A Thread Of Grace (2005)

This busy WWII saga dramatizes the experience of Jews in Italy — the country with the highest Jewish survival rate in Nazi-occupied Europe. ''As soon as our Führer began to drive them from the Vaterland, Jews ran like rats for Italy,'' one Gestapo thug explains. A Thread of Grace's enormous cast includes native Italians, like small-town rabbi Iacopo Soncini, as well as Jews fleeing Northern Europe, like Belgian teenager Claudette Blum. Claudette falls in love with a Calabrian soldier, one of the many ''artistically inefficient'' Italians who flout German orders. Unfortunately, the earnest novel's focus is too diffuse to provide a compelling picture of what any of these characters endures.