Reviews
Fiction as a Means to Uncover the Truth
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Searching for Wallenberg
by Alan Lelchuk
Mandel Vilar Press 2015
Review by Louis Gordon
The fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of countless Hungarian Jews in the last years of World War II, is as shrouded in mystery today as it was sixty years ago when he vanished during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. Was Wallenberg executed by the Soviets after capture? Did he die of a heart attack in a Soviet prison in 1947? Or did he languish in the Gulag for many years afterward, as reported by an assortment of witnesses? Alan Lelchuk’s novel, Searching for Wallenberg, offers a fictional account of Wallenberg’s life that draws on a startling nonfictional interview by the author with the Swedish diplomat’s KGB interrogator to create a narrative which is more illuminating than any history we have or may ever get.