Imagine the horror that was Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most lethal of the Third Reich's six annihilation camps. Imagine it 1944 and a prisoner uprising at that terrible place, the rebels blowing up one crematorium, damaging another, and killing many of their SS masters. Imagine it Jews leading this revolt, a people those same SS thought incapable of fighting. Now imagine one of these leaders a 22-year-old girl, arguably the greatest Jewish heroine to come out of the Holocaust. Finally, imagine her and three other young female inmates arrested by the Gestapo during the investigation that followed the rebellion and savagely tortured for weeks without giving up a single fellow conspirator.
Imagine all that and more and you have The Trumpets of Jericho, the only novel ever to tell this extraordinary, true-life story of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in its entirety. It has everything you could ask of historical fiction: intensive research, action and adventure, heart-wrenching emotion, heroes and villains brought to life with a vividness straight history can't touch.
Its main character, Roza Robota, exists to this day as an example of female empowerment at its gutsiest. No one in the book is more courageous than she. Most readers will have never heard of this remarkable girl barely out of her teens, but after Trumpets, it's just as likely none will forget her. The same can be said of the other heroic men and women who inhabit its pages, in which there are as many of the latter as the former. Indeed, without its contingent of female conspirators, the revolt of the Sonderkommando (those Jewish wretches forced to work the gas chambers and ovens) could not have happened, at least not the way it did.
With so star-studded a distaff cast, Trumpets bears resemblance to Kelley's WWII novel Lilac Girls. Devoted as it is to Jews fighting back, it also mirrors Uris's towering saga of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mila 18. The sheer horror and certain thematic elements of Wiesel's iconic Night can be seen in it as well, even a feel-good ending to rival that of Schindler's List. In comparison to noted movies about the Holocaust, it rates as moving as the latter, as horrific as Son of Saul, as heroic as The Grey Zone, as personal as The Pianist.
In short, the award-winning novelist and historian J. Michael Dolan has produced a sweeping epic of a work that he believes will stir you as deeply as its subject has him. In conjunction with resurrecting this fascinating slice of history, he explores, among other themes, religion and the existence of God, the psychology of genocide, friendship and romantic love, sexual and other pathologies, the nature of good and evil, right and wrong. Above all, he shows how the most monstrous crime ever committed was in the end no match for the indomitability, the grandeur of the human spirit.
Silver Medalist in the Military/Wartime fiction category of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards, or "Ippy's." Silver Medalist in the War and Military fiction category of the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book Awards. 2017 Notable Book of the Year from Blue Ink Review.
The author feels compelled to state here that the above awards were won despite him putting The Trumpets of Jericho on the market too early. This new Second Edition is the product of fifteen months of rewriting, refining, and adding to his material, making it in his opinion not only a vastly better read than its first incarnation but more deserving of the tale entrusted to it.
Fascinated from an early age by the Holocaust, J. Michael Dolan has used his talents as an award-winning novelist and historian to bring the heroic if little-known story he sets forth in Trumpets to life. A traveler in his youth, he has lived in many places, preferring the tropical, but recently moved outside of Austin, Texas to be near his family and because it is a magnet of a city for the freethinking young. Or in his case, he says, the young at heart.Taking a break from the horrors of the Holocaust but not the fertile ground of Jewish history, he is working on a novel set in the Roman-occupied Palestine of the 1st century. Though heavy on iconoclasm (Dolan's literary idol is Gore Vidal), and not lacking in the glorification of the flesh, he claims it at heart a religious book, if not religion as most are taught. The narrator/main character, he adds, might surprise you, too---And no, it isn't who you may be thinking it is.
