Short answer: yes—it’s absolutely worth developing. You’ve got a sticky central irony, a distinctive tonal promise, and a trio of postwar “afterlives” that can carry both comedy and ache. The idea has legs; the question is execution (tone, point of view, and scene design).
Why it works
- A clean thematic engine: An “indestructible alloy” promised to a death-state vs. the radical fragility of people. Silver roses as the answer Solly actually gives the world—beauty/ritual over armor. That’s a great controlling idea.
- Built-in irony that can play funny and mournful: A kosher chef in a Nazi-run “villa,” a metals scientist bargaining for privileges, a nail-file magnate, and a dance teacher—absurd on the surface, devastating in the light.
- A strong frame: The nephew’s flashback narration lets you ramble, undercut, contradict, and let time shingles overlap. It also buys distance so the humor never lands on the victims.
Risks (and how to handle them)
- Taste/tone: Keep the Nazis ridiculous, venal, and bureaucratic; keep the victims human, never the punchline. Let the jokes target delusion, paperwork, and pomp—never the suffering itself.
- Theresienstadt specifics: Treat the “villa” as a fable/absurdist set piece. Signal artifice early: a line like, “In our family edition of events, Theresienstadt had one villa, and naturally it went to Uncle Solly; the Reich loved a good brochure.”
- Collaborator ambiguity: Make Solly’s “deal” morally knotted; he survives by weaponizing the regime’s vanity. His promised alloy can be a MacGuffin (perpetually “almost perfected”), or a private joke—he’s actually discovering ductility, not invulnerability.
Story architecture (one viable shape)
- Prologue (present day): The nephew at Solly’s funeral, pocketing a slightly tarnished silver rose. Voice establishes the comic-rambling register, then sidesteps into ache.
- Part I — The Villa of Exceptions: Theresienstadt through absurd bureaucracy: menus vetted by a humorless Obersturmbannführer of Dietary Affairs; Solly filing “preliminary metallographic observations” on the tensile strength of strudel.
- Part II — The Displaced Persons’ Waltz: DP camp friendships: Efrem (nail files and emery boards) and Marie Therese (barre exercises in a bombed-out rec hall). Small economies, rumors, and rehearsals for the lives they’ll try to rebuild.
- Part III — The Silver Rose Works (HaShoshanah Kesef): British Mandate → early Israel. Three parallel revivals: Solly’s silver-rose factory (catalog copy as mini-chapters), Marie Therese opening a studio that teaches hora with a Viennese spine, Efrem rebuilding his factory and marrying grit to elegance.
- Part IV — Creep of the Past: An investor or former camp guard appears in disguise (or a letter about “the alloy”), forcing Solly to name what he really invented: rituals that outlast terror. The nephew discovers a ledger with “Rosenkavalier” scribbled in the margins; the roses were always about presentation, not protection.
- Epilogue: The nephew returns the rose to Marie Therese’s studio, now run by a student; a final class rehearses—arms like branches, bodies tempered, not hardened.
Character engines
- Solly Oxenberg: Not a saint; a quicksilver improviser. Guiding metaphor: annealing—heated by catastrophe, cooled to toughness. Comic habit: over-precise digressions (“Yield strength, my boy, is not a moral category, though it should be.”)
- Efrem Epshteyn: Apostle of micro-abrasion. Life philosophy: everything can be made smooth with patience. Deadpan moralist; best at puncturing pomposity.
- Marie Therese: A gentile modernist with political singe. Dances like she’s re-articulating skeletons. She teaches presence and balance to people who feel eternally off-center.
- The Nephew/Narrator: Talky, affectionate, intermittently unreliable. He hoards family myths and footnotes them like a Talmudist with a sense of timing.
Voice & form ideas (to get the “rambling, off-beat, wistful” mix)
- Catalog humor: Memos, menus, patent abstracts, catalog blurbs for silver roses (“Model 3A: Anniversary Proof, refuses to wilt under ordinary marital conditions”).
- Parenthetical side-routes: Let the nephew step out mid-scene to explain, contradict, or gossip—then return to the scene.
- Deadpan officialese vs. warm kitchen-table Yiddishkeit: Toggle between a fussy register and intimate, food-scented warmth.
- Leitmotifs: Tempering/annealing; filing/burnishing; rehearsal vs. performance; roses (presentation) vs. armor (protection).
Scene seeds (you can write these tomorrow)
- “The Menu Trial”: Solly bargains for kosher standards; an SS functionary decides the fate of gefilte fish as if deciding a weapons tender.
- “Barre in the Barracks”: Marie Therese corrects posture in the DP camp: “Head high. We are rehearsing for citizenship.”
- “The Emery Sermon”: Efrem teaches workers to feel with their fingertips when the grit is right; his hands are both comic and priestly.
- “The Investor Visit”: A “patron” hints he funded Solly’s villa; the nephew misreads it; later we realize Solly redirected that money into stipends for widows.
Motifs & imagery you can thread
- Ductility vs. brittleness: People who bend and recover vs. shatter. Give each main character a “failure mode.”
- Roses of metal: A thing that lasts but can’t smell—beauty without biology (a metaphor for survival without innocence).
- Music and rehearsal: Classes, factory shifts, and dinners all feel like rehearsals for a future that finally arrives.
Possible titles
- The Indestructible That Wasn’t • Annealing Solly • The Silver Rose Works • Temper • Proof Against Nothing.
A quick sample in the right key
“On the day the Reich discovered my uncle’s genius for alloys, he discovered theirs for menus. A villa was arranged (‘villa’ here meaning two rooms with a chandelier that coughed), and a chef materialized whose kosher certificate was issued by a rabbi no one had ever met but everyone quoted. Uncle Solly signed papers with the same pen that had just approved twelve kilos of carp, and in exchange he promised an alloy that would make German tanks impervious to explosions, disappointment, and possibly criticism. He told me this himself, years later, while polishing a silver rose with the concentration some men devote to prayer, which in his case it probably was.”
What to decide now
- Is the alloy real or a tease? If real, make Solly sabotage it by insisting the process requires an impossible, benign ingredient (e.g., “three sabbaths of rest”); if not, make his “research” a series of delays that keep people alive.
- How dark do you let the past intrude onstage? I’d keep direct violence largely offstage; show its perimeter through food, rumor, absence, and bureaucratic menace.
- What does the nephew learn that changes him? Give the frame a small but real turn of the screw—he inherits more than a story; he inherits a practice (perhaps he begins making a single rose each year, or he teaches one of Marie Therese’s exercises to his own kids).