Nathan Mayer, M.D. The Fatal Secret; or, Plots and Counterplots. A Novel of the Sixteenth Century, Founded on Facts.

(AMERICAN JUDAICA)

Bloch & Co., Office of The Israelite

Cincinnati

1859

Singerman 1538.

Rare first edition. Singerman records just one copy. “Set in 16th-century Portugal during the Inquisition…this swashbuckling melodrama tells the story how the last Portuguese Jews were saved from forced conversion and escaped to Amsterdam, the portal to the New World, becoming in effect, the ancestors of the very first American Jews.” See J. Chametzky (ed.) Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2000) pp. 94-9. Nathan Mayer (1838-1912), one of the first American-Jewish novelists came to America from Alsace in 1849 with his father, a rabbi and advocate of Conservative Judaism. Mayer later trained as a doctor and served a surgeon in Connecticut’s Sixteenth Infantry before he was captured by the Confederates. After the war he settled in Hartford, Conn. where he wrote and practiced medicine.