It is the year 1989, and Izzy Schneider, age 78, has flown back to Toronto from his bungalow in Florida to attend the funeral of his best friend Phil Lewis (born Fishel Lubinsky), age 66, shot dead on the steps of his own shirt factory by the irate boyfriend of his young lover. So opens Cynthia Holz’s new novel, an extended meditation on the definition of heroism and the reverberations of history.

Phil’s death brings together Izzy and his daughter Eva, who was once married to Phil’s son. An undisputed war hero and successful businessman, Phil’s larger-than-life persona and lusty appetite for love earned him admiration and envy. Snared in Phil’s charisma, Izzy is forever weighing himself against his unrivaled friend. Izzy’s inferiority is compounded by his guilt over the fate of the family he left behind in Berlin and lost to the Holocaust. He constantly com-pares his wartime efforts to those of Phil, who rescued Jews hiding from the Nazis as a Partisan in the Polish woods.

Izzy’s predicament is bleak and ever-present, but his voice is colourful, pitch-perfect, and far from morose. While trying to get the full story on his friend, he badgers passers-by with reminiscences, conjures memories with polka music, and comes up with creative curses for fellow motorists: “May a trolley grow in your stomach and may you shit transfers!”

Eva, a seemingly tactless woman, and the voice of the second half of the novel, is more difficult to warm to, even after we are made aware of her motivations. However, she is an equally effective narrator. Because her connection to Phil was much more than met Izzy’s eye, Eva provides a new vantage point from which to view the hero’s slipperiness. It is through her we truly understand the circuitousness of reconstructing and reconciling the past. There is a compelling contemplative lilt to Holz’s prose, regardless of viewpoint, and the novel garners its heft and eloquence from this consistent thoughtfulness.