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Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan5/19/2023 Hiero is arrested, and we later hear that he was incarcerated in a concentration camp and apparently died not long after his release. As they struggle to get forged exit visas to leave France, Hiero and Sid, rather implausibly, roam the dangerous, abandoned streets, despite knowing they are at great risk of being rounded up by the Gestapo. Along with two of his fellow band mates, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African-Americans, Hiero escapes to Paris in 1939 where, when war is declared and the Germans invade, they go into hiding. Only 19, he is a member of the Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band forbidden to play live in late 1930s Berlin because the Nazis have banned their "degenerate" music. Hiero is a jazz trumpeter extraordinaire. In this novel, the fictional Hieronymous "Hiero" Falk, around whom the plot revolves, is one of them – a Mischling or "half-breed" from the Rhineland. A fro-Germans don't usually get a look-in when the narratives of Nazi Germany are told, yet the black presence in Germany goes back to at least the 18th century, and later waves of African immigrants produced German-born offspring who, by the interwar years, numbered several thousand.
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