In his new novel "The Kortelisy Escape," Leonard Rosen crafts an ingenious, complex thriller that’s deeply moving, as well as highly original. The hook is the use of magic tricks to advance the plot and theme. The magical connection between the two main characters, whose alternating points of view move the narrative along, makes this unusual story memorable.
He’s Nate Larson, a grizzled 66-year old just out of Danbury prison when the story begins. She’s his 14-year-old savvy, sardonic granddaughter Grace, who’s been bounced around the foster care system for years. They haven’t seen each other for a decade.
Nate was born in Kortelisy, Ukraine, and smuggled into America by his older brother Dima. Nate’s a good man, but he got caught up in a legalistic trap and wound up in jail. His wife and daughter both died of cancer when they were young, but because he was in prison, he could not take custody of Grace then 4. About the only good thing that’s happened to him is that in prison he learned how to be a magician, a skill that brought him sanity and pleasure.
As the story begins, he’s been released early because a federal prosecutor wants him to testify against his beloved brother, who got in wrong with the mob. If Nate does, his brother – now old and ill – goes to jail. If he doesn’t – and flees to Canada, his plan – Grace who’s just been turned over to him, will be sent back to foster care.
A word about Kortelisy. On September 23, 1942, German mercenaries murdered 2,875 inhabitants, almost the entire population, including 1,620 children.
Nate was 8 when the Germans invaded. Dima hid him in a cellar in the forest with a gun. Learning about the real life horror of Kortelisy, the reader realizes that Rosen’s title is loaded. The Kortelisy Escape is the name of one of Nate’s Houdini-like tricks. But it stands for much more.
What can one do to escape the frightful memory of savagery? How can one ever after care for, trust or love another human being?
Nate’s answer in this novel is heartbreakingly creative: invent a different Kortelisy. And so, the patter accompanying his trick describes Kortelisy as “heaven on Earth, a place of miracles where love conquers all,” based on a potential suicide of a young woman called Rachel, who was rescued and who thereafter inspires everyone in the village to love. It will turn out that Rachel is real, but in a way readers will not expect. Nate’s audiences, however, lap up the idealized story, whoop, scream, cry, moved and diverted as he performs his tricks. Grace, who has become Nate’s assistant, is at first joyful but then stunned when he tells her the truth.
So is the reader, though it’s obvious the patter is a fairytale. At one point Nate says, “You know you’re a magician when you perform a trick and see the total and complete confusion on the faces of your audiences. It lasts only a second, but it’s a beautiful thing.” And maybe, under circumstances such as his, a cathartic thing.
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