Woodstock Area Jewish Community Congregation Shir Shalom - 493 Route 4 W, Woodstock, VT 05091 - (802) 457-4840

Vermont author Jack Mayer gives a slide presentation and discussion about the history that inspired his new historical novel, BEFORE THE COURT OF HEAVEN, which has received 13 book awards:  www.jackmayer.net  Free.  Co-sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. 

BEFORE THE COURT OF HEAVEN is based on the true story of a fascist assassin, Ernst Techow, and his complex and harrowing redemption.  Techow participates in the 1922 murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the highest-ranking Jew in the Weimar Republic.  The novel is inspired by the history of how Germany’s Weimar democracy became the Third Reich – how ordinary Germans became complicit in extraordinary crimes.  

“Haunting echoes of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. . . “  US Review of Books

“. . . a strong, affecting novel . . . a story of immense human failure and touching redemption . . . it stands among the finer recent portrayals in fiction of the most troubling era of modern history.” - Jay Parini – Novelist, poet, essayist and D.E. Axinn Prof. of English and Creative Writing, Middlebury College – author of The Last Station.