Gentlemen and Traitors

Gentlemen and Traitors is told in the first person by Nathan Mazer, a gifted, young Jewish merchant, who after befriending Ben Franklin in London, immigrates to the colonies with his parents, sister and business partner, Hayim Salomon. The bawdy Franklin returns to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress right after the “shot heard 'round the world”. He brings Nathan into the backroom political wrangling that makes the wildly unqualified George Washington the commander of the rebel army. He also hopes Nathan will enlist Salomon, who worked with Rothschild in Europe, to help finance the war. Nathan labors with Salomon to that end while also joining Washington’s staff, ostensibly as an aide-de-camp but in reality as a partner at the card table.

Nathan spends the next year and half struggling to finance the army with Salomon and watching Washington bungle his way to a string of defeats leading up to the Battle of Trenton, a true "victory or death" moment. The novel explores these two lesser told stories of the revolution from a fresh and perhaps controversial perspective. It uses real-life historical figures familiar to most Americans, such as Ben Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, John Hancock and George and Martha Washington as well as some less familiar heroes, such as Henry Knox, Thomas Mifflin and Hayim Salomon. I wrote it to be the first book in a series. I am already working on the sequel, Gentlemen and  Diplomats, which covers Ben Franklin’s time in Paris lobbying the French for help battling England.