No Place for Us

No Place for Us is a historical novel about tyranny, rescue, exile, racism, Jewish flight from Nazi Europe, and the strange moral bargains people make when trying to survive inside a dictatorship. It links two historical horrors that at first seem separate: Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican Republic, and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The bridge between them is Trujillo’s bizarre real-life offer to take Jewish refugees into the Dominican Republic — an act that is both humanitarian in effect and politically cynical in origin.

The novel opens in October 1937 in Ciudad Trujillo. Humberto Barbetti, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s private secretary, has returned from the border after witnessing the Parsley Massacre, or El Corte. He has seen truckloads of corpses, a river full of bodies, ruined shacks, and survivors across the Haitian border. He writes a report, but Trujillo orders him to rewrite it into a lie: not a massacre by the army, but a local uprising against Haitians who supposedly “swarmed” across the border. Barbetti knows the famous parsley story is false or at least absurd, but he also knows that his job is to rinse the blood from the page.

At the same time, in Saarlouis in Germany, Chaim Levy is living through another form of terror. He is a young Jewish magician, queer, reckless, funny and brave, still half in love with Ernst, a former friend and lover who is now in the SA. Chaim’s family has already lost its farm after the Saarland returned to Germany. His father Herschel has been reduced to running a butcher shop, and his older brother Sol has become newly religious after losing his fiancée Irma Haas because her family will not let her marry a Jew. When SA men beat their father bloody, Chaim insists they must leave Germany. Sol resists, but the brothers eventually understand that remaining means destruction.