BE STILL, MY SOUL depicts a family struggling to survive the ordeals of war and home-front   tragedies. This new novel, by Richard Shain Cohen, is a family epic that follows Jocelyn and   Aaron as their family faces the turmoil of the late 1930s and the impending war.

Jocelyn, a Catholic and a renowned singer, is married to a Jewish, immigrant physician, Aaron.   With conflicting careers, religious beliefs, and social status, they struggle throughout their marriage. The strain intensifies when their four sons are sent to battle during World War II.

Adding to Jocelyn's worries is her brother, Joseph, who has become an agent for the British.   He works as a spy in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, eventually marrying a German double agent, Elena. Elena comes to America to live, but, mistakenly believes her husband died in battle and returns to occupied France. Jocelyn, meanwhile, seeks a semblance of stability while trying to reconcile differences with Aaron and also with her difficult daughter-in-law, Lou Ann.

These home problems occur as her sons' letters arrive describing their trials on the battlefields. What the letters do not reveal is the sons' knowledge that their uncle, Joseph, committed a revenge murder. The question is whether Jocelyn's strength is enough to carry the family through such tragic events, or whether she will succumb to the intensity of her own pain.

Bookviews by Alan Caruba, January 2005

Also set during World War II is an interesting novel by Richard Shain Cohen. Be Still, My Soul ($21.95) begins on the eve of the war with Hitler on the march. Three thousand miles away another war is brewing within a Boston Brahman family that has tyrants of its own. Cohen, a retired professor of literature, based elements of the story on his own family’s correspondence from that period, but the characters are entirely fictional. At the center of the story is Aaron Lobel, an immigrant Jew, a physician who has married into a wealthy Catholic family. His wife, Jocelyn, is a renowned singer, but was banished by her father for getting pregnant and marrying Aaron. Thirty years later they have four sons whom they desperately want to protect from the events that promise war in Europe. And to complicate matters more, German double agents have married into the family and British intelligence is aware of it. Jeremie, the youngest of their sons, narrates the story in a fast-paced narrative that evokes the time and the battles. A very good novel to read as our world is enveloped into a new war between good and evil.

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A Letter-Perfect Portrait of an American Family Enduring the Unendurable

It's the eve of Word War II. Hitler is on the march, swallowing entire countries, extinguishing
the lights of Europe. Three thousand miles away another war is brewing for the soul of a
Boston Brahman family with tyrants of its own. Thus sets the stage for Be Still, My Soul, Richard Shain Cohen's new novel based, in part, on real-life war letters sent by his brothers and an uncle from Europe and British Palestine.

Aaron Lobel has done well for himself. The immigrant Jew, married into a wealthy Catholic family, is a prominent Boston doctor. Jocelyn, his wife, is a nationally renowned singer banished by her father for getting herself pregnant and marrying beneath her. After thirty years of marriage, they share four precious sons-if little else-whom they hope to protect from the lure of enlistment.

Jeremie is the youngest and narrates the story, a rich, insightful portrait of a family's struggles to keep the realities of war out of their well-to-do home.

For such a nuanced family portrait, there is extraordinary intrigue-German double agents marrying into the family, spies for British Intelligence already in it.

Cohen, a World War II veteran himself, does a wonderful job of evoking the terror of a world on the precipice, teetering between right and wrong, darkness and light.

There's no room for gray in a world fighting between good and evil, and Cohen is masterful at conjuring the mood of America circa in the first half of the 1940s. Close your eyes and you'll hear the Andrews Sisters. You 'll feel the cohesion of war-time Christmas in New York-soldiers in uniforms, women with shoulder pads scurrying in the cold past department store windows on their way to give blood for the boys overseas.

The fast-paced narrative is alternately heart-racing and heartbreaking; struggling for survival in the desert against Rommel, persevering on a home front missing sons and fathers who will never come home.

Jeremie's brothers' letters are perfect-the homesickness, the humor of the greatest generation assuring its parents that the sacrifices are worth it. The author's mother saved dozens of letters, strikingly literate, heartfelt, and innocent, written by boys destined never to be innocent again.

In Be Still, My Soul, Cohen has succeeded in showing that no family-no matter how privileged-was immune from the poison of mankind's most destructive war. The story he presents is immensely absorbing-even more so knowing he's woven the history of the war from an authentic and touching history of his family.

An "intriguing book. [Cohen's] description of the struggle between Allied and Axis powers comes across as masterful and authentic. . . . Like The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever or Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, this fictional family history is rich in detail."
Maine Sunday Telegram

MONDAY: END OF THE WEEK- Monday is a day of deception, conspiracy, cowardice, self-indulgence; day of kindness, love, courage during early and mid twentieth century anti-lesbianism, glass-ceiling norms.

Marion deserts her fiancé, Warren, and elopes to France with the artist Giselle. Returning to Warren, she meets Jocelyn, a celebrated singer, and the wife of Aaron Lobel, a physician.   Aaron has established a clinic for the poor, anathema to the Massachusetts Medical Society of that day. He courageously combats his opposition while his wife resolutely continues with her career. Marion becomes a college professor. The Lobel son Jeremie comes to teach at the college. He and Marion become links for the contrast between the Lobel and Worfield families.

The deceitful college president, Edmond Worfield, and his wife, Lisa, desire an exemplary family, as their frustrated and disappointing sons, Nelson and Conrad, compete over the Worfield's ward, Frances. They prevent the Worfields' wished for fulfillment. Within this turmoil, Marion struggles for success while Jeremie learns the secret of his parents' turbulent relationship.

END OF THE WEEK shows that courage, endurance, and love triumph over cowardice, conspiracy, and degeneracy, that these intertwined persons sustain or destroy themselves by self-indulgence or commitment to social benefit.