The title is intriguing. Whoever thought “virtue” could be ambiguous? But the fraught period during which the book’s protagonist, Gertrude van Tijn, was active ensured that matters were rarely straightforward, as Bernard Wasserstein so adeptly relates.Born into the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie in 1891, Gertrud Franzisca Cohn, as she was then, had led a very liberated teenage life prior to being “expelled” to England by her elder brother before the First World War. She had acquired a progressive social vision and was active in London in the suffragette movement. An “enemy alien” after war broke out, she was obliged to leave England and found refuge in Holland.There she rediscovered her Jewishness and embraced Zionism, perspectives that led