In the opening pages of Children of Radium, Joe Dunthorne describes the ring his mother gave him on his wedding day, an “oval bloodstone, black with flecks of red”. She told him that it was smuggled out of Germany when their family fled the Nazis in 1935. He imagines their escape “with the unique clarity of someone untroubled by having done any research”.
Later in the book and deep into the research, Dunthorne revisits the symbolic heirloom. “My decision to write this book had been premised on my own delusion that the ring on my finger was heroically smuggled out of the Berlin Olympics, a story that should be true, regardless of the evidence.”
In this excellent family memoir, Dunthorne digs down through layers of memory and myth to uncover an unsettling story. The central figure is his great-grandfather, Siegfried Merzbacher, a Jewish chemist who created a radioactive toothpaste in the 1920s that promised “blindingly white” teeth. He was institutionalised for a brief period at the end of his life and wrote a 2,000-page memoir, apparently so boring and badly written that only Dunthorne succeeded in finishing it. What he found inside contradicted everything he had believed about his past.
As Hitler rose to power, the lab where Merzbacher worked started refining chemical weapons. For a time he worked under the Nazis in Berlin, running a military-funded lab in Oranienburg, now one of the most radioactive places in Germany. In 1935 Merzbacher and his family fled to Turkey, not in a daring escape as Dunthorne had imagined, but via the comfortable arrangements of his former employer. They even paid to ship his grand piano. In Ankara he continued to work in the chemical industry and maintained ties with Germany, possibly facilitating the sale of chemical weapons later used against the Kurdish.
Children of Radium is a powerful exploration of the struggle to separate truth from the stories we want to believe. Dunthorne interrogates not just the omissions and self-deceptions in his great-grandfather’s memoir, but also his own complicated motivations for revisiting his familial past. A triumph of stylish prose, the book tackles dark subject matter with moral precision and a surprisingly keen sense of humour.
