[Thank you Marina!]‘Like The Vampire Of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex’s previous novel (see my review here) published in English translation by Bitter Lemon Press, A Jew Must Die is based on an historical crime, and like the first book it raised questions Swiss society did not necessarily want raised. But where Vampire was more concerned with the way society reacted to a crime, A Jew Must Die is more concerned first with the crime itself, the murder, in Payerne, of a Jewish cattle-merchant by Swiss Nazis, and by the lack of reaction from Swiss society to this crime. The beauty of the work, if beauty is the right word, is the way Chessex expands that lack of reaction into a wider indictment, an analysis using the Swiss microcosm of the awful phenomenon that was the Third Reich. He does this in prose that is consciously bare, factual, its emotions controlled. Chessex grew up in the area where the murder took place; he was…
Click to read the full article: Reviews for A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex – Bitter Lemon Press
