Book Review/The Puzzle King
The Puzzle King 
By Betsy Carter
A novel based on fact
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Betsy Carter grew up thinking her great uncle had invented the board game “Monopoly,” but when she started research to write a novel based on family legend, she discovered that was untrue. However, he did invent and patent a method of making cardboard jigsaw puzzles and became a millionaire through he patent and patents to 75 other enterprises.
The research into family lore turned up more than just jigsaw puzzles, material for Carter to paint a panorama portrait of life for German Jews in the turbulent 1930s as Hitler swept into power. Using fact and fiction, she has written a stirring novel of the terror faced by Jews as Hitler began his campaign to annihilate the race. “The facts are about my own family who narrowly escaped Hitler’s Germany through the heroic effort of my great aunt, Flora and my great uncle Morris.”
Her great uncle was Morris Einson in real life and the successful “Puzzle King,” but she renamed him Simon Phelps in the novel. Flora was Carter’s mother’s aunt who had immigrated to America before Hitler’s rise to power and had married Morris. Strangely, Carter kept her Aunt Flora’s name in the book, but changed Morris’ name to Simon.
While Carter said most of the story is from her imagination, the two main characters, Edith and Werner are based on her parents. The novel takes place from 1892 to 1936. “The chronology leading up to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in Germany is true and based on fact,” she said.
One of the scenes in the book that adds Carter’s great talent for humor amid high drama, is when Flora, now an American widow, travels to Germany in 1935 to rescue her family, including her two of her sisters, Edith and Seema. Some of the best dialog comes between Flora and the overworked, exhausted American Consul employee facing hundreds of German Jews wanting to flee Hitler’s horror.
Carter injects a moment of relief in this tight scene as the harrowed official discovers Flora is from New York, his home state and reminisces about upstate New York. She brings him a coveted copy of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” as a gift and he looks at the thick Civil War novel and then at the long lines of people seeking refuge and wonders if he will ever have time to read it.
The most poignant scenes in the book is the daring fete of the two main characters when they are married in the Byzantine synagogue in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1935 at a time when such an act of defiance of the German masters was to invite arrest and imprisonment. Betsy had only heard of this act of defiance through family lore. There were no pictures or written accounts of the wedding.
Shortly after the wedding, the temple was burned to the ground by the Nazi henchmen. She wrote those scenes from her imagination.
“It was an incredibly moving scene to write and when I finished it, I felt as if I had actually witnessed it.”
That statement should come as no surprise to anyone who has read Betsy Carter’s work before. She is a noted writer of two other novels, including the national best seller, “Swim to Me,” and her block buster memoir, “Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist.” She was a working journalist as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine and was editor of six national magazines and still writes a column in the AARP magazine.
While “The Puzzle King” is fiction based on fact, she explains why she decided to write it as fiction. “All that family, I wrote about is gone now, which is why I chose to tell the story as fiction,” she said.
“I used the fictional character, Simon Phelps to tell how he and his wife, Flora, were so desperate to save their families. ‘The Puzzle King,’ is about how one person saved thousands of lives assuring a future for them and the children who would come after them.”
She gives the reader a punch right to the heart in the book’s final words told in a brief epilog:
“I am one of those children.”
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)