Central Library Brown Baggers had a lively discussion of Ira Levin’s “The Boys from Brazil” on Thursday, May 21st.  Published in 1976, this thriller operates under the chilling premise that Dr. Josef Mengele, the concentration camp Nazi Dr now living in Brazil,(spoiler warning) has used Hitler’s DNA to clone 94 baby boys in Brazil. The boys were dispersed across several countries as adoptive infants. Now that the boys are 13 years old, Dr. Mengele assigns six former SS officers to go kill all the boys’ fathers, just as Hitler’s father was killed when Hitler was 13.  Meanwhile, the other central character, Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann, gets wind of the killings but has to piece together what the victims have in common. Ultimately, as you might expect there is a violent showdown between Liebermann and Mengele.

Our readers did not catch on to the clues regarding the connection between the men being killed until the reveal at the end. Readers had some difficulty with the audiobook version and the printed book because while there were breaks in the text, it wasn’t always clear what was happening, which character we were with or where we were.

Our readers found that the cloning science was not so far fetched.

We again noted the recurring themes of history repeating itself and the human capacity to hate. We appreciated Yakov’s moral point of view at the end not to destroy the children. Despite the dark themes, readers appreciated the structure of the story, the complexity of plotting it and what a good writer Levin was.

Also notable is that this book was published while Dr. Mengele was still alive, free and somewhat well in Brazil since he didn’t die until 1979.  

There was much discussion of the film version from 1978 which some remembered as well as the book and film versions of Marathon Man.

And we discussed how and why many former Nazis got away at the end of WWII.  Some Nazi scientists were recruited and protected  in order to harness their intelligence for American military and scientific capabilities.

The 2024 paperback version of the book includes an afterward by Dr. Efraim Zoroff (Chief Nazi-Hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center) who says that Levin was quoted as saying “he wrote this book to entertain, not to express anxiety about scientific advances in the hands of irresponsible geniuses.”

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