Half-life

British writer’s relentless search to find the toxic truth behind his German-Jewish family’s WWII survival.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

Irony and deadpan humour have defined Jewish storytelling for millennia. And it is with dry alacrity that Joe Dunthorne, the Welsh novelist and poet renowned for his hilarious yet anguished coming-of-age novel Submarine, tells the astonishing saga of his quest to discover the buried war history of his family, specifically that of his great-grandfather Siegfried Merzbacher.

Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various radioactive household items, including a dentifrice called Doramad. Due to its wildly popular success, Merzbacher was promoted by his respected German employer to develop new gas mask filters, as well as a chemical weapon laboratory.

“My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste,” Dunthorne begins. “The active ingredient was irradiated calcium carbonate and her father was the chemist in charge of making it... it promised gums ‘charged with new life energy’ anda ‘blindingly white smile’.” Doramad became the preferred toothpaste of the German Army.

The cover of Children of Radium features a photograph of children playing ring-a-ring-o'-roses while wearing gas masks. The shot was discovered in an edition of the popular magazine Die Gasmaske, which often included evidence of Dunthorne’s great-grandfather’s discoveries.

Forced to leave Berlin in 1935 because they were Jews, the Merzbacher family took “tubes of itwith them, their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles as they travelled a thousand miles east”.

Like the radioactive ions slowly leaking poison into the Merzbacher's possessions, a sinister undercurrent gradually poisons Dunthorne's heroic imagining of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany.