The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa, Simon & Schuster
When Ally Keller’s daughter emerges into the world, she’s silent, whimpers and finally howls – and it’s no wonder. The midwife who pulls her out condemns the newborn – “It’s a Rhineland bastard. You’ve brought a mischling into the world. This girl isn’t German, she’s Black,” she viciously announces. “She’s Lilith. Her name means light,” Ally corrects. It’s 1931 and a terrifying change is underway in the fatherland of freethinking German writer Ally whose daughter is the result of a passionate affair with a black German musician. Her parents disowned her when she fell pregnant and soon Ally discovers her progressive ideas are out of step with the status quo.
As she grows up, Lilith learns to only go out under the cover of darkness, while at home Herr Professor, a Jewish lecturer thrown out of his university, becomes her educator. By age five she has nailed Pythagoras; age six she’s reading Shakespeare. But then as age seven draws near Lilith is called up in front of the German Commission for Racial Purity, her features measured in a chilling, barbaric scene.
“I’d read about the terrible fate of more than 60,000 Black Germans under the Nazis,” author Armando Lucas Correa says of his inspiration for this haunting novel. “Under the Nuremberg racial laws
