Champion

Dark haired, slight, with deep-set haunted eyes, Herschel Grynszpan is an undocumented Jewish alien living in Paris. He receives a postcard from his parents - recently bundled from their Hanover flat, put on a train and dumped, with 12,000 others on the Polish border. Enraged, Herschel buys a gun and kills a minor German official in the German Embassy. The repercussions trigger Kristalnacht, the nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany and Austria, a calamity which some have called the opening act of the Holocaust. Intertwined is the parallel life of the German boxer, Max Schmeling, who as a result of his victory over the then 'invincible' Joe Louis in 1936 became the poster boy of the Nazis. He and his movie-star wife, Anny Ondra, were feted by the regime - tea with Hitler, a passage on the airship Hindenburg - until his brutal two-minute beating in the rematch with Louis less than two years later. His story reaches a climax during Kristalnacht, where the champion performs an act of quiet heroism.

Stephen Deutsch was born in New York and moved to the UK in 1970, becoming a naturalised citizen in 1978. He was trained as a pianist and composer, spending the first part of his career composing music for concert hall, theatre, television and film. He has been a lecturer in film sound and music, and has edited a journal on that subject, The Soundtrack, and later The New Soundtrack. His first novel, Zweck, a historical comedy about music, was published in 2016. He is the co-author of a coming book Listening to the Film: A Practical Philosophy of Film Sound. He has written plays for television, broadcast on the BBC. For 25 years he composed the music for all stage, film and TV works of the playwright Peter Barnes.