Justice, Revenge and the Temptation to Settle Accounts

 

The man walking ahead has the easy posture of someone who believes the worst part of his life is over. He leaves a neighborhood cafe, coat buttoned, hat at the usual angle, book tucked under his arm. Streetlights turn the wet pavement into strips of gray and yellow. His steps echo off shop windows and shuttered doors.

A few paces behind, another man matches his rhythm. To anyone watching, they are just two strangers heading the same way. His hands stay in his pockets. In one of them, his fingers rest on a loop of wire, carefully shaped and coiled so it can tighten in an instant. In the other pocket is a photograph of the man ahead, younger and in a different uniform.

At a narrow spot in the street, the distance closes. The man at the rear calls out. The man in front half turns. There is a word, the beginning of recognition. Then the wire is over his head, the knee is in his back, and his body hits the cobblestones. The photograph is left with the body, as if someone were filing a document.

This is not a police report. It is the moral ground on which Prodigal Sons begins. In Sheldon Greene’s novel, the man with the wire is living under a German identity, working quietly in postwar Europe while carrying the memories of a Jewish survivor. He now works with an Israeli unit that tracks down former Nazis who escaped formal justice. His job is to kill selected targets, and he often leaves just enough evidence behind that someone, somewhere, will know what has been done and why.

The scene asks questions without needing to state them. What does justice mean when the courts have stopped calling names? What happens to the rule of law when those who lost the most watch perpetrators walk to the baker in the morning and to the concert hall at night? Where, exactly, is the line between justice and revenge?

Greene has spent much of his professional life in and around law, trying to make institutions do what they claim: protect the vulnerable and hold the powerful to account. His fiction keeps circling the places where law fails and other, darker impulses step in.

The Promise of Law, and Its Silences

Modern legal systems make a strong promise. They claim that no one is above the law, that even the most powerful can be brought to account in a courtroom with evidence and argument. Punishment, in this view, should be public, reasoned and proportionate, not a matter of private vendettas in alleyways.

Greene knows this ideal from the inside. His career in public interest law and policy has depended on courts and agencies working well enough to be worth fighting in. He has also seen the limits. Cases where poor clients never really get a hearing. Files that languish because the people involved have no political weight. Decisions made quietly in bureaucratic back rooms because pursuing certain abuses would be too disruptive or too expensive.

Postwar Europe magnifies those limits to a brutal scale. A handful of high-profile trials produce images that stand for justice: judges in robes, defendants in glass boxes, witnesses recounting crimes that defy language. Behind those images lies a much longer list of names that never appear in any courtroom. Men who commanded units or ran camps return to medicine, business, municipal government. They age, retire and die in their own beds. Survivors walk past them in train stations and offices.

Prodigal Sons inhabits that landscape. Its assassin is not operating in an empty space with no legal order. He moves in the shadow of courts that have done something, but not enough, and that have largely decided to move on. His work is born out of the gap between law’s promise and its practical ceiling.

Horst: The Survivor Who Becomes a Hunter

By day, the man who calls himself Horst has a respectable job in a European museum. He helps identify paintings that were looted from Jewish families during the war and works to see them returned. The work is slow and delicate. It involves archives, provenance research and correspondence with heirs now scattered across Israel, the United States and beyond. It is the painstaking version of justice: the kind that reconstructs a paper trail so a canvas can finally hang where it belongs.

By night and on quiet trips away from the museum, a different kind of work begins. Under his German identity, Horst travels by train and bus to small towns and cities where ex-officers and ex-functionaries have built new lives. He observes routines the way a lawyer studies testimony: who drinks at which bar, who walks home alone, which route a man takes on a rainy evening. When the pattern is clear and the moment seems right, he acts. Wire, pistol, staged accidents: each killing is planned, personal and carried out without witnesses.

Horst is not a fantasy figure. Greene writes him as a man whose present is hollowed out by what he has lived through. He is both victim and perpetrator, both an embodiment of law’s failure and an affront to its rules. When he thinks of what he is doing, he sometimes reaches for an old phrase: tribal vendetta. It is a way of acknowledging that his work belongs to a tradition older than modern ideas of due process.

