sweat. His breath fogged out in gasps as he rocked, face huddled between spindly knees that peeked out through his threadbare trousers like two dim streetlamps in an otherwise dark alley. He’d drawn himself into a ball, hugging his legs so tightly with his stick-like arms that the tips of his dirty fingers had gone white.
He’d already seen more than a twelve-year-old should have to witness, let alone process.
He grasped the individual details of the scene, many of which were by themselves familiar: the table, the flickering bare bulb dangling from the ceiling as if on an umbilical cord, his father’s sharp and varied tools.
They’d been familiar sights, but when his father had moved aside, no longer obscuring the boy’s field of view—that was when the whole had become incomprehensibly greater than the sum of its parts. That was when his heart leapt out of his skinny chest, commanding the scuffed leather-clad feet to run, run, RUN!
And he had run. Back to the empty basement storeroom, with stone walls that sweated in the summer and radiated cold in the winter. He’d spent more time down here in the basement, as the weather had grown colder, rainier, and more dismal. Since it was no longer possible to play outside in the building’s small, dingy courtyard, he’d turned the mostly empty building into a personal playground. From nooks like his current subterranean roost, up to the attic rooms whose small dormer windows, reached eagerly en point, provided a glimpse of occasional passersby on the narrow cobblestone street below—the boy knew the limestone-faced building inside-out.
Now, he drew closer to the building’s main sewage pipe, which provided faint warmth that always comforted, as long as he didn’t dwell on its origin.
| Language | Status |
|---|---|
|
German
|
Translation in progress.
|
|
Portuguese
|
Already translated.
Translated by Cilmara de Lelis Dias
|
