DISCOVERIES

The Red Letters

My Father’s Enchanted Period

Ved Mehta

Nation Books: 196 pp., $22.95

In “The Red Letters,” the 11th and final book of Ved Mehta’s family history, “Continents of Exile,” the author struggles to come to terms with his father’s two-year affair in the early 1930s with a close family friend, Auntie Rasil. “This series,” writes Mehta in an afterword, “is predicated on the notion that the more particular a story, the more universal it is.”

This story begins with a 1967 dinner party in Mehta’s one-bedroom New York apartment for his parents, who were visiting from India. Mehta invited his editor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn (“my father was worldly, Mr. Shawn was otherworldly”), and a few close friends. Mid-party, Mehta’s father burst into tears and excused himself to the other room for the duration of the evening. Mehta later heard from another guest that his father had felt guilty about the causes of his son’s blindness.

Then, in the course of helping his father write a novel, Mehta learns of the affair with his mother’s closest friend. Over the course of several years, father and son discuss the relationship; Mehta senior gives his son the packet of love letters (Red Letters), which he has saved for 40 years.

The affair shakes the foundations of Mehta’s carefully constructed world, from his ideas about arranged marriage and his understanding of his mother’s many moods to his own sense of himself as a stiff, closed person (compared with his father). It also raises his old dilemma: “loyalty to my family” versus “loyalty to my craft, to which any kind of censorship is anathema.” The author sacrifices himself on the altar of his memoirs; he emerges as the least likable, least striking character. The heroic literary figures are Mehta’s long-suffering, uneducated but devoted mother; his charming, human, storytelling father; and his Auntie Rasil, a hill girl abused by her husband and stepson.

Mehta stands alone, a little shabby, a little insecure, a confused child feeding on the lives of his ancestors. He exits stage left, and we, the audience, are certain that he planned it all, down to our very judgments about his character. Surely there must be more.

The Nuremberg

Interviews

An American Psychiatrist’s

Conversations With the

Defendants and Witnesses

Leon Goldensohn, edited by

Robert Gellately

Alfred A. Knopf: 474 pp., $35

“I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children,” Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Goering tells U.S. Army psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn in a Nuremberg cell.

Says Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943: “In each farmhouse eighteen hundred to two thousand persons could be gassed at one time.... The men were always exterminated in a separate chamber, and the women and children together in the same chamber.”

“Didn’t it bother you to kill children of the same ages as your own?” Goldensohn asks in “The Nuremberg Interviews,” his encounters with 19 defendants and 14 witnesses in their cells during the nine months of the war crimes trials in 1946. “If I had not had direct orders plus reasons for the orders ... ,” Hoess answers.

Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic journal Der Sturmer, tells him, “Because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years.”

Goldensohn queries each about his childhood, family and romantic life and his role in Hitler’s government. Karl Doenitz, the grand admiral of the German navy from 1943, is resolute: “I sit here in my cell with my clear, clean conscience, and await the decision of the judges.”

The 34-year-old doctor is careful not to appear to treat the men like “laboratory mice,” but his transcripts -- handwritten first in notebooks and then typed, usually within a few days of each interview -- note every facial tic, expression (appropriate or not) and physical appearance.

They are, he writes, “all too normal,” but a few do exhibit emotional lability or obsessive behavior. Those who don’t -- like Goering and Hoess -- may be the most terrifying. Almost to a man, they blame someone or something else, especially the spell of “Hitler’s genius.”