The Beech Forestby Marlis WesselerPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Brandon Fick$24.95 ISBN 9781771872546 The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler is a novel that combines day-to-day life in rural Saskatchewan with a gradual reckoning with the Holocaust on the part of its protagonist, Lisa Braun. Lisa is a middle-aged retiree, a wife and a mother – with all the attendant regrets and worries – who is mostly separate from her German husband, Gerhardt, throughout the course of the novel. This causes her to reflect upon her marriage and far-flung children, induces general restlessness, and transforms a semi-detached understanding of the Holocaust into a morbid, all-consuming fascination. The latter is incited by meeting Ben Meisner, an elderly Jewish man who was interned at Buchenwald. Meisner’s harrowing recollection of life under Nazi Germany, coming at the novel’s midpoint, is the hinge that pulls all the story’s disparate threads together. Wesseler’s writing is clear and understated. Much like the pristine German beech forest Lisa walks through in the opening scene, there is no “excess of any kind.” But while there are no rhetorical fireworks, secrets and ironies – familial, cultural, interpersonal – abound. The largest irony being that Buchenwald means “beech forest” in German….