Divided Loyalties

By Richard E. Witten

Divided Loyalties is an extensively researched historical novel that tells the story of an Army veteran's desperate attempt to come to terms with the gruesome choices he was forced to make during the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419643878
• ISBN13: 9781419643873
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Booksurge Publishing
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Terrific first novel

I found this first novel to be a combination of a Holocaust remembrance, the ironic confession of a U.S. soldier assigned to load the trains with Russian refuges captured on behalf of an unspeakable madman who happened to be an ally of the U.S. during the war after liberating a Nazi work camp, and the intrigue and thrill of Working Girl, Part II, The Return of Gordon Gekko. Beautifully written with keen observations on life on Wall Street.

Book Review --Divided Loyalties by Richard Witten

"Divided Loyalties" recently received a Five Star Rating (out of 5 Stars) from Pat Avery of Forward Reviews. Here's the link: [...] In addition, the following review of Divided Loyalties appeared in the Featured Book section of the March 2007 edition of "Columbia College Today": Fixing the World Sam Hart is a man accustomed to warfare. When we first meet the hero of Richard E. Witten'75's novel, Divided Loyalties (Booksurge, $[...]), he is a soldier in the 14th Infantry, dodging bullets during World War II. Later on, he's a corporate general, head of the trading division at a New York investment bank. "Thirty years of battle" on Wall Street have left him scarred, feeling empty, inclined to drink a little more than he needs to. So far, not an abnormal suburban story. But as we read on, Hart begins, surprisingly, to undertake an unusual inward journey. He recovers, at first with ambivalence, a few of the painful wartime memories he's tried so hard and so long to suppress. He befriends Anton, a concentration camp survivor. As their friendship grows, he feels more and more able to acknowledge both guilt and searing pain. The slow process of healing begins. A Hebrew phrase of Anton's sounds again and again through the book, like a tolling bell, as Hart slowly repairs his life: tikkun olam, or "fix the world." Witten's novel is so moving and memorable that a reader could be forgiven for guessing that it might be based on a true story. In fact, the reader would be right. Witten, a University trustee and senior managing director of The Orienta Group, says that the novel was the result of "serendipity," a story that fell into his lap. His late father-in-law, Harold Hayes II, Witten says, was a man whom he loved deeply. Hayes was "a very inwardly turned person, with very few surface emotions;" but "deep down you knew that he was this incredibly sweet and wonderful person." Unbeknownst to his family, Hayes -- like Hart -- was concealing a past that he found too difficult to face. As a World War II soldier, he had gone through the horrors of liberating a concentration camp. Still more painfully, he had taken part in the postwar forced repatriation of Russians: a hushed-up Allied conspiracy which sent more than a million people back to imprisonment and death under the Stalin regime. Thanks to his friendship with a concentration camp survivor, Hayes began to open up to his family about his wartime experiences. And that's how the story came to Witten, a comparative literature major at Columbia who says that he was "always an aspiring writer." However, Witten attended Harvard Law School, practiced corporate law and rose to prominence as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where he says he "grew up on the currency desk." Recently, after 25 years as an investment banker, he was ready for a new kind of challenge. And Hayes' story was, to Witten, one that demanded to be told, with a juxtaposition of events that was "almost too amazing to be real." So h

Captivating

An impressive first novel with well-developed characters and two parallel highly engaging story lines. A very fast and satisfying read.