Alan Lelchuk | Searching for Wallenberg

Who was Raoul Wallenberg, the 33 year old Swedish diplomat who went to Budapest and saved approximately 17,000 Jews and indirectly another 125,000?

Why did this young Christian fellow from a very rich Stockholm family do this, and put his comfortable life in danger? And once he was taken away to Moscow’s Lybianka prison by the Soviets in 1945, why did he languish there for two whole years, without being redeemed or exchanged? These were the questions of mystery, both biographical and historical, that were never answered by the biographers or historians, when I started my research back in 2001.

But even more vital for me and for the inspiration for the novel, was the sculpture of Wallenberg that I passed every day near the street where I lived in the hills of Budapest. I was teaching at ELTE, the university in Pest, but living up in Buda with my 16 year old son,. Every day, when I went for a walk or for shopping, I passed this imposing bronze sculpture of RW, and became more and more interested in this figure, in his austere gaze. What did it signify? From there I began to do my research, which took me to the archives and cities of Moscow, and Stockholm, plus Ann Arbor Michigan, where RW had completed three years of architecture school back in the 1930’s. Gradually as I began to get a feel for the man, his dilemmas, his mysteries, I began also to see the dilemmas of history, the many huge gaps and spaces in the history, concerning this enigmatic hero and his personal and Holocaust context.

Being a novelist, I understood very comfortably how this all fit in perfectly with my craft, intensifying my belief that only through fiction, where a writer has the most license and liberty to invent, could some of those gaps and spaces be filled in. Hence my novel, which is a combination of history and fiction—not historical fiction—or more specifically, history seen through the eyes of a fiction writer. This presented a wonderful challenge for me-- how to get at the deep layers about a complex man, an extreme context, a puzzling history-- through the lens of fiction. In other words, diving below the surface of facts to get at deeper truths, more haunting and enchanting revelations. (The fictional leaps in scenes and characters grounded in the real, guided but not limited to the historical.)

Naturally, to fill out my multi-tiered mystery story, I had to find a suitable cast of characters, beginning with a clever detective. Manny Gellerman, my history professor, becomes such a clever and relentless detective, hunting down all alleyways and nooks and strange persons to try to get at the truths. A mysterious lady named Zsusannah Frank turns up, claiming she is the daughter of Wallenberg and providing my detective with many enticing leads and provocative gambits; which are real, which are false? Is she mad this woman, or maddeningly brilliant? And what about her beautiful young daughter, Dora, is she there to tempt Prof. Gellerman? If so, tempt him into what? Finally there is the character of Raoul Wallenberg himself, who emerges increasingly in the text, as a ghost who has a growing interest in the pursuit of this American professor. This RW is a ghost with charm, with intelligence, with challenging questions for Gellerman, and the two engage in interesting conversations, forming a friendship that is both beguiling and probing. Not often in literature do we find a ghost helping along an interested party in the investigation of his own death—except perhaps in the tragedy of Hamlet. Well now here in “Searching for Wallenberg “ we find such an unusual pairing and friendship, as the mystery slowly unwinds into its unusual outcome.

This was a curious tale which surprised me the writer with its twists and turns, with its surprising charms and challenging credibility, with its mysterious characters and cities of deceit, so I had a very interesting journey as I moved along in the narrative. Hopefully a reader will experience a similar ride of roller coaster highs and sudden dips, and sly surprises and detours, leading to a destination of new wonder, faith and ….well, we can’t give everything away.

About SEARCHING FOR WALLENBERG

After reading a graduate student's thesis about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Budapest from 1944 to 1945, Professor Manny Gellerman--part-time detective, historian, and novelist--follows the twists and turns along unorthodox paths and uncovers some uncomfortable truths that may explain what happened when Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets in 1945, taken to Moscow, and left to fester in a Lybianka prison.

Now more than 65 years later, Gellerman begins unthreading these mysteries--and discovers that the deepest may be Wallenberg, himself. Who was the real man behind the legendary persona of noble diplomat and savior of Budapest Jews? Gellerman's quest eventually leads him to a Jewish Hungarian woman, who claims she is Raoul Wallenberg's daughter. At once a detective story and an unusual love story, this novel within a novel is filled with multiple layers and surprising characters that all lead to a deeper understanding of this enigmatic hero.

About Alan Lelchuk

Alan Lelchuk is a novelist, professor, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. He did his undergraduate work at Brooklyn College and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1965. His work has been translated into more than half a dozen foreign languages, including Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

His short fiction has appeared in such publications as Transatlantic Review, The Atlantic, Modern Occasions, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Partisan Review. Significant critical studies on Lelchuk have been Philip Roth in Esquire, Wilfrid Sheed in Book-of-the-Month Club News, Bejmain DeMott in The Atlantic, Mordechai Richler in the Chicago Tribune, Robert Towers in The New York Times, and Steven Birkets in The New Republic.