About halfway through By Blood, Ellen Ullman's marvelously creepy new novel, Dr. Dora Schussler, a tight-lipped, determinedly impersonal therapist, confides to her own therapist the story of her childhood. Her father was an SS officer, a “true believer in the Fuhrer and the Master Race,” whose job before World War II involved funneling “money to amenable French candidates for office. Fascist rightists. Anti-Semites.” In other words, he might have been the German liaison for someone like Darquier de Pellepoix, who was on the Nazi payroll during the 1930s for exactly those reasons. Like Anne Darquier, Dora Schussler rebelled totally against her father, becoming an American citizen and devoting herself to a life of curing pain, instead of causing it.
