Zion on the Isar

Munich, 1937. A Mormon farm boy from Idaho is sent to preach in the city where his father was born a Jew.

Zion on the Isar is a historical novel about a young Latter-day Saint missionary of Jewish descent who serves in Munich in the late 1930s, as the Nazi regime tightens its grip.

The central character is Daniel Kessler, raised in Blackfoot, Idaho, by parents who converted from Judaism. He is called to the Swiss-German Mission and arrives in a city the Nazis called the capital of their movement. He is both literally Jewish (of the lineage of Judah) and, by Church teaching, of the house of Israel. The novel follows what happens when those two identities stop pointing the same way. He tries to help Jewish relatives and others while under instructions to stay out of politics, keep quiet, and protect the local branch. The story tracks the rising pressure of the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, the limits of what one careful missionary can do, the costs of institutional caution, and the long aftermath.

Interspersed between the 1930s-40s chapters are interludes set in 2025. They follow Daniel's great-grandson, Elder Ben Kessler, also serving in Munich. He is bored, homesick, and only half-aware of the city under his feet until small discoveries begin to connect him to the family history that was never fully explained.

The book draws on real history (including the story of Helmuth Hübener, reimagined as the Munich branch boy Werner Lindt) while making clear where the fiction begins. It is less a rescue thriller than a novel about identity, silence, the difference between the Church's covenant idea of "gathering Israel" and the actual people with names and graves, and what the living can still do for the dead.