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PREFACE

André Aciman

Berlin, just after Kristallnacht: Nazis everywhere, Jews being hounded, picked up, beaten, and arrested, their stores ransacked and vandalized, every Jew in Greater Germany now terrorized. Not a shred of humanity or shame left in this wide country, except in scant, totally insignificant gestures—the occasional tap on the shoulder, No worries, you don’t look Jewish, or the unctuous but ultimately malevolent Would love to help, but under the circumstance, surely you understand. Everyone—even people you once thought were your friends and partners—will fleece you or rat on you, or both, and if you call them out as the barefaced rogues they are, they’ll only reply with the one infallible curse: Jew! You’ve become a swear word on two legs, and your only hope is that no one nearby heard it spoken, because informants and plainclothes policemen are stalking everywhere, in trains, hotels, street corners, cafés. Anyone who looks at you is dangerous, and if he looks twice, you know you’d better scram; a third gaze can mean the unimaginable. You try to blend in but, as Otto Silbermann, the protagonist of this remarkable novel, realizes soon enough, you look most suspicious precisely when you’re trying not to.

This is 1938, and World War Two hasn’t erupted yet, but everyone knows it’s coming, and though no one has the merest foreboding that what’s about to happen will turn Europe into a slaughterhouse, Germany has already started its single-minded war against its Jews. The death camps haven’t been built but concentration camps are already fully operational. Yellow stars have yet to make their appearance, but it would help, says a waiter to Silbermann, if Jews were asked to wear a yellow band on their sleeve to make it easier to spot them. Meanwhile, the German bureaucratic machine leaves nothing to chance: your passport bears a loutish red J, your phone may be tapped, and even if you have “Aryan” looks, your name instantly identifies you as a Jew. With the dragnet closing in, you realize you’re trapped and have nowhere to go, and as for fleeing the country, well, you should have thought of that months earlier, now it’s too late. Germany won’t let you out, and other countries don’t want to let you in. In the words of novelist Ulrich Boschwitz, “For a Jew the entire Reich [has become] one big concentration camp.”