If one’s parents are from Europe and emigrated to America in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it’s a given that those parents have horrors in their background that they don’t want to talk to their children about. Such is the case for Michael Daniels, the protagonist of Nothing is Forgotten, by Peter Golden. Michael is the children of Russians. He knows that they come from somewhere in Ukraine, that they came over in waves, and that he is not supposed to ask them questions about their past. All this goes out the window when Michael finds his beloved grandmother shot dead in the family’s candy and soda shop.
Michael is living the American dream at the opening of Nothing is Forgotten. His family is a success. He’s got little to worry about other than girls and his suddenly popular radio program. (Making fun of Nikita Khrushchev is a winner in the early 1960s.) But then his grandmother, Emma, is murdered and he is whisked away to Europe to reprise his radio show in Munich at a station with a similar mission to Radio Free Europe. His family’s past follows Michael to Europe and, before long, he just throws his job out the window and decides to figure out where his grandmother came from and who might have wanted to murder him.
Fortunately for this somewhat naive American, Michael has a partner in Yulianna Kosoy, who he meets through a smuggler who does jobs for the CIA, the KGB, Mossad, and probably a bunch of other intelligence agencies. (His bosses at Four Freedoms are well connected.) Once Michael and Yuli join forces, they start to follow the little things Michael remembers his grandmother said and the clues she left for him to follow through her old haunts. For a novel that starts with making fun of Russians and involves bookmakers in the backroom of the Daniels’ family shop, I was surprised at how deeply this book dove into the Holocaust and the hunt for war criminals who got away after the war. Michael’s hunch that her death was because of something that happened to her during the war turns out to be correct.
Nothing is Forgotten isn’t always plausible. People are weirdly helpful to Michael and Yuli throughout their travels. But I was moved at the horrors that Michael’s grandmother survived, and admired the love she shows to her grandson and the children who visit the family shop. I was right behind Michael and Yuli as they dug into Emma’s past and did their best to put right things that Emma was never able to. For all its sadness, this book provides a delicious dose of justice at the end that I really enjoyed.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 10 April 2018.