A Murky Picture, Developed And Enlarged

Novelist Frederick Reuss Fleshes Out a Family Album

Frederick Reuss's novel is based on Max Mohr, a Jewish physician who left his family behind in Nazi Germany. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

"If you want, I can start the slide show now," Fred Reuss says.

Sure, you tell him. How often do you get to examine the raw materials of a work of fiction, clicked into life on the writer's laptop one by one?

Bavarian hamlet, picture-postcard mountains.

Old chalet with balcony and overhanging eaves.

Laughing girl.

Man and woman sitting at a table: handsome, unsmiling, staring into a future that they cannot know.

This last photograph was taken in 1934, Reuss tells you, not long before the man sailed off to Shanghai, leaving the woman and the laughing girl behind. He is Max Mohr: a physician, minor German literary figure and Reuss's great-uncle. She is Mohr's wife, Kathe, and the girl is their daughter, Eva. Long drawn to their story -- and having discovered a trove of photos, letters and other documents about them -- Reuss set out to reimagine their lives.

The result was "Mohr: A Novel" -- an unusually close collaboration between fiction and fact.

The book is driven, on one level, by a psychological conundrum the documents cannot resolve. Mohr was Jewish, and for him to want to leave the encroaching darkness of Nazi Germany seems understandable enough. And yet: How could he possibly have left behind a beloved wife and daughter?

But Reuss chose to highlight a different level of question, as well. For he didn't just use that trove of photographs to inspire his storytelling -- he layered them into the novel itself. "Mohr" is constructed around a selection of almost 50 images through which the story flows.

Mostly it flows in straightforward, third-person narration, moving back and forth between Max in China and Kathe and Eva at home. But at times the voice changes, and Reuss considers those haunting images directly.

He's hoping his readers will be inspired, as he was, to puzzle out the links between photography and memory, between "truth" and the reconstructed past.