Greene keeps reminding readers that “Horst” is a role, not a name he was born with. The man underneath is Jan Goldberg, a Polish Jew whose family home, neighbors and future were erased by the war, who fought as a partisan and later landed on a crowded beach in Palestine before ever setting foot in postwar Munich as a “German” curator.

The novel does not invite unqualified admiration for him. It allows the reader to feel, viscerally, the satisfaction of a wire tightening around the neck of someone who once stood proudly in a death camp photograph. It then follows Horst into the nights afterwards, where sleep is restless and guilt accumulates. Whatever peace he finds is temporary and incomplete.

Greene contrasts this work with the museum’s quieter restitution efforts. On one side, a painting makes its way back to a family that can remember where it once hung. On the other, a man dies untried in a back street. Both acts are responses to the same crime-riddled past. Neither feels wholly adequate.

Jan’s Many Lives in One Body

Prodigal Sons refuses to let Jan shrink into the figure of an avenger. He is also a professional in the art world who spends long hours with catalogues and wartime inventories, trying to match paintings in Bavarian collections to records from Warsaw or Krakow. His days contain meetings with British and German colleagues, tense conversations about missing Murillos and misattributed canvases, and small satisfactions when a lost work can finally be linked to a particular family.

He is also a lover and a would-be husband. Under the name Horst Vogle, he drifts into the cultural life of Munich, attends house concerts, meets the conductor Maestro Feuermann, trades easy jokes with young bankers and insurance men, and falls in love with Greta, a gifted pianist. Their scenes together are filled with Schubert, shared meals and the kinds of playful arguments people have when they are planning trips and imagining futures. The book spends real time on their courtship, on Greta’s excitement about Bayreuth, and on the way she begins to picture a life built around music, children and a repaired city.

Jan’s covert work keeps colliding with that fragile normality. A romantic trip is postponed by a mission. Injuries from an operation have to be disguised as the aftermath of a motorcycle accident. When he raises the possibility of emigrating to Israel, Greta does not hear a simple career move. She hears a life spent as the visible German in a Jewish state, at the very moment she is quietly realizing that she may be pregnant with his child.

Greene also shows Jan in explicitly Jewish space, even while he is operating under German papers. During the Teutoberg raid, the unit discovers a bunker full of crates stamped with Reich eagles and filled with bags of gold fillings, jewelry and religious items. The men recite Kaddish over the teeth before loading the trucks. In the middle of that work Jan spots a crate of ritual objects and, against orders, slips a single silver Torah pointer into his pocket so that at least one sacred object will reach an Israeli museum.

Taken together, these strands make Jan a many-layered figure. He is survivor, soldier, curator, lover, infiltrator and future immigrant at the same time. Prodigal Sons asks the reader to keep all of that complexity in view when he steps into a narrow street with a wire in his hands. The question is no longer only “Is revenge justified?” but “What does this act do to a life that also contains tenderness, work, loyalty and hope?”

Why Revenge Feels So Clear

Greene does not treat the desire for revenge as something pathological. In a world where unimaginable harm has been inflicted and acknowledged only partially, wanting to strike back is a rational response.

If your family has been murdered, your town emptied and your tormentors are eating dinner in restaurants and attending concerts, the claim that “the rule of law” will sort things out can sound hollow. Revenge offers something law often cannot: a sense of symmetry. A particular man did a particular evil. Now something has happened to him. The account, for a moment, feels less grotesquely one-sided.

Prodigal Sons allows that feeling to be felt from the inside. It does not dress it up. The killings are work, not heroics. The planning is meticulous. The sense of completion afterwards is real but thin, quickly invaded by doubt.

The novel also shows what revenge cannot do. It cannot create a public record. There is no courtroom where witnesses speak and the accused is forced to listen. There is no judgment written in a language the next generation can quote. There is only a body in a side street, a photograph on a chest and a survivor who must live with what he has done.

In the background, the museum continues to process claims and return property. This slower, institutional version of justice is frustrating and incomplete. It is also one of the few ways the world can formally acknowledge that something was stolen and must be, at least in part, restored. Greene refuses to choose between the two. He lays them side by side and lets the reader feel the tension.

When Vengeance and Restitution Are Not Enough

Even when the bullets and wires are put away, Greene does not suggest that the quieter forms of repair can close the books. Restitution cases are limited to works that survived. They depend on fragmentary records and on heirs who are still alive to file claims. A returned painting cannot summon back the people who once argued about where to hang it.

