Waiting for Leah

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Harvill, 2004 - 153 Seiten
Waiting for the Train is set in Theresienstadt, the ghetto created by the Nazis in northern Bohemia as a staging post for the transport of Jews to Poland. The time is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'Final Solution'. Rumours are rife among the Jews in the ghetto, even though nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions, or perhaps it is deliberately not believed. The heroine of the novel, Leah, an 18-year-old girl from Holland, has, like most of those around her, given up living in accordance with her beliefs. The narrator is a lad of seventeen, likewise still relatively unaffected by the moral disintegration around him. By chance he encounters Vili Feld, a pre-war acquaintance who had seduced his young girlfriend. Vili takes the narrator to the tiny attic he shares with Leah. Thus begins an erotic entanglement that ends with the narrator and Vili being sent to their deaths in the East. Leah travels with them, but in a different part of the train. Conditions on this journey are unspeakable; Lustig evokes them memorably in this novel about impossible moral choices made in appalling circumstances.

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Autoren-Profil (2004)

Arnost Lustig (December 21,1926 - February 26, 2011) was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust. Lustig himself was a survivor of the Holocaust. He was born in Prague. As a young boy, he was sent in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from there he was later transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, followed by time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp. When he returned to Prague, he took part in the anti-Nazi uprising. After the war, he studied journalism at Charles University in Prague and then worked for a number of years at Radio Prague. Lustig later taught at the American University in Washington, D. C. His most renowned books are A Prayer For Katerina Horowitzowa (published and nominated for a National Book Award in 1974), Dita Saxová (1962, trans. 1979 as Dita Saxova), Night and Hope (1957, trans. 1985), and Lovely Green Eyes (2004). Lustig's short story selections included "Children of the Holocaust," "Indecent Dreams," and "Street of Lost Brothers." He was awarded an Emmy, a National Jewish Book Award, and the Karel Capek Award for Literary Achievement by President Valclav Havel. After his retirement from the American University in 2003, he became a full-time resident of Prague. In 2008, Lustig became the eighth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize, and the third recipient of the Karel Capek Prize in 1996. Lustig died at age 84 in Prague on February 26, 2011, after suffering from Hodgkin lymphoma for five years.

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