A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz - Softcover

Rosenberg, Goran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783781300 ISBN 13: 9781783781300

Publisher: Granta Books, 2015

Synopsis

On the 2nd of August 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the harrowing slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. In this intelligent and deeply moving book, Goeran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father's story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the long shadows of the past.

About this title

About the Author

Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden, where he is a well-known author. In 1970 he left academia to work as a journalist for Swedish television, radio, and print. He is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed Det Förlorade landet [The Lost Land: A Personal History of Zionism, Messianism, and the State of Israel].
 
Sarah Death is a translator, literary scholar, and editor of the UK-based journalSwedish Book Review. Her translations from the Swedish include Ellen Mattson’sSnow, for which she won the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize. She lives and works in Kent, England.

Excerpt. Š Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We move to the house I actually remember a year or two later.  The documents say one thing and the aging memory another, but it doesn’t matter; this is where it all begins, in the building below the railroad station where the young man who would be my father alighted from the train on an early August evening in 1947, and which you can see right beneath the window on the left-hand side of the coach if you arrive by train from the north, across the Bridge.
           
This is it; this is the Place.  This is where my world assumes its first colors, lights, smells, sounds, voices, gestures, names, and words.  I’m not sure how far back a human being can remember; some people say they have memories going back to their second year, but my first memories are of snow and cold and therefore probably date from somewhat later, since I was born in October.  But one thing I’m certain of is that even before the point where my memories of that first world of mine begin, it had already set its stamp on so much that even things I can no longer remember aren’t forgotten either.  This is the Place that will continue to form me even when I’m convinced that I’ve formed myself.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783781300
• ISBN 13: 9781783781300
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336