Around Jan, other characters improvise their own responses to the same past. Men like Gerhardt and Manfred build respectable banking and industrial empires while quietly managing Nazi legacies through the Kultur Bund and Die Spinne. Friends such as Freddie and Hermann half suspect that something is wrong about Horst, yet hesitate to push too hard because he is also charming company and a valuable tennis partner. Greta clings to the possibility that love and music can carve out a space untouched by politics, only to discover that history is already inside her relationship. The novel becomes a study of people who are willing to benefit from stability built on buried crimes, and of one man who cannot abide that bargain.

Nothing in this landscape feels whole. Revenge creates corpses and rumors. Restitution produces files and newspaper clippings. Careers and romances move forward, yet the foundations under them remain cracked. Greene does not offer a version of justice that feels complete. He offers a world in which every option carries a cost that someone must live with.

What Greene Seems to Trust, and What He Does Not

Read through Prodigal Sons alone, Greene’s work suggests a cautious respect for institutions and a deep suspicion of any character who believes he can settle accounts on his own.

His lifetime in and around law has clearly convinced him that courts and procedures, however flawed, are necessary. In the novel, formal processes are slow and heavily compromised, yet they are still the only mechanisms that can create records, expose evidence and force people to speak on the record. Without that framework, the public sphere would collapse into rumor, conspiracy and private score-settling.

At the same time, Greene’s attention to history and survivor testimony leaves him under no illusion that legal systems ever fully deliver justice. The very premise of Jan’s missions is that countless crimes never reach a docket, that many perpetrators will never be questioned under oath and that some harms cannot even be defined in legal terms. In that space, people act outside the law. Prodigal Sons does not endorse those actions, but it insists that they are understandable responses to a world in which the gap between law and justice remains painfully wide.

What he seems to value most in this terrain is restraint. Judges and bureaucrats should be wary of thinking that a verdict or a restitution agreement has repaired a shattered life. Survivors and their children should be wary of believing that one killing has “evened the score.” Certainty about who is clean and who is tainted often functions, in Greene’s fiction, as the first step toward a new round of cruelty.

Living with an Unsettled Account

Prodigal Sons does not end with a scene that tidies up the ledger. There is no final court that calls every name, no public ceremony that places all the paintings, fortunes and lives where they “ought” to be. The story closes with many questions still open and with its central figure permanently marked by the choices he has made.

Jan, who cannot accept that so many perpetrators have escaped formal judgment, chooses to become a hunter and pays for that choice in his own mind and body. Others around him choose accommodation. Some devote themselves to careers in banks, insurance companies and construction firms and decide that the past is best left to archivists. Some channel their energy into culture and philanthropy funded by money that once moved through Nazi accounts. Greta tries to build an ordinary life of teaching and performance and finds that the man she loves cannot step fully out of that history. None of them stand outside the system they inhabit.

The novel does not present any of these paths as clean. Revenge satisfies a craving for symmetry but leaves the larger order of things almost untouched and the avenger transformed in ways he cannot reverse. Legal and bureaucratic work can return paintings and trace stolen assets, yet it cannot resurrect the dead or rewrite childhoods. Attempts at private happiness take place on ground that is still shifting.

Greene has described Prodigal Sons as a loose retelling of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the gods. That frame adds another layer to Jan’s story. Ideologies that once claimed absolute authority have burned themselves out in war and genocide. The novel follows a man who has lived through that collapse and now has to decide what, if anything, he can still believe in. Even the question of whether he will eventually return to Israel or remain in Germany is left open. The reader is invited to decide which future seems more truthful, and what each choice would say about the possibility of starting again in a world where the old certainties have failed.

Sheldon Greene’s fiction accepts that some accounts will remain unsettled. Justice, in this world, is not a final balance sheet but an ongoing argument about what can be repaired and what must simply be remembered. Prodigal Sons invites readers to live with that discomfort, to see both the necessity of institutions and the dangerous allure of taking judgment into one’s own hands, and to ask what kind of responsibility remains when neither path can ever be enough.

More of Sheldon Greene’s reflections on law, memory and fiction can be found on his Substack: https://sheldongreenee.substack.com/

https://www.sheldongreene.com/