Rosemary's F
By R.Z. Sheppard
Rosemary's Fuehrer
THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL by IRA LEVIN 312 pages. Random House. $8.95.
Who can forget the grainy documentary film sequence that shows Dr. Josef Mengele greeting new arrivals at Auschwitz? Handsome as a matinee idol in his uniform, he blithely chooses the men, women and children for genetic experiments. Those not gently nudged aside by his baton go more quickly to their deaths in the gas chamber.
The "angel of extermination," as Anne Frank called Mengele in her diary, was not arrested after the war. He lived openly in Bavaria until 1951, when pressure to bring him to justice forced his retreat to the havens of Argentina and Paraguay. Only when Israeli agents came hunting did he flee to the cover of a German settlement in the Paraguayan jungle. Presumably he is still there, drinking Chilean Riesling and reminiscing about the Third Reich.
Ira Levin has other ideas. In The Boys from Brazil, he pulls 64-year-old Mengele out of shady retirement to play a grotesque caricature of himself. As he did in Rosemary's Baby, Levin bases his new plot on a perversion of planned parenthood. This time the mumbo jumbo of the occult has been replaced by the gizmos of science fiction.
After years in his secret lab, Mengele has perfected the biological techniques necessary to duplicate Adolf Hitler--not once but 94 times. The procedure, known as cloning, is based on scientific fact. Because each cell in an organism contains the genetic material that gives the organism its unique characteristics, it is theoretically possible to grow an entire and identical organism from any one cell. In 1943 Mengele had the foresight to ask the Fuehrer for blood and skin samples.
The embryonic Adolfs are brought to term in the wombs of compliant Indian women, then sent to Rio and put on the world adoption market. Mengele schemes to place them with families in Europe and North America that most closely resemble the parental environment of the original Hitler. The principal qualification: mothers have to be much younger than the fathers--retired civil servants who must die when the ditto Hitlers are about 14 years old. If nature does not take its course, killers are sent to eliminate the old men. Having manipulated both nature and nurture, Mengele hopes that at least one of the 94 boys will grow up with the zeal to re-establish a supreme Aryan order.
Challenging this diabolism is Jakov Liebermann, a death-camp survivor who has devoted his postwar life to detecting and exposing unpunished Nazi war criminals. He is obviously modeled on Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based sleuth who has tracked down some 800 Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann.
Liebermann's job is to learn what Mengele is up to and then convince the appropriate people to put a stop to the Hitler baby boom. Author Levin's job is harder. He must convince his readers that The Boys from Brazil is more than just a sick joke. He cannot. Levin's primitive literary skills aside, the turning of Josef Mengele into a mad scientist from the pages of a 1940s comic book requires more than a suspension of disbelief. It also requires a suspension of taste. Exploiting such a monster for entertainment and profit is enough to give evil a bad name.
R.Z. Sheppard
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